Weakness of Principles, Venality, Pragmatism and Treason as a Diplomatic Tool in The Jugurthine War. Approaches to Roman Foreign Policy in the Second Century BC.

Indexación: Revista UNABEn base a La guerra de Yugurta, obra del historiador romano Cayo Salustio Crispo, se analizan aspectos y comportamientos de la política externa de la República romana ante el rey de los númidas, Yugurta. Lo anterior, se observa en un marco de crisis y conflicto social en Roma, deviniendo la política exterior de esta —en un recorrido que va desde la inacción a la reacción— en venal, circunstancial y pragmática, alejada de todo fundamento ético-religioso, cuestión que, a su vez, terminó por convertir a la traición en una de las herramientas más poderosas de la diplomacia romanaBased on the War of Jugurtha, the work of the roman historian Gaius Crispus Sallust, it is analyzed the behavior of the foreign policy of the Roman Republic to the Numidian King, Jugurtha. This is observed within a context of social conflict and crisis in Rome, becoming the foreign policy of this —on a path from the inaction to reaction— in venal, circumstantial, and pragmatic, away from all ethical and religious grounds, a matter that ended up turning the betrayal in one of the most powerful tools of Roman Diplomacyhttp://revistahumanidades.unab.cl/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/A10.-ALFARO.pd

Collision-free path planning for robots using B-splines and simulated annealing

This thesis describes a technique to obtain an optimal collision-free path for an automated guided vehicle (AGV) and/or robot in two and three dimensions by synthesizing a B-spline curve under geometric and intrinsic constraints. The problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem and solved by using simulated annealing. A two-link planar manipulator is included to show that the B-spline curve can also be synthesized by adding kinematic characteristics of the robot. A cost function, which includes obstacle proximity, excessive arc length, uneven parametric distribution and, possibly, link proximity costs, is developed for the simulated annealing algorithm. Three possible cases for the orientation of the moving object are explored: (a) fixed orientation, (b) orientation as another independent variable, and (c) orientation given by the slope of the curve. To demonstrate the robustness of the technique, several examples are presented. Objects are modeled as ellipsoid type shapes. The procedure to obtain the describing parameters of the ellipsoid is also presented

Fact and Fable: Ethics and the Defamiliarisation of theFamiliar in Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow

[Abstract] In the face of a thought-defying catastrophe, nothing is more cathartic than the transformation of fact into fable. In the case of the Holocaust, this would amount to the fable of seeing the Nazis as devilish arch-villains or of reducing the Nazi genocide to a series of commonplaces. The aim of this paper is to show how Martin Amis plays with this impulse to reduce fact to fable precisely by having the narrator tell a fable that has to be decoded into fact by the reader. The focus on a perpetrator rather than a victim is dealt with as confronting the reader with the “banality of evil”, while the relationship between narrator and main character is approached in the view of Lifton’s concept of “psychological doubling”, and also in the light of Levinas’ notion of excendance. I argue here that Time’s Arrow should be regarded as the result of a conscious attempt to defamiliarise the familiar on the part of the author, giving voice to and requiring of the reader an ethical positioning that, far from being divorced from formal experimentation, turns it into an effective vehicle for revision, reflection and commitment

ONCE UPON A TIME ... THE PAIN OF HISTORY: APPROACHES TO THE HOLOCAUST THROUGH THE RE-WRITING OF FAIRY TALES

La literatura del Holocausto constituye una categoría representativa, y ciertamente recurrente, en los estudios sobre trauma y literatura de trauma. Este artículo comienza con una breve introducción a los Estudios de Trauma en la literatura y crítica literarias para abordar a continuación algunas de las características y paradojas básicas de la representación del Holocausto en la literatura. Después de introducir el tema en esta línea, se consideran distintas vertientes del tratamiento literario del Holocausto. En primer lugar, y de forma más breve, la literatura de supervivientes, prestando especial atención a la literatura testimonial de mujeres y al tratamiento del Holocausto desde la perspectiva de la especificidad de género. La parte central del artículo se centra en algunas obras de ficción escritas por autoras que utilizan una estrategia concreta para retratar este hecho histórico y/o sus repercusiones: la re-escritura de cuentos populares. Esta estrategia parece ser más recurrente en (si bien no es exclusiva de) la literatura de mujeres y las obras en las que se utiliza suelen recrear además universos femeninos en los que los cuentos proporcionan metáforas que nos acercan al horror de la catástrofe, al dolor de los que la sufrieron y a las consecuencias en sus vidas y en las de sus descendientes. A pesar de los cuestionamientos que suelen acompañar a la literatura ficcional sobre el genocidio nazi, puede decirse que estas obras son fieles a los hechos de otra manera, participando en la compleja tarea de dar testimonio sobre uno de los capítulos más dolorosos de la historia contemporánea, tan presente en la memoria colectiva de la época en la que nos ha tocado vivirHolocaust literature constitutes a highly representative and certainly recurrent category within the field of Trauma Studies and trauma literature. This article begins with a brief introduction to Trauma Studies in the context of literary theory and criticism. Then, it explains the features of as well as the paradoxes inherent in the literary representation of the Nazi genocide. After this introduction of sorts, different ways of representing the Holocaust in literature are considered. Firstly, and more succintly, I focus on testimonial literature, paying special attention to non-fictional works by women and to the treatment of the Holocaust from a gender-specific prespective. After that, in what constitutes the bulk of the article, I deal with fictional works by women writers that resort to the re-writing of classical fairy tales in order to portray this historical event and its aftermath. This narrative strategy seems to be more recurrent in (though far from exclusive to) narratives penned by women. In them, female universes are evoked by using the fairy tale as a template that provides metaphors intended to make the reader feel in an indirect way the horror of the catastrophe, the suffering of the victims and the consequences that the experiences gone through had on their lives and on those of their descendants. Although the fictionalisation of the Holocaust has often been questioned, these works are faithful to the facts in another way as they take part in the complex task of bearing witness to one of the most painful chapters of contemporary history, so vivid in the collective memory of those living in present tim

