Muriel Spark's postmodernism

This study explores the shifting notions of postmodernism developed through Muriel Spark’s fiction, and thereby clarifies this artist’s own postmodernism. I use Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the notion in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), that there is no grand narrative, as my starting point, and deploy various postmodernist theories, which can illuminate Spark’s art and can in turn be illuminated by her art, in my arguments. Throughout the thesis, I focus on two of Spark’s most important themes as crucial keys to understanding her postmodernism: the theme of individual subjectivity and the theme of the interplay of life and art. The thesis begins with the claims Spark makes for her individuality and her individual art through the voice of “I”. Chapter I considers issues about being a woman and an artist, which Spark raises around the narrator-heroine of a fictional memoir, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). Here I present this heroine as a definition of the strength of Sparkian women who liberate themselves by practicing art. Chapter II discusses Loitering with Intent (1981), a fictional autobiography of a fictional woman novelist, alongside Spark’s own autobiography and her various biographical works. This section illustrates Spark’s notion of the “author” in relation to the “work” - and an author in control in her sense - by investigating the dynamic interplay of life and art in the form of this novel. Chapter III analyses The Driver’s Seat (1970), the novel which most shockingly elucidates the postmodern condition according to Spark and demonstrates her postmodernist narrative strategies. Her concern with the crisis of the “subject” in the world in its postmodern phase is observed in the figure of the heroine, a woman who has tried and failed to be an author in control. I argue that Spark here theorises the notion of subject, by providing her own version of the psychoanalytical “death drive” and also represents the Lacanian real as the unfigurable with this figure. Chapter IV and Chapter V follow the developments of Spark’s discussion of the crisis of the “subject” in two of her later novels. Chapter IV concentrates on the theme of Otherness in Symposium (1990). Chapter V discusses Reality and Dreams (1996), in which Spark pursues the theme of excess and opens up the contradictions inherent in this notion to bring about a new philosophy of life by art as excess

Hayabusa2’s superior solar conjunction mission operations: planning and post-operation results

Abstract In late 2018, the asteroid Ryugu was in the Sun’s shadow during the superior solar conjunction phase. As the Sun-Earth-Ryugu angle decreased to below 3°, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft experienced 21 days of planned blackout in the Earth-probe communication link. This was the first time a spacecraft had experienced solar conjunction while hovering around a minor body. For the safety of the spacecraft, a low energy transfer trajectory named Ayu was designed in the Hill reference frame to increase its altitude from 20 to 110 km. The trajectory was planned with the newly developed optNEAR tool and validated with real time data. This article shows the results of the conjunction operation, from planning to flight data.</jats:p

Rapid glaciation and a two-step sea-level plunge into The Last Glacial Maximum

The approximately 10,000-year-long Last Glacial Maximum, before the termination of the last ice age, was the coldest period in Earth’s recent climate history1. Relative to the Holocene epoch, atmospheric carbon dioxide was about 100 parts per million lower and tropical sea surface temperatures were about 3 to 5 degrees Celsius lower2,3. The Last Glacial Maximum began when global mean sea level (GMSL) abruptly dropped by about 40 metres around 31,000 years ago4 and was followed by about 10,000 years of rapid deglaciation into the Holocene1. The masses of the melting polar ice sheets and the change in ocean volume, and hence in GMSL, are primary constraints for climate models constructed to describe the transition between the Last Glacial Maximum and the Holocene, and future changes; but the rate, timing and magnitude of this transition remain uncertain. Here we show that sea level at the shelf edge of the Great Barrier Reef dropped by around 20 metres between 21,900 and 20,500 years ago, to −118 metres relative to the modern level. Our findings are based on recovered and radiometrically dated fossil corals and coralline algae assemblages, and represent relative sea level at the Great Barrier Reef, rather than GMSL. Subsequently, relative sea level rose at a rate of about 3.5 millimetres per year for around 4,000 years. The rise is consistent with the warming previously observed at 19,000 years ago1,5, but we now show that it occurred just after the 20-metre drop in relative sea level and the related increase in global ice volumes. The detailed structure of our record is robust because the Great Barrier Reef is remote from former ice sheets and tectonic activity. Relative sea level can be influenced by Earth’s response to regional changes in ice and water loadings and may differ greatly from GMSL. Consequently, we used glacio-isostatic models to derive GMSL, and find that the Last Glacial Maximum culminated 20,500 years ago in a GMSL low of about −125 to −130 metres.Financial support of this research was provided by the JSPS KAKENHI (grant numbers JP26247085, JP15KK0151, JP16H06309 and JP17H01168), the Australian Research Council (grant number DP1094001), ANZIC, NERC grant NE/H014136/1 and Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux