The Remnants of Harmonious Bildungs: The Classical Bildungsroman as an Ontological Dimension of the Novel of Counter-Development in England from Jane Austen to Ford Madox Ford (1813–1924)

This dissertation will examine the paradoxical tensions that exist in the English Bildungsroman, by studying the ways in which both the novel of emergence and autobiography at once strive towards a conformity with what is known as the Classical Bildungsroman form, while at the same time undermining that very generic formula. This dissertation pays attention to a wide range of British writers, some whose novels embody the archetypical Bildungsroman form, and then some whose work does not resemble the Classical Bildungsroman at all. For instance, this dissertation will focus on the work of Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Ford Madox Ford in the attempt to prove that the Bildungsroman genre underscores the whole enterprise of fictional biography and autobiography. In my chapter on Jane Austen, I offer Pride and Prejudice as the rare example of a novel that fulfills the difficult generic requirement of the Classical Bildungsroman, but then I compare this masterpiece with Persuasion, a novel in which the protagonist’s chances for happiness and personal fulfillment are delayed by the unavoidable passing of time. In the end, Anne Elliot cheats fate, when she becomes wife to Captain Wentworth, and thus achieves the necessary social Bildungs that is required of the protagonist of the Classical Bildungsroman; however, in writing Persuasion, Austen takes great liberties with the generic form to turn her unlikely heroine into a happily married woman. In my second chapter, I examine Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical prose work as an extreme re-imagining and generic inversion of the Classical Bildungsroman form. If the Classical Bildungsroman inaugurates its protagonist into a life of cheerful normality, then De Quincey’s coming of age tracts illustrate a young person succumbing to opium addiction and experiencing his adulthood from inside his addiction. In describing his oppressive opium dreams, De Quincey reverses the causality of the Classical Bildungsroman, because at the end of his journey from adolescents to adulthood, he finds himself living isolated and alone inside of an elaborate but ultimately nonsensical nightmare that bears no resemblance to the gentile British world in which he lives. In my chapter on Henry James and Oscar Wilde, I explore the role aestheticism plays in inverting the coming of age stories of the late-nineteenth century. In their exposure to aestheticism, both Isabel Archer of Portrait of a Lady and Dorian Gray from Picture of Dorian Gray gravitate towards aesthetic experiences that will lead them away from the trajectory of the Classical Bildungsroman, which must end in marriage, happiness, and prosperity. The final chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman as it informs modernist authors by analyzing Ford Madox Ford’s multi-volume Parade’s End, a work that would appear to reject every Bildungsroman convention, by featuring an adult protagonist whose inner and outer life has been paralyzed by the global catastrophe of the Great War. Even though Ford is clearly writing a novel of regression, his protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, continues to strive for the same spiritual Bildungs that writers such as Austen and Goethe bestow on their protagonists, as they are largely credited with inventing the Classical Bildungsroman form

Acme Wheat

Acme wheat, S. D. No. 284 (C. I. No. 5284) was developed by selective breeding at the Highmore experiment farm. Acme is a selection from Kubanka, a tested wheat for South Dakota. Comparative results with Kubanka may be found in South Dakota bulletin 146. This bulletin also quotes the history of Kubanka wheat as follows: It has medium or short heads that are white with occasionally a slight bluish bloom, and have rather long beards. The grain is large, yellowish white and very hard. The variety is much grown by the Kirghiz and Turghai people on the Siberian border, where it is absolutely impossible to grow ordinary wheats of any kind because of extreme drouth [sic], the rainfall being as low as 10 inches per annum. It is cultivated throughout the entire Volga River region from Kazaii to the Caspian Sea, and eastward into the Kirghiz steppes and Turkestan. It is the most popular bread wheat of the lower Volga region

Holographic predictions for cosmological 3-point functions

We present the holographic predictions for cosmological 3-point correlators, involving both scalar and tensor modes, for a universe which started in a non-geometric holographic phase. Holographic formulae relate the cosmological 3-point functions to stress tensor correlation functions of a holographically dual three-dimensional non-gravitational QFT. We compute these correlators at 1-loop order for a theory containing massless scalars, fermions and gauge fields, and present an extensive analysis of the constraints due to Ward identities showing that they uniquely determine the correlators up to a few constants. We define shapes for all cosmological bispectra and compare the holographic shapes to the slow-roll ones, finding that some are distinguishable while others, perhaps surprisingly, are not.Comment: 51pp; 4 fig

Landsat TM and ETM+ derived snowline altitudes in the Cordillera Huayhuash and Cordillera Raura, Peru, 1986–2005

The Cordilleras Huayhuash and Raura are remote glacierized ranges in the Andes Mountains of Peru. A robust assessment of modern glacier change is important for understanding how regional change affects Andean communities, and for placing paleo-glaciers in a context relative to modern glaciation and climate. Snowline altitudes (SLAs) derived from satellite imagery are used as a proxy for modern (1986–2005) local climate change in a key transition zone in the Andes. <br><br> Clear sky, dry season Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) satellite images from 1986–2005 were used to identify snowline positions, and their altitude ranges were extracted from an Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) digital elevation model (DEM). Based on satellite records from 31 glaciers, average snowline altitudes (SLAs), an approximation for the equilibrium line altitude (ELA), for the Cordillera Huayhuash (13 glaciers) and Cordillera Raura (18 glaciers) from 1986–2005 were 5051 m a.s.l. from 1986–2005 and 5006 m a.s.l. from 1986–2002, respectively. During the same time period, the Cordillera Huayhuash SLA experienced no significant change while the Cordillera Raura SLA rose significantly from 4947 m a.s.l. to 5044 m a.s.l

The Holographic Universe

We present a holographic description of four-dimensional single-scalar inflationary universes in terms of a three-dimensional quantum field theory. The holographic description correctly reproduces standard inflationary predictions in their regime of applicability. In the opposite case, wherein gravity is strongly coupled at early times, we propose a holographic description in terms of perturbative QFT and present models capable of satisfying the current observational constraints while exhibiting a phenomenology distinct from standard inflation. This provides a qualitatively new method for generating a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of primordial cosmological perturbations.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figs; extended version of arXiv:0907.5542 including background material and detailed derivations. To appear in Proceedings of 1st Mediterranean Conference on Classical and Quantum Gravit

Thyroid cancer

Thyroid cancer is the fifth most common cancer in women in the USA, and an estimated over 62 000 new cases occurred in men and women in 2015. The incidence continues to rise worldwide. Differentiated thyroid cancer is the most frequent subtype of thyroid cancer and in most patients the standard treatment (surgery followed by either radioactive iodine or observation) is effective. Patients with other, more rare subtypes of thyroid cancer-medullary and anaplastic-are ideally treated by physicians with experience managing these malignancies. Targeted treatments that are approved for differentiated and medullary thyroid cancers have prolonged progression-free survival, but these drugs are not curative and therefore are reserved for patients with progressive or symptomatic diseas