‘A succession of incomprehensible images’ : decoud, boredom and history in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo

In an early scene in Nostromo, Emilia Gould declares that ‘nothing ever happened’ in Sulaco. ‘Even the revolutions, of which there had been two in her time’, the narrator adds, ‘respected the repose of the place’. The sense of historical impasse in Sulaco despite its tumultuous history is part of what I will call Nostromo’s rhetoric of boredom. I will suggest that Conrad’s novel embodies this rhetoric through Martin Decoud, the ‘idle boulevardier’ who commits suicide when marooned with the Goulds’ silver. Decoud’s weary conception of the universe as ‘a succession of incomprehensible images’ marks him out as a familiar cultural trope: the Parisian flâneur. During the nineteenth-century, this famous figure was often depicted in the language of disengagement, despondency and fatigue that would become characteristic of modern boredom. By attributing these qualities to Decoud, Nostromo locates the sceptical and ahistorical philosophy that leads him to commit suicide within a specific historical context. Moreover, Nostromo’s narrative form often presents its content as ‘a succession of incomprehensible images’, depicting its characters’ perspective through the paratactic accumulation of inconsequential details. Thus, the historically-constituted experience conveyed through the rhetoric of boredom is further expressed through the novel’s dissonant mode of historical narration.peer-reviewe

Reducible systems and embedding procedures in the canonical formalism

We propose a systematic method of dealing with the canonical constrained structure of reducible systems in the Dirac and symplectic approaches which involves an enlargement of phase and configuration spaces, respectively. It is not necessary, as in the Dirac approach, to isolate the independent subset of constraints or to introduce, as in the symplectic analysis, a series of lagrange multipliers-for-lagrange multipiers. This analysis illuminates the close connection between the Dirac and symplectic approaches of treating reducible theories, which is otherwise lacking. The example of p-form gauge fields (p=2,3) is analyzed in details.Comment: Latex 23 pages, some corrections and improvements in the text. To appear in Annals of Physic

Quantum photon emission from a moving mirror in the nonperturbative regime

We consider the coupling of the electromagnetic vacuum field with an oscillating perfectly-reflecting mirror in the nonrelativistic approximation. As a consequence of the frequency modulation associated to the motion of the mirror, low frequency photons are generated. We calculate the photon emission rate by following a nonperturbative approach, in which the coupling between the field sidebands is taken into account. We show that the usual perturbation theory fails to account correctly for the contribution of TM-polarized vacuum fluctuations that propagate along directions nearly parallel to the plane surface of the mirror. As a result of the modification of the field eigenfunctions, the resonance frequency for photon emission is shifted from its unperturbed value.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures. To be published in Optics Communication

Metallic Continuum Quantum Ferromagnets at Finite Temperature

We study via renormalization group (RG) and large N methods the problem of continuum SU(N) quantum Heisenberg ferromagnets (QHF) coupled to gapless electrons. We establish the phase diagram of the dissipative problem and investigate the changes in the Curie temperature, magnetization, and magnetic correlation length due to dissipation and both thermal and quantum fluctuations. We show that the interplay between the topological term (Berry's phase) and dissipation leads to non-trivial effects for the finite temperature critical behavior.Comment: Corrected typos, new discussion of T=0 results, to appear in Europhys. Let

A superspace embedding of the Wess-Zumino model

We embed the Wess-Zumino (WZ) model in a wider superspace than the one described by chiral and anti-chiral superfields.Comment: 5 pages, Revtex (multicol