16 research outputs found
"Author! Author!" : Shakespeare and biography
Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t714579626~db=all Copyright Informa / Taylor & Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/17450910902764454Since 1996, not a year has passed without the publication of at least one Shakespeare biography. Yet for many years the place of the author in the practice of understanding literary works has been problematized, and even on occasions eliminated. Criticism reads the “works”, and may or may not refer to an author whose “life” contributed to their meaning. Biography seeks the author in the works, the personality that precedes the works and gives them their characteristic shape and meaning. But the form of literary biography addresses the unusual kind of “life” that puts itself into “works”, and this is particularly challenging where the “works” predominate massively over the salient facts of the “life”. This essay surveys the current terrain of Shakespeare biography, and considers the key questions raised by the medium: can we know anything of Shakespeare's “personality” from the facts of his life and the survival of his works? What is the status of the kind of speculation that inevitably plays a part in biographical reconstruction? Are biographers in the end telling us as much about themselves as they tell us about Shakespeare?Peer reviewe
Constraining designers and their CAD tools
Electronics product designs can fail for technological reasons and also for human reasons. Both computer-aided design (CAD) tools and formal methods have attempted to limit the risk of product failure by logical assessment of the design and its technology. However, to improve design effectiveness and efficiency the contribution of people to a design's risk of failure must also be assessed and controlled. A method is presented of controlling and limiting human design through the application of a four-path model of design previously developed by the author. The model categorizes designs as repeat design, variant design, innovative design or strategic design. Each has its own set of pre-existent constraints that limit the capacity for unwanted innovation to the product at the outset of each development programme. This provides a mechanism by which designer creativity may be controlled. The manner in which designers are constrained may also be applied to the control of CAD tools commonly employed in the design process.