\u201cThe Only Cure I Know Is a Good Ceremony": Post-traumatic Reconstruction of Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko\u2019s Ceremony

The article deals with the representation of post-traumatic stress disorder in Leslie Marmon Silko\u2019s novel Ceremony (1977), and with the complex psychological and cultural procedures of identity reconstruction its protagonist, half-blood Tayo, must follow in order to find some sort of inner balancing. Tayo\u2019s traumatic experience of war seems to schizophrenically split his identity, turning his \u201creal\u201d self into a Lacanian absence (the symptom of the \u201cReal\u201d), a void that denounces the source of the trauma (not the war in itself, which is mainly a metaphorical projection of Tayo\u2019s inner conflict, but his being neither Indian nor white) by erasing it from Tayo\u2019s consciousness and substituting it with a mythical plot that constructs him as a scapegoat-like figure responsible for the drought afflicting the Reservation. Both the novel and its main character at the end manage to reach some sort of coherence by accepting the unrepresentable Real and turning it upside down: they both finally reject the dream of a homogenous identity, and the trauma, no more something to be simply \u201ccured,\u201d is transformed into a source of self-definition, thanks to the equally polymorphic, hybrid, \u201cbroken\u201d ceremonies Tayo is subject to in the novel

"For the Bright Side of the Painting I Had a Limited Sympathy": Emancipation and Counter-Emancipation in Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

The article focuses on the contradictory construction of a free and self-reliant (and \u201cimperialist\u201d) white male identity in Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe\u2019s romance builds up the myth of sea travelling as a way to reach an individual emancipation from the constraints (but also privileges) of social and familiar conditioning which ultimately fails due to a sort of \u201creturn of the repressed,\u201d of the censored reality that allows those same socio-familiar conditions to exist as they are \u2013 namely, the subjugation of black or non-white people who in the romance do not accept the role white domination would like to impose on them. On the other hand, the analogies linking Pym\u2019s predicament to the condition of African Americans in antebellum America (something symbolically alluded to in the famous quote \u201cFor the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy\u201d) threaten to subvert Poe\u2019s construction of a free and authorative white identity, undermined also by the sheer fact that at the end of the romance we have only one last man standing who knows the final outcome of the story \u2013 and this man is not Pym, but mixed-blood Dirk Peters, half white and half Indian, and showing some distinctly African American somatic features. The route of the American \u201cship\u201d comes therefore to ultimately look as already bound towards a dramatic redefinition of the power relationships between whites and non-whites, despite Pym\u2019s (and Poe\u2019s) desperate attempt to resist this change and reinstall individual and collective white authority

The survey of the Basilica di Collemaggio in L’Aquila with a system of terrestrial imaging and most proven techniques

The proposed job concerns the evaluation of a series of surveys carried out in the context of a campaign of studies begun in 2015 with the objective of comparing the accuracies obtainable with the systems of terrestrial imaging, compared to unmanned aerial vehicle imaging and laser scanner survey. In particular, the authors want to test the applicability of a system of imaging rover (IR), an innovative terrestrial imaging system, that consists of a multi-camera with integrated global positioning system (GPS)/global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver, that is very recently released technique, and only a few literature references exist on the specific subject. In detail, the IR consists of a total of 12 calibrated cameras – seven “panorama” and five downward-looking – providing complete site documentation that can potentially be used to make photogrammetric measurements. The data acquired in this experimentation were then elaborated with various software packages in order to obtain point clouds and a three-dimensional model in different cases, and a comparison of the various results obtained was carried out. Following, the case study of the Basilica di Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L’Aquila is reported; Collemaggio is an UNESCO world heritage site; it was damaged during the seismic event of 2009, and its restoration is still in progress

Advanced chondrosarcoma of the pelvis: a rare case of urinary obstruction

Chondrosarcoma is the second most common malignant tumor of the bone with an incidence of 1 in 200.000 per year. Axial skeleton is frequently involved showing poorer oncological outcomes than appendicular one: human pelvis is a site predilection. It is rarely associated to urinary obstruction but according to its localization, it can be frequently linked to compression of pelvic organs as bladder, prostate or bowel. We describe the case of a 52 years old caucasian male with history of advanced pelvic chondrosarcoma and severe hydronephrosis due to total bladder dislocation

Cosmological Perturbations from a New-Physics Hypersurface

Within a broad class of inflationary models we critically analyze the way initial quantum fluctuations on a new-physics hypersurface (NPH) affect standard predictions for large-scale cosmological perturbations. We find that these so-called transplanckian effects depend crucially on the definition of the "vacuum state" in particular on which Hamiltonian is minimized on the NPH in order to select such a state. Transplanckian effects can be made much smaller than previously suggested if sufficiently "adiabatic" Hamiltonians are minimize

New technology based on clamping for high gradient radio frequency photogun

High gradient rf photoguns have been a key development to enable several applications of high quality electron beams. They allow the generation of beams with very high peak current and low transverse emittance, satisfying the tight demands for free-electron lasers, energy recovery linacs, Compton/Thomson sources and high-energy linear colliders. In the present paper we present the design of a new rf photogun recently developed in the framework of the SPARC_LAB photoinjector activities at the laboratories of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Frascati (LNF-INFN, Italy). This design implements several new features from the electromagnetic point of view and, more important, a novel technology for its realization that does not involve any brazing process. From the electromagnetic point of view the gun presents high mode separation, low peak surface electric field at the iris and minimized pulsed heating on the coupler. For the realization, we have implemented a novel fabrication design that, avoiding brazing, strongly reduces the cost, the realization time and the risk of failure. Details on the electromagnetic design, low power rf measurements and high power radiofrequency and beam tests performed at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) are discussed in the paper