“Receive with Simplicity Everything That Happens to You”: Schlemiel (Meta)Physics in the Coens’ A Serious Man

Before Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2009 production A Serious Man, Jewish motifs have consistently appeared in their cinematic output. However, the Jewish characters functioned in an ethnically diverse setting and rarely took centre stage, with the notable exception of the eponymous struggling leftist playwright in Barton Fink. Nevertheless, even here the Jewishness seemed to be universalized into “humanity.” Elsewhere, through their accessory characters, the Coens primarily offered a nod to the illustrious and/or notorious Jewish presence in various spheres of American society (e.g., smalltime gangster Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing or movie mogul Jack Lipnick in the aforementioned Barton Fink). In addition, steadfast religious observance has been an object of affable ridicule (e.g., store owner Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski). A Serious Man, however, reveals an unprecedented strategy. Described by the Coens as their most autobiographical film to date, it has a predominantly Jewish cast, deals almost exclusively with a Jewish community in the Midwest, and is heavily steeped in themes which have long been the staple of the Jewish literary tradition. Most evident is the familiar figure of the schlemiel, the eternal loser, embodied in the protagonist Larry Gopnik, whose seemingly endless predicaments form the spine of the plot. Marketed as a comedy, A Serious Man nevertheless consistently exhibits a dark, existential undercurrent, which renders its decidedly grim ending a rather logical payoff. Drawing on the research of seminal scholars on the subject of schlemiel narratives (e.g., Ruth Wisse, Sanford Pinsker), the essay is an attempt to situate the film within this tradition. Furthermore, I argue that the Coens reinvest the figure of the schlemiel with a philosophical charge that it possessed in folk legends and Yiddish literature; at the same time, they adapt the schlemiel to the postmodern condition. This allows them to address the fundamental uncertainty of our age, signalled in the film through the formulae of Heisenberg and Schrödinger

A Pedagogical Evaluation of Intra-Sentential Code-Switching Patterns in L2 Classroom Talk

The paper is concerned with teachers' and students' alternation between L1 and L2 within the same utterance, i.e. uses of intra-sentential code-switching which in classroom discourse tends to be less accepted by modern language pedagogy than its inter-sentential counterpart. The rationale for the study is the universal nature of the phenomenon known to occur in the first place in interactions among natural bilinguals and multilinguals. The data analysis sections of the article review eight different patterns which are evaluated pedagogically. It transpires that the category most likely to arouse methodological controversy is code-mixing

In the beginning, there was the sentence: a few remarks on a literary approach to writing classes

Any text, whether literary or academic, is a set of sentences. It is my firm belief – and has been the organizing principle of my writing classes over the years – that no stylistic excellence can be achieved until one learns to develop well-crafted, reader-friendly sentences. The goal of my paper is to demonstrate the benefits of such a sentence-centered approach to writing. Many of my writing classes have featured workshop-style exercises where students would work on anonymous fragments culled from their essays. Firstly, they would analyze and then try to improve them in terms of grammar, syntax, economy or broadly understood style; the ideal upshot would be a “correct” sentence in the reading of which they would themselves take pleasure. In my presentation, I intend to briefly describe and classify the difficulties which they would have to face. Underlying the whole enterprise has been a hope that the students will learn to value stylistic elegance and to locate its center: several words, put together to good effect, between two full stops

Learning English pronunciation in and outside the classroom: Psychopedagogic considerations

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

A Morse complex for Lorentzian geodesics

We prove the Morse relations for the set of all geodesics connecting two non-conjugate points on a class of globally hyperbolic Lorentzian manifolds. We overcome the difficulties coming from the fact that the Morse index of every geodesic is infinite, and from the lack of the Palais-Smale condition, by using the Morse complex approach.Comment: 19 pages; updated references, final versio

Hilbert's 'World Equations' and His Vision of a Unified Science

In summer 1923, a year after his lectures on the `New Foundation of Mathematics' and half a year before the republication of his two notes on the `Foundations of Physics,' Hilbert delivered a trilogy of lectures in Hamburg. In these lectures, Hilbert expounds in an unusually explicit manner his epistemological perspective on science as a subdiscipline of an all embracing science of mathematics. The starting point of Hilbert's considerations is the claim that the class of gravitational and electromagnetic field equations implied by his original variational formulation of 1915 provides valid candidate `world equations,' even in view of attempts at unified field theories \'a la Weyl and Eddington based on the concept of the affine connection. We give a discussion of Hilbert's lectures and, in particular, examine his claim that Einstein in his 1923 papers on affine unified field theory only arrived at Hilbert's original 1915 theory. We also briefly comment on Hilbert's philosophical viewpoints expressed in these lectures.Comment: 23 pages; to appear in Einstein Studie

Developmental stage is an important factor that determines the antioxidant responses of young and old grapevine leaves under UV irradiation in a green-house.

The impact of UV irradiation was studied on photosynthesis, photosystem II photochemical yields and antioxidant responses using green-house grown grapevine (Vitis vinifera L. cv. Chardonnay) leaves. Supplemental UV irradiation (290-400 nm) was centred in the UV-B region, and corresponded to 8.95 kJ m-2 d-1 global (280-400 nm) or 8.04 kJ m-2 d-1 UV-B (280-315 nm) biologically effective dose. UV irradiation was applied daily and its effects were evaluated after 4-days. Younger (1-3 weeksold) leaves (YL) and older (4-6 weeks-old) leaves (OL) were affected differently, UV irradiation decreased their photochemical yields to 78% and 56%, respectively. Unlike OL, YL responded by an increase in UV-B absorbing pigment, anthocyanin and total phenolics contents. UV irradiation increased total antioxidant capacities in YL but not in OL. YL were also different in their ability to increase speciıic hydroxyl radical and singlet oxygen neutralizing capacities in response to the supplemental UV irradiation, which is reported here for the ıirst time. Our results suggest that the ability of maintaining photosynthesis under supplemental UV is not necessarily determined by base levels of antioxidants but rather by their inducibilities in response to the irradiation and emphasise the importance of comparing leaves of the same age in UV studies. Correlations between various antioxidant capacities, pigment contents and photosynthesis parameters were also examined. However, no single element of the defence system can be picked up as decisive factor of sensitivity to UV

When the Morse index is infinite

Let f be a smooth Morse function on an infinite dimensional separable Hilbert manifold, all of whose critical points have infinite Morse index and co-index. For any critical point x choose an integer a(x) arbitrarily. Then there exists a Riemannian structure on M such that the corresponding gradient flow of f has the following property: for any pair of critical points x,y, the unstable manifold of x and the stable manifold of y have a transverse intersection of dimension a(x)-a(y).Comment: 10 page