The insistent realism of Don DeLillo’s ‘Falling Man’ and Paul Auster’s ‘Man in the Dark’

Many scholars considered that the fictionalization of September 11 marked the apotheosis of the postmodern era of images and perception. At the same time, the WTC collapse inspired a kind of post 9/11 fiction characterised by strong realistic descriptions. The aim of this article is to understand how Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) and Paul Auster's Man in The Dark (2008) tried to find a way to present, through a complex recourse to realism, the uncanny events of 9/11 and its prolonged aftermath that culminated in the subsequent horrors of the Iraq war. The insistent assertion of a proper representation of the traumatic events explictly contrasts the evasive literary narrations and the imaginary counter-narratives that might erode the relevance of the events. Furthermore, the detailed representation of these tragedies opposes itself to the equally insistent aesthetics of terror, through a revaluation of what the American literary theorist Ihab Hassan correctly defined (with no religious implications) a “postmodern aesthetic of trust”, that “brings us to a fiduciary realism, a realism that redefines the relation between subject and object, self and other, in terms of profound trust.

Advanced control based on Recurrent Neural Networks learned using Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning and application to an Electronic Throttle Body (with supplementary material)

In this paper the application of Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning (VRFT) for control of nonlinear systems with regulators defined by Echo State Networks (ESN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks is investigated. The capability of this class of regulators of constraining the control variable is pointed out and an advanced control scheme that allows to achieve zero steady-state error is presented. The developed algorithms are validated on a benchmark example that consists of an electronic throttle body (ETB)

Virtual-bike emulation in a series-parallel human-powered electric bike

Combining the advantages of standard bicycles and electrified vehicles, electric bikes (e-Bikes) are promising vehicles to reduce emission and traffic. The current literature on e-Bikes ranges from works on the energy management to the vehicle control to properly govern the human-vehicle interaction. This last point is fundamental in chain-less series bikes, where the link between the human and the vehicle behavior is only given by a control law. In this work, we address this problem in a series-parallel bike. In particular, we provide an extension of the virtual-chain concept, born for series bikes, and then we improve it developing a virtual-bike framework. Experimental results are used to validate the effectiveness of the solutions, when the cyclist is actually riding the bike.Comment: Accepted for publication at the IFAC World Congress 202

Walid Raad, « Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World »

Walid Raad, artiste en résidence au 104 en 2010, prend comme objet de travail le lien entre art et histoire. Depuis des années, il interroge par des moyens visuels la situation politique et sociale de son pays, le Liban, tout en le situant dans le contexte complexe du Moyen-Orient. À partir de documents comme des photographies, des vidéos, des notes, Raad construit des récits qui s’inspirent de la réalité. Il transforme les faits en images, les statistiques en taches colorées. Ces éléments so..

Pattern/randomness. Il rapporto fra testo e lettore in Infinite Jest di David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace questioned the previous literary tradition usually defined as “postmodern” through his narrative and non-fiction production. Following Katherine Hayles, it is possible to consider the decreasing prominence of the presence/absence dialectic typical of deconstructionism and postmodernism and, on a parallel plane, the increasing relevance of a pattern/randomness dialectic. From this point of view, one might argue, many postmodern fictions merely diagnosed the presence of a “technological sublime”, without proposing cognitive solutions to actively deal with it. Through a comparison between some key aspects of neural networks and the narrative structure of Infinite Jest (1996), the primary aim of this contribution is to understand how Wallace's novel may be considered as a literary device that helps the reader to become the manufacturer of new cognitive patterns, by processing and selecting information from the huge amount of data contained in the novel

Les domestiques au Canada en 1681 : étude d'un groupe à partir du recensement nominatif de la Nouvelle-France de 1681

Québec Université Laval, Bibliothèque 201

Uterine glands agenesia in the mare

All mammalian uteri contain endometrial glands that synthesize and secrete a substance termed histotroph, which is essential for early pregnancy nutrition. Because of that function, endometrial glands play a crucial role as regulators of survival and development of conceptus. In all mammalian females as well as in woman, endometrial glands undergo extensive hyperplasia and hypertrophy during pregnancy as a response to increasing demands of the developing conceptus for uterine histotroph. The process of endometrial glands development is called adenogenesis. Inhibition of the development of these glands through gene mutation or epigenetic strategies results in infertility. Two cases of total intrauterine glands developmental agenesis are presented, which were diagnosed on the base of histopathological examination of endometrial biopsy specimens. Despite the fact that endometrial glands agenesis in mare is a rare condition, it is worth while to emphasize that the endometrial biopsy is currently the best diagnostic tool to recognize the above developmental disturbance. Clinicians should be aware, that the mare with normal reproductive organs during macroscopic clinical investigation, can present with uterine glands agenesis

Walid Raad, « Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World »

Walid Raad, artiste en résidence au 104 en 2010, prend comme objet de travail le lien entre art et histoire. Depuis des années, il interroge par des moyens visuels la situation politique et sociale de son pays, le Liban, tout en le situant dans le contexte complexe du Moyen-Orient. À partir de documents comme des photographies, des vidéos, des notes, Raad construit des récits qui s’inspirent de la réalité. Il transforme les faits en images, les statistiques en taches colorées. Ces éléments so..

Dinamica stagionale e distribuzione orizzontale di fitoplancton, carbonio organico e batterioplancton. Struttura dei popolamenti fitoplanctonici

No abstract availabl