Annie Proulx’s Imaginative Leap: Constructing Gay Masculinity in “Brokeback Mountain”

Non-heterosexual men have long existed on the social and cultural margins. Gay and bisexual male characters in literature, too, have done so for many generations. This essay explores the construction of gay masculinity in the short story “Brokeback Mountain” in relation to the “imaginative leap” that its author, Annie Proulx, undertook in order to conceptualize and represent this noteworthy form of marginalized otherness. It demonstrates that, despite the story’s various refreshing elements, “Brokeback Mountain” ultimately relies far too extensively on the logic of melodrama when telling the tale of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who fall in love in 1963 and continue their sexual relationship over the course of two decades. As a result, this story ends up positioning its two queer protagonists as enemies of the patriarchal social order and the larger society within which it so comfortably exists, implicitly perpetuating both heterosexism and homophobia as it does its cultural work

Local and Global Convergence of a General Inertial Proximal Splitting Scheme

This paper is concerned with convex composite minimization problems in a Hilbert space. In these problems, the objective is the sum of two closed, proper, and convex functions where one is smooth and the other admits a computationally inexpensive proximal operator. We analyze a general family of inertial proximal splitting algorithms (GIPSA) for solving such problems. We establish finiteness of the sum of squared increments of the iterates and optimality of the accumulation points. Weak convergence of the entire sequence then follows if the minimum is attained. Our analysis unifies and extends several previous results. We then focus on $\ell_1$-regularized optimization, which is the ubiquitous special case where the nonsmooth term is the $\ell_1$-norm. For certain parameter choices, GIPSA is amenable to a local analysis for this problem. For these choices we show that GIPSA achieves finite "active manifold identification", i.e. convergence in a finite number of iterations to the optimal support and sign, after which GIPSA reduces to minimizing a local smooth function. Local linear convergence then holds under certain conditions. We determine the rate in terms of the inertia, stepsize, and local curvature. Our local analysis is applicable to certain recent variants of the Fast Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (FISTA), for which we establish active manifold identification and local linear convergence. Our analysis motivates the use of a momentum restart scheme in these FISTA variants to obtain the optimal local linear convergence rate.Comment: 33 pages 1 figur

‘A devotion to the experimental sciences and arts’: the subscription to the great battery at the Royal Institution 1808–9

A significant but neglected theme in the history of British science in the nineteenth century is the funding of institutional research. The subscription to the ‘great battery’ at the Royal Institution in 1808 and 1809 provides the first instance of named individuals prepared to commit themselves to the provision of apparatus to be used for research in the new field of electrochemistry. This paper analyses the subscribers who were deemed to be ‘enlightened’ and whom Humphry Davy subsequently described as ‘a few zealous cultivators and patrons of science’. Using information from the subscription list, a distinction is made between the individual subscriptions pledged and the sums actually paid. In contextualizing the subscription, insights are provided into the Royal Society, the contemporary scientific community and the politics of metropolitan science. The voltaic subscription represents an early example of the repercussions of the nature of research funding for institutional finances and governance