‘For recuperation’: elegy, form, and the aleatory in B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates

B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969) is British fiction's predominant attempt to embrace aleatorism and to subvert linear causality: the chapters are unbound, and the text invites the reader to shuffle them before reading. Narrative can be understood as a means of containing the ever-present risk of death, of disease, of loss, and has as its impetus a curative trajectory: recuperation is, perhaps, implicit in narrative. The Unfortunates, however, defiantly refuses such comfort. Johnson, this essay asserts, uses his form to cancel the consolations of narrative construction, taking the infectious chains of narrative and repudiating any doctorial/authorial urge to trace the spread of disease/narrative. The anti-linear narrative is inextricable from the type of mourning it enacts, and from the aetiology of the disease that it displays, but declines to track: a type of mourning that refuses movement through time, and the story of a disease that refuses to certify its own development. These refusals, I suggest, are embedded in the grammar and syntax of Johnson's prose. In The Unfortunates the full stops are nodal points of anxiety and loss, an expression of the novel's mortal anxiety. Johnson's final, missing full stop, the novel's aterminal terminus, offers a defiant refusal of recuperation of any kind

Human Rights Through the ATS After Kiobel: Partial Extraterritoriality, Misconceptions, and Elusive and Problematic Judicially-Created Criteria

The purpose of this study has been to examine what approach and experience pedagogues at pre-schools, with a limited amount of nationalities, have regarding cultural promoting work in pre-schools. The concept ”cultural promoting” mainly regards the children's cultural backgrounds. The first question formulation focussed on the what the concepts ”cultural promoting” and ”cultural diversity” meant to the pedagogues. The second question focussed on the interpretation and knowledge of what the syllabus says about cultural promoting work.Earlier research has shown that there exists an insecurity among the pedagogues regarding how they should work in a culturally promoting way, however, Swedish research in this area is very limited. The method used in this study has been qualitative interviews and a total of six pedagogues from four different pre-schools have been interviewed. The result gave a varied view regarding what can be looked upon as cultural promoting work. All the pedagogues agreed that working with other native languages than Swedish was considered cultural promoting. The knowledge about the contents of the syllabus varied greatly among the pedagogues.The conclusion shows a positive attitude among the pedagogues towards cultural promoting work, however, they were insecure about how to shape, develop and perform the actual work, which can be linked back to their amount of knowledge about the syllabus

Task scheduling for a real time multiprocessor

Algorithm for scheduling real time tasks in multiprocessing syste

Sufficient conditions for uniqueness of the weak value

We review and clarify the sufficient conditions for uniquely defining the generalized weak value as the weak limit of a conditioned average using the contextual values formalism introduced in Dressel J, Agarwal S and Jordan A N 2010 Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 240401. We also respond to criticism of our work in [arXiv:1105.4188v1] concerning a proposed counter-example to the uniqueness of the definition of the generalized weak value. The counter-example does not satisfy our prescription in the case of an underspecified measurement context. We show that when the contextual values formalism is properly applied to this example, a natural interpretation of the measurement emerges and the unique definition in the weak limit holds. We also prove a theorem regarding the uniqueness of the definition under our sufficient conditions for the general case. Finally, a second proposed counter-example in [arXiv:1105.4188v6] is shown not to satisfy the sufficiency conditions for the provided theorem.Comment: 17 pages, final published respons