Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime

Samuel Beckett\u27s texts are populated with characters who have been so deprived of their humanity that humanity appears as essentially absent from his texts. The characters\u27 presence in the diegesis is marked by unmistakable absences-absence of vision, of mobility, of sense, of name. Beckett\u27s characters are often without: without hair, without teeth, without foreseeable future. The human character is at the limit of humanity and runs the risk of passing over into the grey zone of the inhuman. They lose track of their place, of their time, of their names. They frequently belong to no time and no place. When they are specifically situated, they are in and among ruins

On Mutilation: The Sublime Body of Chuck Palahniuk\u27s Fiction

Much of Chuck Palahniuk\u27s writing centers on the mutilation of bodies. Bodies are broken from the outside. They are beaten unrecognizable and destroyed beyond recuperation. Bodies are transformed from one sex to another, one gender to another. In Palahniuk\u27s writing, the human body is the site for the inscription of a search for modes of authentic living in a world where the difference between the fake and the genuine has ceased to function. Not just the rules that had regulated behavior and prospects for a good life, but the rules that determine desire, pleasure, gender identity, and family role are all undone. The prospects for a life of the true, the good, or even the real have been lost to their own proper simulacra

Hiroshima, \u27mon amour,\u27 Trauma, and the Sublime

Trauma ruptures the world of our daily experiences. It is an intrusion that threatens the body and psyche and affects us in symptomatic ways. That something happened is certain; what that is, however, resists comprehension and understanding. The impetus of much contemporary trauma research in the humanities derives from the coincidence of survivors\u27 insistence on the truth of their experiences and life in a global culture that multiplies traumatic circumstances. These circumstances pose a radical threat to the fecundity of human life, to be sure, and also to the very possibility of brute survival. My aim in this essay is to find a way in which experiences of terror may acquire forms that will facilitate the necessary thinking through of their significance to our present and future

Differend, Sexual Difference, and the Sublime

The aim of this chapter is to articulate how two key feminist writers, Marguerite Duras and Luce lrigaray, engage and rewrite Lyotard\u27s interest in the sublime as a feminist aesthetic category. Jean-François Lyotard was at the vanguard of a retrieval of the category of the sublime in contemporary aesthetic theory. A trenchantly polymorphous philosopher, he wrote of the sublime in a range of styles that rivals the old masters of aesthetics, who not only mastered the thought, but were themselves sublime in their works. Whereas the tradition of aesthetics almost unequivocally aligns the sublime with the masculine and the feminine with beauty, lrigaray and Duras invent a feminist sublime that seeks to be a source of resistance and transformation of oppressive and repressive elements of Occidental aesthetics and politics

Mathematical modelling for red squirrel conservation

In this thesis we develop mathematical models to understand the impact of forest management and pine marten predation on red and grey squirrel disease-mediated competitive dynamics. Our work extends a well-tested, spatially-explicit, stochastic model framework to assess the impact of forest management plans undertaken in designated red squirrel stronghold forests in Scotland. We determine the impact of the forest management on the population viability of red squirrels, when threatened by grey squirrel invasion. The model framework is further extended to identify natural strongholds - forest sites that act as red squirrel strongholds without the need for specific forest composition plans or grey squirrel control. The results have direct implications for forest management practice and will inform an upcoming review of red squirrel conservation policy on the future of designated strongholds. The stochastic model framework was modified to include pine marten dynamics in order to assess the impact of pine marten predation on red and grey squirrel interactions. Over the last few decades pine marten have seen a recovery in their density and range in Scotland and Ireland, and this has coincided with a reduction in grey squirrel density and the recovery of red squirrels. We use the model to assess the impact of pine marten trans-locations into North Wales, with particular attention paid to the red squirrels resident on Anglesey and in Clocaenog (a forest site in North Wales). The thesis also develops a deterministic model framework to understand how a temporal refuge from predation can mediate the interactions of competing prey species. This deterministic framework is extended to consider the red and grey squirrel and pine marten system, where a temporal refuge can occur when pine marten predation is focussed on the peak phase of vole density cycles. The refuge from predation has the potential to reverse the beneficial advantage of pine marten for red squirrels, and provides a necessary note of caution for the role of pine marten as grey squirrel control agents. The work in this thesis highlights how important mathematical models are in understanding the potential impact of conservation policy on focal species in Scotland and Wales.UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant EP/L016508/01

A temporal refuge from predation can change the outcome of prey species competition

Funding Information: – AS was supported by The Maxwell Institute Graduate School in Analysis and its Applications, a Centre for Doctoral Training funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant EP/L016508/01), the Scottish Funding Council, Heriot‐Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors. Oikos published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Nordic Society Oikos.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Mixed-conducting oxygen permeable ceramic membranes for the carbon dioxide reforming of methane

This is the published version. Copyright 2007 Royal Society of ChemistryDue to the high economic, environmental, and safety costs associated with pure oxygen, mixed-conducting oxygen-permeable ceramic membranes are being explored as an alternative oxygen source for hydrocarbon conversion reactors. This work reports a dramatic improvement in catalyst performance when an oxygen-permeable SrFeCo0.5Ox ceramic membrane is used in conjunction with a conventional powder Pt/ZrO2 catalyst for the CO2 reforming of CH4. Experiments comparing catalyst performance with up to 2% co-fed oxygen to catalyst performance with oxygen from the ceramic membrane demonstrated a conversion three times higher with the membrane than with any amount of co-fed oxygen. The results suggest that membrane oxygen is more beneficial for catalyst activity and stability than molecular gas-phase oxygen

DOC 2018-01 Human Sexuality Studies Certificate

Legislative Authority; Art. III. B. 1-7; DOC 2015-0