Érase una vez... el dolor de la historia: aproximaciones al Holocausto a través de la re-escritura de cuentos populares

La literatura del Holocausto constituye una categoría representativa, y ciertamente recurrente, en los estudios sobre trauma y literatura de trauma. Este artículo comienza con una breve introducción a los Estudios de Trauma en la literatura y crítica literarias para abordar a continuación algunas de las características y paradojas básicas de la representación del Holocausto en la literatura. Después de introducir el tema en esta línea, se consideran distintas vertientes del tratamiento literario del Holocausto. En primer lugar, y de forma más breve, la literatura de supervivientes, prestando especial atención a la literatura testimonial de mujeres y al tratamiento del Holocausto desde la perspectiva de la especificidad de género. La parte central del artículo se centra en algunas obras de ficción escritas por autoras que utilizan una estrategia concreta para retratar este hecho histórico y/o sus repercusiones: la re-escritura de cuentos populares. Esta estrategia parece ser más recurrente en (si bien no es exclusiva de) la literatura de mujeres y las obras en las que se utiliza suelen recrear además universos femeninos en los que los cuentos proporcionan metáforas que nos acercan al horror de la catástrofe, al dolor de los que la sufrieron y a las consecuencias en sus vidas y en las de sus descendientes. A pesar de los cuestionamientos que suelen acompañar a la literatura ficcional sobre el genocidio nazi, puede decirse que estas obras son fieles a los hechos de otra manera, participando en la compleja tarea de dar testimonio sobre uno de los capítulos más dolorosos de la historia contemporánea, tan presente en la memoria colectiva de la época en la que nos ha tocado vivir

The Spectral Evidence of Photography in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room: An Album of Fractured Lives

This article focuses on Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (2001), which I place in the context of what Froma I. Zeitlin (2006) regards as an emerging trend in Holocaust literature: fictional stories that move away from the victims and focus instead on the victimisers, as well as on the impact and legacy of the Nazi period on average Germans. The Dark Room consists of three independent but related stories, entitled after each German protagonist, and taking place in Germany at different moments of the 20th century. It is my aim to analyse the themes that connect these three stories —loss, guilt, shame, secrets and deception, traumatic awakenings and the fall from innocence, the crisis of identity, etc.— and to relate them to the motif already suggested by the work’s title: photography. Pictures recur insistently throughout the book’s pages and, like the past, they constitute a spectral presence in Seiffert’s novella triptych, where photographs emerge as a vehicle for exploring the problems posed by photographic evidence. Thus, I argue, the thread that ultimately weaves the stories together has to do with each protagonist’s negative epiphany, that is to say, his/her painful discovery that, in spite of all that a picture can be said to capture or show, the truth turns out to be disturbingly absent, lying in an unreachable elsewhere, always beyond the frame

The Estrangement Effect in Three Holocaust Narratives: Defamiliarising Victims, Perpetrators and the Fairy-Tale Genre

Holocaust literature has often been described as producing disruption and estrangement. As the Holocaust challenges traditional forms of expression, writers have used alternative techniques, sometimes blurring genres and registers. This is the case with Holocaust narratives that rewrite fairy tales or use fairy-tale motifs and structures: they produce an estrangement effect in that their intertexts are defamiliarised as a strategy for opening up the possibilities of representation. This article focuses on three works of this kind, by authors Lisa Goldstein, Louise Murphy and Rachel Seiffert. Specifically, it considers how they constitute an alternative to the sanctioned metanarrative of the Holocaust, which is victim centred and facilitates the reader''s empathy. Indeed, the works discussed here complicate the categories of victim and perpetrator, thus problematising our engagement with the characters in a way that furthers the abovementioned estrangement effect. Attention is paid to the role played by secrecy in each narrative, as I contend that it is the secret and its effects in the diegesis that keep the characters at a distance, "estranged" from the reader. This distance precludes easy identification and invites critical discussion on the limitations of familiar categories and binaries, such as the victim/victimiser opposition and the public/secret dichotomy

Art, Nature and the Negotiation of Memory in J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country

The present article analyses J. L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country (1980) in the light of an approach to traumatic experience as paradoxically relating destructiveness and survival. This view of trauma – already present in Freud and further elaborated in more recent theories like Cathy Caruth’s – accentuates the possibility of constructing a new story that bears witness not only to the shattering effects of trauma but also to a departure from it. From this perspective, the author deals first with the role of art as a survival aid to the novel’s traumatised protagonist, explaining how his restoration of a medieval mural helps him work through his troubled memories of the Great War. Repetitions and doublings link the two central characters, their discoveries and their recovery, creating layers of meaning that, it is argued, call for a ‘palimpsestuous’ reading, in Sarah Dillon’s sense of the term. The author then focuses on the regenerative power of nature in the novel, relating its use of the pastoral to the frequent recourse to it in Great War literature, and interpreting Carr’s text in line with critical approaches that reject escapism as the main trait of the pastoral mode. Finally, the protagonist’s retrospective narration is discussed as a creative act that is also an aid to the survival of the self