Dickens and his intrusive first-person authors

This study explores the intrusive authorial presence of the fictive autobiographer in Charles Dickens\u27s David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations and traces the biographical implications in these three thinly veiled rewritings of Dickens\u27s own life\u27s story, the story of the abandoned, neglected child. After defining intrusive authorial presence more precisely according to the Structuralist conception of narrative discourse, the discourse tendencies in Dickens\u27s third-person fiction are examined for context and comparison, and then the discourse tendencies establishing David Copperfield, Esther Swnmerson, and Philip Pirrip as unique writers and fictive personalities are explored in depth. Almost certainly more than Dickens intended, David Copperfield\u27s narrative discourse suggests that he emerges from his traumatic childhood with enduring scars or minor character flaws that belonged to Dickens as well: defensiveness, insecurity, irrational guilt, class snobbery, lingering self-pity, and an inability to escape the past that impinges so vividly upon the narrating present. In the Esther Summerson revealed in her discourse lies Dickens\u27s deeper exploration of the more debilitating consequences of abandonment and neglect in childhood: most evidently, the denial of painful emotions that reveal themselves despite their intended suppression, a compulsive need for praise and admiration that cannot be satisfied, and grossly distorted feelings of guilt and worthlessness

Drone Chic

Policy Recommendations: Within the UK there is currently a bias depicting drones as precise, clean and value free. Our recommendations question this. 1) Precision is a 'myth': We need to stop deceiving ourselves that progress is being made and costs are being avoided through precision. War is never cost-free. But it appears to be in most accounts of contemporary conflict. We term this 'Drone Chic'. The stories we tell ourselves deceive us. 2) No strategy: Drones are tactical devices and cannot substitute for an overarching and coherent national strategy. Yet we ignore the primacy of the tactical and celebrate false 'victories' through simply 'proportionate and discriminate' means. A form of Moralism has replaced Politics. 3) The Victims: It is not just 'death' on the receiving end of the drone that demands attention. There are profound consequences for those living under the ever present and seemingly omnipotent machines hovering in the sky above. Drones are, we believe, 'disheartening'. They change cultural practices and cause psychological damage. 4) 'Where are the women?': More investigation is needed as to the gendered effects of drones and drone killing on the ground. What are the hard socioeconomic implications for families when the men are killed? What are the psychological implications for those who witness drone strikes? Can the rise in female suicide rates in places such as Afghanistan be attributed in part to an increase in drone strikes? 5) The Veterans: One of the important 'stories' we are told about drones is that they are accurate and precise. Yet the mounting evidence points, on numerous occasions, in 'precisely' the opposite direction. Do drone pilots 'suffer' trauma and PTSD from their duties? 6) Future concerns: As drones continue to proliferate into the hands of both state and non-state actors, we must realize that drones can be used in a multitude of ways which may compromise our safety

Man and his world : an Indian, a secretary and a queer child : Expo 67 and the nation in Canada

Read today as a "bright and shining" moment, or as the "last good year" in Pierre Berton's estimation, a period that has since slid into the current crises of nationhood, Expo 67 is seen to mark a "turning point" in the complexion of the nation. This representation of history became entrenched as we passed through the thirtieth anniversary of Expo 67 and as monumental national events threatened to divide Canada permanently, producing a yearning for a simpler and better epoch when Canada was seen to be united. Man and His World attempts to rethink the unity 1967 is now seen to possess and challenges this nostalgic refiguration as well as theoretical concepts that regard the nation as a singular entity. Although Expo 67 was produced to unite Canada, fissures were present within the discourses on the nation as they were on the Expo 67 site itself. This thesis, which emphasizes the fragment, multiplicity and the surface, interrogates three sites at Expo 67 which show us that "'adding to' need not 'add up,' but may disturb the calculation" of nationhood (Bhabha, 1994:155): the Indians of Canada Pavilion, the Man in the Home Pavilion and the Quebec Pavilion. Each of these sites produced a challenge to the definition of the nation being performed in 1967, although not without problems. Man and His World investigates the possibilities and the limits of these challenges, while employing a methodology based on multiplicity, an attribute "thinking the nation" necessitates

