“Why do you write what isn’t true?”: Dostoevsky and the Fantastic Paradox

In this paper, my starting point will be Philip Roth’s famous essay “Writing American Fiction,” in which he complains about the difficulty of writing novels in a country “where the actuality is constantly outdoing our talents.” I shall contend that this perception is not a new one, nor does it apply to American reality alone, and trace it back through a series of writers commenting on the difficulty of writing novels in the face of contemporary reality to its origins in Byron’s Don Juan: “For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.” I shall argue that the aesthetics of “romantic realism,” as Donald Fanger labels it—the writing of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Gogol, etc—directly addresses this paradox, and that this partly accounts for the differences between it and “classic realism.” My contention is that we mistake the nature of such writing if we judge it by the criteria of “classic realism”—and find it wanting, as is often the case

The Voice of Objects in The Old Curiosity Shop

Curiosities are objects on sale in an antique dealer’s - bric à brac, knick-knacks, souvenirs, mementos. So The Old Curiosity Shop is about what we can think of as commodities, objects on display and for sale. A fine new book by Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Household Words, offers plenty of material for a new focus on objects in Dickens which reinvigorates past, and some of it rather crude, Marxist criticism of Dickens’s works. Its focus is Dickens’s journalism, and that of the staff of the magazine he edited between 1850 and 1859, but its arguments can be used, as I do here, to provide an insight into the fiction. Even if the discussion of Dickens’s novel takes precedence here, and the consideration of its possible critical and theoretical underpinning is brief and largely confined to the end of the essay, my approach here is in fact an attempt to combine Waters’s work, both with an important but still little known essay on The Old Curiosity by the significant German philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno, and with some aspects of recent work by Bill Brown about what he calls ‘thing theory’

Review of Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers

Two of the essays in this volume take George Eliot\u27s Romola as their subject. Both reward attention, and they may be in danger of escaping deserved notice given the major concentration here on the life and writing of Dickens. This is the second of three publications projected by the organizers of a conference on \u27Dickens, Victorian Culture, Italy\u27, held in Genoa in 2007. The advance poster for the conference, still on the web, inadvertently does the book a slight disservice: \u27At present\u27, the organizers write, \u27we are considering any or all of 1) A volume of the very best papers [see The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics, and Art, ed. Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, Paul Vita (Polymetrica, 2008)]; 2) A volume of papers [the present one] that are about Victorian writers and Italy, Dickens yes but others as well; and 3) A concentrated section of a future Dickens Studies Annual Volume. The quality of the individual pieces in Imagining Italy is rather better than this implied scooping up of remains after volume one. Admittedly, balance of coverage has not been a priority - 11 out of the 14 essays are primarily on Dickens; just the two on Eliot; and there is one impressively informed consideration, by Christine Alexander, of Italy’s role in the verbal and visual imagination of the young Charlotte Bronte. There is little effort at cross comparison (and to that extent the editors might have taken a heavier hand) but the quality of the individual pieces is high, and the contributions on Eliot, from Richard Bonfiglio and Robert M. Polhemus, gain more than they lose by their insertion into this very Dickens-centred discussion of Victorian engagements with Italian politics, religion, art and society

A novel three-colour fluorescence in situ hybridization approach for the detection of t(7;12)(q36;p13) in acute myeloid leukaemia reveals new cryptic three way translocation t(7;12;16)

© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).The t(7;12)(q36;p13) translocation is a recurrent chromosome abnormality that involves the ETV6 gene on chromosome 12 and has been identified in 20–30% of infant patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). The detection of t(7;12) rearrangements relies on the use of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) because this translocation is hardly visible by chromosome banding methods. Furthermore, a fusion transcript HLXB9-ETV6 is found in approximately 50% of t(7;12) cases, making the reverse transcription PCR approach not an ideal screening method. Considering the report of few cases of variant translocations harbouring a cryptic t(7;12) rearrangement, we believe that the actual incidence of this abnormality is higher than reported to date. The clinical outcome of t(7;12) patients is believed to be poor, therefore an early and accurate diagnosis is important in the clinical management and treatment. In this study, we have designed and tested a novel three-colour FISH approach that enabled us not only to confirm the presence of the t(7;12) in a number of patients studied previously, but also to identify a cryptic t(7;12) as part of a complex rearrangement. This new approach has proven to be an efficient and reliable method to be used in the diagnostic setting

Productivity framework

Researchers look at skills shortages and careers pathways in the agrifood industry. Sustaining the agriculture, food and drink industries requires human capital. Current estimates calculate that the agrifood supply chain employs approaching 4m people of whom over 10% are within the food and drink sector. The 2017 Nesta report, The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030 has indicated that the food preparation and hospitality occupations are likely to show the largest growth of any industry in the UK. The food and drink industry has identified that it will need over 140,000 new recruits by 2024, along with another 595,000 in agriculture to replace those retiring or leaving the sector for other reasons. There is a particular shortage of experience in food engineering, food science, crop technology, engineering and automation, and management, with higher-level skills shortages across the sector

Framework for productivity

The author's look at skills shortages and careers pathways in the agrifood industry

Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

Following the selection of The Gravitational Universe by ESA, and the successful flight of LISA Pathfinder, the LISA Consortium now proposes a 4 year mission in response to ESA's call for missions for L3. The observatory will be based on three arms with six active laser links, between three identical spacecraft in a triangular formation separated by 2.5 million km. LISA is an all-sky monitor and will offer a wide view of a dynamic cosmos using Gravitational Waves as new and unique messengers to unveil The Gravitational Universe. It provides the closest ever view of the infant Universe at TeV energy scales, has known sources in the form of verification binaries in the Milky Way, and can probe the entire Universe, from its smallest scales near the horizons of black holes, all the way to cosmological scales. The LISA mission will scan the entire sky as it follows behind the Earth in its orbit, obtaining both polarisations of the Gravitational Waves simultaneously, and will measure source parameters with astrophysically relevant sensitivity in a band from below $10^{-4}\,$Hz to above $10^{-1}\,$Hz.Comment: Submitted to ESA on January 13th in response to the call for missions for the L3 slot in the Cosmic Vision Programm