Sight and Knowledge Disconnected: The Epistemology of the Visual and the Ideological Gaze in the Novels of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf

One of the ways to understand literary modernism is to see it as a response to the crisis of Western ocularcentrism. First taking up E. M. Forster as a main figure and later shifting its point of focus to Virginia Woolf and finally to a contemporary author Zadie Smith, this dissertation examines how literature can respond when our long-standing belief in the sight’s ability to reach knowledge is challenged. Forster’s novels, written at the dawn of the twentieth century, can be read as a remarkably honest record of the age’s epistemological anxiety and puzzlement at the recognition that the equation of seeing and knowing in its familiar Cartesian guise was hardly possible any more. The dim feeling of unfitness that Forster felt about realism at the beginning of his career seemed to accompany him to the end, until he felt that he could not produce any more novels after A Passage to India (1924). For Woolf, on the other hand, whose prime as a novelist came later than that of Forster, this condition appeared not so much as a “crisis” of ocularcentrism but rather as a stimulus to invent her new feminist aesthetics of the visual, which is positively assisted by the concept of sight as physical. It culminates with Lily Briscoe the painter’s effort to seize her vision in To the Lighthouse (1927), onto which Woolf may have projected her own venture, which was to grow out of the realist method of writing. The last chapter casts light on a moment that could be called an emergence of a new ocularcentrism by exploring Smith’s latest novel On Beauty (2005), which is based on Forster’s Howards End (1910) and prominently focuses on the meaning that the act of seeing can have in our postmodern world

Effects of abiotic stress on plants: a systems biology perspective

The natural environment for plants is composed of a complex set of abiotic stresses and biotic stresses. Plant responses to these stresses are equally complex. Systems biology approaches facilitate a multi-targeted approach by allowing one to identify regulatory hubs in complex networks. Systems biology takes the molecular parts (transcripts, proteins and metabolites) of an organism and attempts to fit them into functional networks or models designed to describe and predict the dynamic activities of that organism in different environments. In this review, research progress in plant responses to abiotic stresses is summarized from the physiological level to the molecular level. New insights obtained from the integration of omics datasets are highlighted. Gaps in our knowledge are identified, providing additional focus areas for crop improvement research in the future

Effects of Osmotic Stimulation on Expression of Neurohypophysial Hormone Genes in Pre-Spawning Chum Salmon

Changes in expression of vasotocin (VT) and isotocin (IT) genes were analyzed in chum salmon during the last stages of spawning migration. Pre-spawning chum salmon were caught at following four locations in the Sanriku coast of the Pacific Ocean in Japan: 1) the off-coast area north to the Otsuchi Bay, 2) the mouth of the Otsuchi Bay, 3) inside of the Otsuchi Bay, and 4) the place 500 m upstream to the mouth of the Otsuchi River. In addition, effects of hypo-osmotic stimulation by transition from sea water (SW) to freshwater (FW) were examined in animals caught at the mouth of the Otsuchi Bay. The levels of VT and IT mRNAs in the forebrains were determined by Northern blot analysis. The plasma osmolality and the levels of Na+ and Cl- were also analyzed. Expression patterns of VT and IT genes were different between the males and the females. In the males, VT and IT gene expression were maintained essentially at the same levels from the off-coast area to the Otsuchi River. In contrast, in the females, the level of VT-I mRNA was significantly increased in the fish caught at the mouth of the bay. After entering the bay, the level of VT-I mRNA was decreased and maintained at a low level through the final stages of spawning migration. Such sexual difference in VT and IT gene expression found in the field fish was further analyzed by a SW to FW transition experiment, in which fish were divided into two groups, those retained in SW and others replaced with FW. In the FW-replaced fish, the levels of VT and IT mRNAs were decreased in both sexes, although much more conspicuous in the females. In the SW-retained animals, changes in the levels of VT and IT mRNAs were sexually different. The levels of VT and IT mRNAs were increased in the males, whereas they were decreased in the females, when compared to the initial levels just before the experimental treatments. These results suggest that regulation of VT and IT gene expression is sexually dimorphic in pre-spawning chum salmon