From the painted past to digital futures : (re)mediating the Canadian nation at Expo 2000

With the theme Humankind: Nature: Technology: A New World Arising , Expo 2000 was billed as the central event of the celebrations of the millennial year. As a "new world arising", Expo 2000 was to be an innovative model for universal exhibitions that would distinguish itself from the modernism within which expo originated by positioning sustainable development at the core of the event. Moving away from the tourist of former universal exhibitions, Expo 2000 interpellated its visitors as agents who had choices about the type of world they wished to "arise" in the future. In what I have termed a performative pedagogy of ethical action the tourist was transformed into a historical subject with an important role to play in sustaining the earth. Canada, for its part, produced an enormous pavilion in an already existing trade fair space. It is this pavilion that forms the nucleus of the present dissertation, with three central chapters dedicated to each of the three thematic elements of the expo--humankind, nature and technology--and intersected by the three thematic areas of the Canada pavilion itself--"Spirit of Community", "Stewards of the Land" and "Connecting with the Future". Using historical traditions of national representation--landscape and multiculturalism--and modernizing these simultaneously, the Canada pavilion remediated the nation in ways that are problematic and productive simultaneously. The Canada pavilion was very adept in its primary goal of educating its visitors about the nation by engaging pedagogical models that not only "taught" in traditional terms via the rationality of the mind, but also by engaging the body as a pedagogical site. As Walter Benjamin suggested many years ago, the subject is undergoing a complex refiguration through its engagement with technology. This point was mobilized in the pavilion to produce a pedagogical form that is new to universal exhibitions, a hybrid form that I have termed politicotechnoedutainment in an attempt to grasp the crossings and imbrications of pedagogical models used in the pavilion. How these were leashed to national forms proved to be a problem, but this dissertation argues that the resulting "confusion" on the part of visitors to the pavilion is productive both for universal exhibitions and nations, an entry point into the presupposition of seamlessness in national representation where an open-ended, unfixed and transitional model of representation and the nation might be productively established

Negative interference in systems of coupled kinesin: A study of self-assembling complexes with defined structure

Intracellular transport is a crucial process that requires the work of motor proteins to distribute necessary cargos. Many times the motors must move over long distances and against high opposing forces than those generated by single motors. To accomplish this task motors appear to act in teams, as suggested by experiments that show enhanced force production and extended travel lengths. Many motors have been characterized individually, but experiments to study their collective mechanics rely on non-specific groupings where the copy number and geometric arrangement are not explicitly known. In order to resolve the true extent to which each motor contributes enhanced transport properties, a system must be developed that precisely controls the number of motors that are studied. Within this work, a convergent self-assembly approach is presented that allows structurally-defined complexes of kinesin-1 to be created. This approach also provides synthetic control over intermotor spacing and the elasticity of the mechanical motor linkages to rigorously characterize the effects of system structure on the interactions of exactly two motors. This synthetic coupled motor system was then used to examine the extent to which motor grouping enhances the transport properties of cargos. It was determined that the average velocity of coupled kinesin proteins was statistically indistinguishable from that of the single motor, while the average run lengths of the two-motor system were slightly longer (≈ 2X), but less than estimated for a system of non-interacting motors (≈ 4X). This study concludes that, under low loads, intermotor strain in coupled kinesin proteins increases the rate of motor detachment from the microtubule and decreases the rate at which additional motors rebind. The presence of negative interference in these complexes implies that groupings of kinesins preferentially travel in a single motor-attachment state, and that only a subset of cargo-bound motors are used during transport

Where Are They Now(?): Two Decades of Longitudinal Outcome Assessment Data Linking Positive Student, Graduate Student, Career and Life Trajectory Decisions to Participation in Intercollegiate Competitive Debate

In 1997, Rogers (2002, 2007) launched an ambitious cohort-based study to specifically measure student outcomes from forensic participation with direct, empirical comparisons between a debate and non-debate group over an extended period through college, graduate school, professional careers, and life-trajectory decisions. This monograph offers a continuation of those earlier studies in order to provide almost two decades of empirical performance data and outcomes. In order for the reader to place the current study in context, it is helpful to review a brief update of the applicable literature and a brief explanation of the previous two studies before attempting to interpret new data