Literature as Utopia: Spaces of Alterity in West German Postcolonial and Science-Fiction Literature after Sixty-Eight

The dominant narrative surrounding West German literature of the seventies maintains that following the collapse of the student movement around 1968, the collective utopian aspirations of this generation gave way to the loss thereof in the new emphasis on private, political subjectivity in the following decade. Literature as Utopia challenges such commonplace accounts by examining spatial alterity in postcolonial and science fiction literature of the 1970s written by Nicolas Born, Hubert Fichte, Alexander Kluge, and the anonymous cult writer P.M. This study reassess the currency of utopia after 1968--both the good place and no place--by probing these authors' works using post-Adornian aesthetic theories that emerged concurrently in West Germany in the seventies, namely those of Karl Heinz Bohrer, Hans Robert Jauß, Wolfgang Iser, Dieter Wellershoff, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. In addition, my dissertation traffics in the larger intellectual history surrounding the 1970s by bringing my primary texts into dialogue with theorists outside of Germany such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Susan Sontag, Clifford Geertz, Henri Lefebvre, and others in order to assess the ways in which the literature of this period begins to respond to theory. In this dissertation, I argue that this post-revolutionary literature was particularly adept at opening textual spaces in which the idea of utopia could regain a foothold as a socio-critical force after its demise just a few years earlier.Doctor of Philosoph

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School and the West German Student Movement

This thesis examines the tension between Marcuse, the Frankfurt School and the West German student movement focusing primarily on Marcuse's controversial essay Repressive Tolerance and its repercussions. Marcuse's 1965 essay both personifies his radical politics and provides a link to his Heideggarian background, thus incorporating his radical political stance with his radical philosophy. What was Marcuse actually saying in this treatise? How did the students misunderstand it? Further, how does this essay represent the longstanding tension between Marcuse and his Frankfurt School colleagues? The first chapter will provide a critical analysis of Repressive Tolerance and the subsequent dialogues between both Marcuse and the students and Marcuse and Horkheimer and Adorno. The second chapter reaches to the roots of Marcuse's theory. Does Repressive Tolerance contain traces of Marcuse's Heideggarian heritage and if so how does this aid our understanding of Marcuse's philosophy and his relationship with these two competing groups

Understanding mental health trends during COVID-19 pandemic in the United States using network analysis

The emergence of COVID-19 in the United States resulted in a series of federal and state-level lock-downs and COVID-19 related health mandates to manage the spread of the virus. These policies may negatively impact the mental health state of the population. This study focused on the trends in mental health indicators following the COVID-19 pandemic amongst four United States geographical regions, and political party preferences. Indicators of interest included feeling anxious, feeling depressed, and worried about finances. Survey data from the Delphi Group at Carnegie Mellon University were analyzed using clustering algorithms and dynamic connectome obtained from sliding window analysis. Connectome refers to the description of connectivity on a network. United States maps were generated to observe spatial trends and identify communities with similar mental health and COVID-19 trends. Between March 3rd, 2021, and January 10th, 2022, states in the southern geographic region showed similar trends for reported values of feeling anxious and worried about finances. There were no identifiable communities resembling geographical regions or political party preference for the feeling depressed indicator. We observed a high degree of correlation among southern states as well as within Republican states, where the highest correlation values from the dynamic connectome for feeling anxious and feeling depressed variables seemingly overlapped with an increase in COVID-19 related cases, deaths, hospitalizations, and rapid spread of the COVID-19 Delta variant

Assessing the Impacts of COVID-19 and Social Isolation on Mental Health in the United States of America

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the world at large with over 750 million cases and almost 7 million deaths reported thus far. Of those, over 100 million cases and 1 million deaths have occurred in the United States of America (USA). The mental health of the general population has been impacted by several aspects of the pandemic including lockdowns, media sensationalism, social isolation, and spread of the disease. In this paper, we examine the associations that social isolation and COVID-19 infection and related death had with the prevalence of anxiety and depression in the general population of the USA in a state-by-state multiple time-series analysis. Vector Error Correction Models are estimated and we subsequently evaluated the coefficients of the estimated models and calculated their impulse response functions for further interpretation. We found that COVID-19 incidence was positively associated with anxiety across the studied period for a majority of states. Variables related to social isolation had a varied effect depending on the state being considered

Using Google Health Trends to investigate COVID-19 incidence in Africa

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 500 million cases and over six million deaths globally. From these numbers, over 12 million cases and over 250 thousand deaths have occurred on the African continent as of May 2022. Prevention and surveillance remains the cornerstone of interventions to halt the further spread of COVID-19. Google Health Trends (GHT), a free Internet tool, may be valuable to help anticipate outbreaks, identify disease hotspots, or understand the patterns of disease surveillance. We collected COVID-19 case and death incidence for 54 African countries and obtained averages for four, five-month study periods in 2020–2021. Average case and death incidences were calculated during these four time periods to measure disease severity. We used GHT to characterize COVID-19 incidence across Africa, collecting numbers of searches from GHT related to COVID-19 using four terms: ‘coronavirus’, ‘coronavirus symptoms’, ‘COVID19’, and ‘pandemic’. The terms were related to weekly COVID-19 case incidences for the entire study period via multiple linear and weighted linear regression analyses. We also assembled 72 variables assessing Internet accessibility, demographics, economics, health, and others, for each country, to summarize potential mechanisms linking GHT searches and COVID-19 incidence. COVID-19 burden in Africa increased steadily during the study period. Important increases for COVID-19 death incidence were observed for Seychelles and Tunisia. Our study demonstrated a weak correlation between GHT and COVID-19 incidence for most African countries. Several variables seemed useful in explaining the pattern of GHT statistics and their relationship to COVID-19 including: log of average weekly cases, log of cumulative total deaths, and log of fixed total number of broadband subscriptions in a country. Apparently, GHT may best be used for surveillance of diseases that are diagnosed more consistently. Overall, GHT-based surveillance showed little applicability in the studied countries. GHT for an ongoing epidemic might be useful in specific situations, such as when countries have significant levels of infection with low variability. Future studies might assess the algorithm in different epidemic contexts

Computer Science and Engineering Research Review 1988-1989

Table of Contents: Design Rationale for Psyche, a General Purpose Multiprocessor Operating System / Michael L. Scott, Thomas J. LeBlanc, Brian D. Marsh p. 5; Prioritized Access in CSMA Networks: A Node Partitioning Approach / Rajiv Arora and Alexander Albicki p. 14; Prudence and Other Conditions on Formal Language Learning / Mark A. Fulk p. 17; Generating Planar System Interconnectivity Graphs for VLSI Floorplanning / Badri Lokanathan p. 22; Extending Inheritance Abstraction to Symbolic Planning Systems /Josh D. Tenenberg p. 24 Faculty p. 32; Publications p. 34; Doctoral and Master's Theses p. 45; Seminars p. 48; Grant Support p. 50; Industrial Support p. 51