Shipwrecks and Mountaintops: Notes on Canto CII

This is the final version of the article. Available from Glossator via the link in this record

Modernism’s Rubber Sole

This is the final version of the article. Available from UTS ePRESS via the link in this recordA review of David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Harvard University Press, 2013)

The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille: Political Antiquity in Classical Hollywood

This is the final version of the article. Freely available online from the publisher via the link in this recor

Two paths of cluster evolution: global expansion versus core collapse

All gravitationally bound clusters expand, due to both gas loss from their most massive members and binary heating. All are eventually disrupted tidally, either by passing molecular clouds or the gravitational potential of their host galaxies. However, their interior evolution can follow two very different paths. Only clusters of sufficiently large initial population and size undergo the combined interior contraction and exterior expansion that leads eventually to core collapse. In all other systems, core collapse is frustrated by binary heating. These clusters globally expand for their entire lives, up to the point of tidal disruption. Using a suite of direct N-body calculations, we trace the "collapse line" in r_v-N space that separates these two paths. Here, r_v and N are the cluster's initial virial radius and population, respectively. For realistic starting radii, the dividing N-value is from 10^4 to over 10^5. We also show that there exists a minimum population, N_min, for core collapse. Clusters with N < N_min tidally disrupt before core collapse occurs. At the Sun's Galactocentric radius, R_G = 8.5 kpc, we find N_min >~ 300. The minimum population scales with Galactocentric radius as R_G^{-9/8}. The position of an observed cluster relative to the collapse line can be used to predict its future evolution. Using a small sample of open clusters, we find that most lie below the collapse line, and thus will never undergo core collapse. Most globular clusters, on the other hand, lie well above the line. In such a case, the cluster may or may not go through core collapse, depending on its initial size. We show how an accurate age determination can help settle this issue.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 14 Pages, 9 Figures, 2 Table

High Road to Hell: Milton, Blake, McCarthy

This is the final version of the article. Available from Penn State University Press via the DOI in this recordThis article demonstrates that the poetry of William Blake irradiates Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, where it occupies one side of a dialectical relationship with the work of another poet, John Milton. The essay’s argument is that the poetic works of Milton and Blake strain against one another from within McCarthy’s prose to determinately shape how we read the novel. It seeks to show how an understanding of why certain literary influences are enunciated will contribute to our knowledge of the book’s relationship to its thematic content and historical referents

Love in the Time of Capital

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Johns Hopkins University Press via the DOI in this recordThis essay begins with Alain Badiou's book, In Praise of Love, and ends with Jean-Luc Godard's film of the same title. Between these narrative poles and drawing on a web of associated theoretical and artistic registers, it seeks to advance two mutually related theses. The first is that, since the beginnings of the twentieth century, cinema has grappled with its potential to exemplify an aesthetic program for love. The second thesis is that love is materially incompatible with capitalism, the mode of production from and through which cinema has evolved. These two theses are explored concurrently as they advance through the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century, evolving a visual language of what Badiou calls "minimal communism.

Weaponizing Criticism

This is the final version. Available on open access from Open Humanities Press via the link in this recor