Delirious USA: the representation of capital in the fiction of Don DeLillo

In this thesis I offer a new reading of Don DeLillo’s fiction through an engagement with contemporary Marxist literary theory and political economy. Beginning in the 1960s, the thesis traces the launch, expansion, and shattering of DeLillo’s narrative apparatus as it recomposes itself across the genres of the short story, the conspiratorial thriller, the historical novel, and the novel of time. Developing on theories of the novel as a capitalist epic, the thesis takes the insistent appearance of surplus populations in DeLillo’s work as an opportunity to reflect on, but also to revise and reconceptualise, Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. The DeLillo that emerges from this thesis is less an exemplar of postmodernism and more a novelist of the dispossessed whose central representational task is the invention of a multitude. Chapter One contends that DeLillo’s early short stories from the 1960s acquire a new recognisability in the wake of his late turn towards an aesthetic of suspension. The chapter questions whether the forms of stasis depicted in DeLillo’s short fiction generate new historical futures or if they contribute to a de-collectivised eternal present that later consumes his work. Chapter Two addresses DeLillo’s off-kilter conspiracy novels and reads their discovery of pockets of uneven development through and against the concept of ‘cognitive mapping’. Chapter Three examines the formal means by which DeLillo appropriates Georg Lukács’s classic account of the historical novel and reconfigures it through an irrational historicism that hinges on the non-presupposition of the people. Chapter Four considers the extent to which the non-anthropogenic subjects of history that constrain and inform DeLillo’s twenty-first century fiction constitute political resignation or if they intimate historical futures beyond a catastrophic present. The thesis concludes with a brief reflection on passages out of DeLillo’s epic representation of capitalism

Delirious USA: the representation of capital in the fiction of Don DeLillo

In this thesis I offer a new reading of Don DeLillo’s fiction through an engagement with contemporary Marxist literary theory and political economy. Beginning in the 1960s, the thesis traces the launch, expansion, and shattering of DeLillo’s narrative apparatus as it recomposes itself across the genres of the short story, the conspiratorial thriller, the historical novel, and the novel of time. Developing on theories of the novel as a capitalist epic, the thesis takes the insistent appearance of surplus populations in DeLillo’s work as an opportunity to reflect on, but also to revise and reconceptualise, Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. The DeLillo that emerges from this thesis is less an exemplar of postmodernism and more a novelist of the dispossessed whose central representational task is the invention of a multitude. Chapter One contends that DeLillo’s early short stories from the 1960s acquire a new recognisability in the wake of his late turn towards an aesthetic of suspension. The chapter questions whether the forms of stasis depicted in DeLillo’s short fiction generate new historical futures or if they contribute to a de-collectivised eternal present that later consumes his work. Chapter Two addresses DeLillo’s off-kilter conspiracy novels and reads their discovery of pockets of uneven development through and against the concept of ‘cognitive mapping’. Chapter Three examines the formal means by which DeLillo appropriates Georg Lukács’s classic account of the historical novel and reconfigures it through an irrational historicism that hinges on the non-presupposition of the people. Chapter Four considers the extent to which the non-anthropogenic subjects of history that constrain and inform DeLillo’s twenty-first century fiction constitute political resignation or if they intimate historical futures beyond a catastrophic present. The thesis concludes with a brief reflection on passages out of DeLillo’s epic representation of capitalism

Building Large Phylogenetic Trees on Coarse-Grained Parallel Machines

Abstract Phylogenetic analysis is an area of computational biology concerned with the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships between organisms, genes, and gene families. Maximum likelihood evaluation has proven to be one of the most reliable methods for constructing phylogenetic trees. The huge computational requirements associated with maximum likelihood analysis means that it is not feasible to produce large phylogenetic trees using a single processor. We have completed a fully cross platform coarse-grained distributed application, DPRml, which overcomes many of the limitations imposed by the current set of parallel phylogenetic programs. We have completed a set of efficiency tests that show how to maximise efficiency while using the program to build large phylogenetic trees. The software is publicly available under the terms of the GNU general public licence from the system webpage at http://www.cs.nuim.ie/distributed

