Wordsworth\u27s Lyrical Ballads, 1800

Prelude: IN the dense tracts of woodland that stretch south from Esthwaite Water, a young boy pauses amidst a copse of hazel. His chest heaves; his heart races. Brake, bramble, and thorn. Exhaustion and expectation gather in each breath, course through his body and deeper still into his soul. He eyes the trees, fingers the milk-white flowers that hang in clusters, and knows joy. His breathing slows. Leaves murmur in the breeze. His heart fills with kindness. Taking up the crook that lies in the long grass, he swings it wide. Petals fill the air, swirl around him like snow. The hazels give themselves up. Sweat beads his brow as the boy swings the crook again, and again, and again, pulling the branches to earth

Courtroom and Classroom Across the Curriculum: \u3ci\u3eThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde\u3c/i\u3e

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde draws on Robert Louis Stevensons intimate knowledge of Victorian legal culture knowledge Stevenson acquired while studying law at the University of Edinburgh. (Although he was called to the Scottish bar in 1875, he abandoned the legal profession and never practiced it.) Its trace can be found in the work\u27s title, main characters, and narrative structure: the title suggests a legal action; Mr. Utterson is the legal representative of Henry Jekyll, who is himself both a doctor of law (LLD) and a doctor of Civil laws (DCL); and the final two chapters function as depositions. So powerful is this aspect of the novel that it has led at least one criminal defense to cite Dr. Jekyll\u27s plight in court (see Stern). This legal context provides me the occasion to engage students in a collective act of close reading and reasoned argumentation. Turning the classroom into a courtroom, the students place Henry Jekyll on trial for the crimes committed by Edward Hyde

Re-Drawing the Borders of Vision; or, The Art of Picturesque Travel

Jason N. Golsmith\u27s contribution to: Wordsworth Summer Conference, Richard. Gravil, and Wordsworth Conference Foundation. Grasmere, 2012: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference. Penrith, CA: HEB Humanities E-Books, 2012

Celebrity and the Spectacle of Nation

A decidedly promiscuous brand of renown, celebrity has a bad reputation. That reputation was characterised by Daniel Boorstin, who coined what has become a near-axiomatic definition of the celebrity as \u27a person who is known for his well-knowness\u27.1The tautological bent of Boorstin\u27s definition seems to suggest the meretricious nature of celebrities, famous not because they have done anything to merit acclaim, but because their images have been widely publicised and promoted. According to this logic, celebrities are superficial personalities, bold-faced names, air-brushed faces; they are slick images manufactured for the moment. Celebrities signify all that is shallow about contemporary society. Looking to account for the American fascination with stars, John Lahr has suggested that celebrities \u27substitute for the national lack of a historical consciousness\u27. 2 Deriding the presentism of American culture, Lahr\u27s remark is a fairly typical indictment of the vacuity of popular celebrity, especially its lack of historical validation. But what Lahr diagnoses as a symptom of twentieth-century America can be traced back to the Romantic period in Britain, and I find his comment especially telling in that it suggests a certain symmetry between popular celebrities and national consciousness, a symmetry I explore in the following pages.3 Essentially modern phenomena, both mass-media celebrity and the nation-state took shape during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Both memorialise their subjects. Both generate new models of consciousness and identification. Both are based on a regime of publicity and spectacle

The Promiscuity of Print: John Clare’s ‘Don Juan’ and the Culture of Romantic Celebrity

This essay offers a new reading of John Clare\u27s Don Juan, a hard-hitting and deliberately vulgar denunciation of English society and letters. In his extended Byronic performance, Clare harnesses Byron\u27s famed sexual appetite and strong Romantic irony to dramatic effect, defiantly redeploying the machinery of literary celebrity that had produced him as The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. Tracing Clare\u27s imaginative and textual investments in prostitutes and boxers, figures located at the margins of London\u27s criminal underworld, I show how the compulsive misogyny of Don Juan and its obscene sexual punning form part of a concerted, if not entirely coherent, response to a culture increasingly organized by the spectacle of celebrity

John Clare and the Art of Politics

Jason Goldsmith\u27s contribution to Volume 30 of the John Clare Society Journal. Article focuses on Clares poem, \u27Don Juan\u27 and its place in the University classroom

Hogging the Limelight: \u3ci\u3eThe Queen\u27s Wake\u3c/i\u3e and the Rise of Celebrity Authorship

In the following essay, Goldsmith argues that The Queen\u27s Wake is commentary on the literary name branding inaugurated by the periodical culture of Hogg\u27s day. For Goldsmith, the crisis of reception staged in the poem--sixteenth-century provincial bards in a first encounter with royal spectacle--is not unlike the uneasy celebrity Hogg experienced as the Ettrick Shepherd of Blackwood\u27s Edinburgh Magazine

Evaluation of techniques for removal of spacecraft contaminants from activated carbon

Alternative techniques for the regeneration of carbon contaminated with various spacecraft contaminants were evaluated. Four different modes of regeneration were evaluated: (1) thermal desorption via vacuum, (2) thermal desorption via nitrogen purge, (3) in-situ catalytic oxidation of adsorbed contaminants, and (4) in-situ non-catalytic oxidation of adsorbed contaminants

An Anomalous Chick Embryo Pulsating as a Heart

During the regular laboratory work in embryological technique, the finding of anomalous chick embryos is so common that little interest is attracted. However, when one student reported the rhythmic beating of a solitary chick heart apparently without the accompanying chick, special interest was stimulated. This strange pulsating bit of protoplasm was noted in an egg of about 50 hours incubation. It was transferred to warm, normal physiological saline solution and observed for fifteen minutes. The beating was not unlike that of a normal chick heart of corresponding age. In order to assure a good fixation, the specimen was removed from the yolk and placed in Bouin\u27s fluid, stained in Borax Carmine and mounted in toto on a slide by the usual borax carmine method

A Herschel/HIFI Legacy Survey of HF and H2O in the Galaxy: Probing Diffuse Molecular Cloud Chemistry

We combine Herschel observations of a total of 12 sources to construct the most uniform survey of HF and H2O in our Galactic disk. Both molecules are detected in absorption along all sight lines. The high spectral resolution of the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) allows us to compare the HF and H2O distributions in 47 diffuse cloud components sampling the disk. We find that the HF and H2O velocity distributions follow each other almost perfectly and establish that HF and H2O probe the same gas-phase volume. Our observations corroborate theoretical predictions that HF is a sensitive tracer of H2 in diffuse clouds, down to molecular fractions of only a few percent. Using HF to trace H2 in our sample, we find that the N(H2O)-to-N(HF) ratio shows a narrow distribution with a median value of 1.51. Our results further suggest that H2O might be used as a tracer of H2 -within a factor 2.5- in the diffuse interstellar medium. We show that the measured factor of ~2.5 variation around the median is driven by true local variations in the H2O abundance relative to H2 throughout the disk. The latter variability allows us to test our theoretical understanding of the chemistry of oxygen-bearing molecules in the diffuse gas. We show that both gas-phase and grain-surface chemistry are required to reproduce our H2O observations. This survey thus confirms that grain surface reactions can play a significant role in the chemistry occurring in the diffuse interstellar medium n_H < 1000 cm^-3.Comment: 53 pages; 12 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ main journa