The Forces of Life and Death in Roch Carrier\u27s Fiction

Carrier\u27s fiction is based on exaggeration and the grotesque, but it also deals with serious questions: the forces of life and death in the lives of his characters. Death is the subject of La Guerre, Yes Sir! and of several short stories, and it is symbolically present in certain other works. In Le Deux-millième étage and II est par là, le soleil, life in the city is equated with death. None of Carrier\u27s characters live happy lives, and their religion is one of death and sin. As French-Canadians, they are threatened with destruction by the English-speaking world and by American capitalism. Yet they affirm their will to live by clinging to life; they react against their religion of death by blaspheming, and, in some cases, by openly rejecting it. They express their will to live through their sexual activity and by their humour. As a community, they show their will to survive by remembering their past. Jean-Thomas in II n\u27y a pas de pays sans grand-père, by talking of the past, keeps it alive and passes on to his grandson the will to survive as a French-Canadian. Telling stories which others will remember is thus a way of cheating death

Jewish Destiny in the Novels of Albert Cohen

The unity of Cohen\u27s novels is due to their common theme of Jewish destiny. This is traced in the lives of the Valeureux and of Solal. The Valeureux are caricatures of the Jew, and demonstrate that Jewish identity and destiny are imposed by others. Their lives are precarious because Jews are always persecuted, a message also conveyed by other persecuted characters and by Cohen\u27s direct interventions. But the Valeureux cling to their Jewishness and exalt their religion because it teaches the need to tame man\u27s instincts. Solal seeks success in Gentile society, but learns it is a cruel society that exploits man\u27s instincts. He is sickened by the hypocrisy of this society, by its frivolity and by the realisation that death makes all ambition pointless. Unable to escape his Jewish background, he defends Jewish victims of Hitler, and is ostracised. He now encounters the same fate as other Jews and becomes a victim of anti-Semitism. He finally commits suicide. Neither the Valeureux nor Solal have the solution to anti-Semitism, which Cohen sees only in the State of Israel. But, while seeing Israel as the solution, Cohen is interested mainly in Jews like the Valeureux, who have preserved the Jewish identity for centuries

Generalizing the running vacuum energy model and comparing with the entropic-force models

We generalize the previously proposed running vacuum energy model by including a term proportional to \dot{H}, in addition to the existing H^2 term. We show that the added degree of freedom is very constrained if both low redshift and high redshift data are taken into account. Best-fit models are undistinguishable from LCDM at the present time, but could be distinguished in the future with very accurate data at both low and high redshifts. We stress the formal analogy at the phenomenological level of the running vacuum models with recently proposed dark energy models based on the holographic or entropic point of view, where a combination of \dot{H} and H^2 term is also present. However those particular entropic formulations which do not have a constant term in the Friedmann equations are not viable. The presence of this term is necessary in order to allow for a transition from a decelerated to an accelerated expansion. In contrast, the running vacuum models, both the original and the generalized one introduced here contain this constant term in a more natural way. Finally, important conceptual issues common to all these models are emphasized.Comment: Version accepted in Phys. Rev. D. LaTeX, 24 pages and one figure. Slightly extended discussio