Improving the indistinguishability of single photons from an ion-cavity system

We investigate two schemes for generating indistinguishable single photons, a key feature of quantum networks, from a trapped ion coupled to an optical cavity. Through selection of the initial state in a cavity-assisted Raman transition, we suppress the detrimental effects of spontaneous emission on the photon's coherence length, measuring a visibility of 81(2)% without subtraction of background counts in a Hong-Ou-Mandel interference measurement, the highest reported for an ion-cavity system. In comparison, a visbility of 50(2)% was measured using a more conventional single photon scheme. We demonstrate through numerical analysis of the single photon generation process that the new scheme produces photons of a given indistinguishability with a greater efficiency than the conventional one. Single photon schemes such as the one demonstrated here have applications in distributed quantum computing and communications, which rely on high fidelity entanglement swapping and state transfer through indistinguishable single photons

Superconducting Films for Absorber-Coupled MKID Detectors for Sub-Millimeter and Far-Infrared Astronomy

We describe measurements of the properties, at dc, gigahertz, and terahertz frequencies, of thin (10 nm) aluminum films with 10 ohm/{rm square}$ normal state sheet resistance. Such films can be applied to construct microwave kinetic inductance detector arrays for submillimeter and far-infrared astronomical applications in which incident power excites quasiparticles directly in a superconducting resonator that is configured to present a matched-impedance to the high frequency radiation being detected. For films 10 nm thick, we report normal state sheet resistance, resistance-temperature curves for the superconducting transition, quality factor and kinetic inductance fraction for microwave resonators made from patterned films, and terahertz measurements of sheet impedance measured with a Fourier Transform Spectrometer. We compare properties with similar resonators made from niobium 600 nm thick

Building large phylogenetic trees on coarse-grained parallel machines

Phylogenetic analysis is an area of computational biology concerned with the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships between organisms, genes, and gene families. Maximum likelihood evaluation has proven to be one of the most reliable methods for constructing phylogenetic trees. The huge computa- tional requirements associated with maximum likelihood analysis means that it is not feasible to produce large phylogenetic trees using a single processor. We have completed a fully cross platform coarse grained distributed application, DPRml, which overcomes many of the limitations imposed by the current set of parallel phylogenetic programs. We have completed a set of efï¬ciency tests that show how to maximise efï¬ciency while using the program to build large phylogenetic trees. The software is publicly available under the terms of the GNU general public li- cence from the system webpage at http://www.cs.nuim.ie/distribute

Highly disordered histone H1-DNA model complexes and their condensates.

Disordered proteins play an essential role in a wide variety of biological processes, and are often posttranslationally modified. One such protein is histone H1; its highly disordered C-terminal tail (CH1) condenses internucleosomal linker DNA in chromatin in a way that is still poorly understood. Moreover, CH1 is phosphorylated in a cell cycle-dependent manner that correlates with changes in the chromatin condensation level. Here we present a model system that recapitulates key aspects of the in vivo process, and also allows a detailed structural and biophysical analysis of the stages before and after condensation. CH1 remains disordered in the DNA-bound state, despite its nanomolar affinity. Phase-separated droplets (coacervates) form, containing higher-order assemblies of CH1/DNA complexes. Phosphorylation at three serine residues, spaced along the length of the tail, has little effect on the local properties of the condensate. However, it dramatically alters higher-order structure in the coacervate and reduces partitioning to the coacervate phase. These observations show that disordered proteins can bind tightly to DNA without a disorder-to-order transition. Importantly, they also provide mechanistic insights into how higher-order structures can be exquisitely sensitive to perturbation by posttranslational modifications, thus broadening the repertoire of mechanisms that might regulate chromatin and other macromolecular assemblies