Existential Thought in American Psycho and Fight Club

Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991) and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) demonstrate a strong basis in existential thought. Both novels reference the philosophical and literary works of Sartre and Camus—two French intellectuals associated with the midtwentieth- century movement existentialism—as well as existentialism’s nineteenth-century antecedents Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. More importantly, American Psycho and Fight Club also modify the philosophy and its expression, incorporating postmodern satire, graphically violent content, and the Gothic conventions of "the double" and "the unspeakable", in order to update existential thought to suit the contemporary milieu in which these texts were produced. This new expression of existential thought is interlaced with the social critique American Psycho and Fight Club advance, particularly their satirical accounts of the vacuous banality of modern consumer culture and their disturbing representations of the repression and violent excesses ensuing from the crisis of masculinity. The engagement with existentialism in these novels also serves a playful function, as Ellis and Palahniuk frequently subvert the philosophy, keeping its idealism secondary to their experiments with its implications within the realm of fiction, emphasising the symptoms of existential crisis, rather than the resolution of the ontological quest for meaning. While these two novels can be considered existential in relation to the tradition of classic existentialist texts, they also represent a distinctive development of existential fiction—one that explores the existential condition of the postmodern subject at the end of the twentieth century

Seasonal Prokaryotic Community Linkages Between Surface and Deep Ocean Water

Sinking organic particles from surface waters provide key nutrients to the deep ocean, and could serve as vectors transporting microbial diversity to the deep ocean. However, the effect of this seasonally varying connectivity with the surface on deep microbial communities remains unexplored. Here, a three-year time-series from surface and deep (500 m) waters part of the Munida Microbial Observatory Time-Series (MOTS) was used to study the seasonality of epipelagic and mesopelagic prokaryotic communities. The goal was to establish how seasonally dynamic these two communities are, and any potential linkages between them. Both surface and deep prokaryotic communities displayed seasonality with high variation in community diversity. Deep prokaryotic communities mirrored the seasonal patterns in heterotrophic production and bacterial abundance displayed by surface communities, which were related to changes in chlorophyll-a concentration. However, the magnitude of this temporal variability in deeper waters was generally smaller than in the surface. Detection of surface prokaryotes in the deep ocean seemed seasonally linked to phytoplankton blooms, but other copiotrophic or typically algal-associated surface groups were not detected in the mesopelagic suggesting only specific populations were surviving the migration down the water column. We show transfer of organisms across depths is possibly not always unidirectional, with typically deep ocean microbes being seasonally abundant in surface waters. This indicates the main mechanism linking surface and deep communities changes seasonally: sinking of organic particles during productive periods, and vertical convection during winter overturning

Existential Thought in American Psycho and Fight Club

Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991) and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) demonstrate a strong basis in existential thought. Both novels reference the philosophical and literary works of Sartre and Camus—two French intellectuals associated with the midtwentieth- century movement existentialism—as well as existentialism’s nineteenth-century antecedents Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. More importantly, American Psycho and Fight Club also modify the philosophy and its expression, incorporating postmodern satire, graphically violent content, and the Gothic conventions of "the double" and "the unspeakable", in order to update existential thought to suit the contemporary milieu in which these texts were produced. This new expression of existential thought is interlaced with the social critique American Psycho and Fight Club advance, particularly their satirical accounts of the vacuous banality of modern consumer culture and their disturbing representations of the repression and violent excesses ensuing from the crisis of masculinity. The engagement with existentialism in these novels also serves a playful function, as Ellis and Palahniuk frequently subvert the philosophy, keeping its idealism secondary to their experiments with its implications within the realm of fiction, emphasising the symptoms of existential crisis, rather than the resolution of the ontological quest for meaning. While these two novels can be considered existential in relation to the tradition of classic existentialist texts, they also represent a distinctive development of existential fiction—one that explores the existential condition of the postmodern subject at the end of the twentieth century

The Lothian picture collection : history and context

The historic picture collection of the earls and marquises of Lothian hung, until the middle of this century, at their Sottish seat, Newbattle Abbey (near Edinburgh). The first pictures came to the house in the mid-sixteenth century, and were continually added to until 1900. This thesis reconstructs the contents of that collection, now dispersed, by tracing the contribution to it of the successive owners. A parallel aim is to put each collector, and the collection as a whole, in a national and historic context, thus reflecting developments of taste within both the family and the nation. A detailed analysis of each picture has not been attempted. Chapter I provides an account of the changing architectural context of the collection. Chapter II is concerned with the artistic interests of the earlier members of the family. Chapter III deals with the 1st Earl of Ancram, whose son became 3rd Earl of Lothian by marriage, and who himself had an important role in the cultural history of Britain. Chapters IV and V analyse in detail the extensive acquisitions of the 3rd earl, and of his son, the 1st marquis, respectively. Chapter VI covers the years 1703-1853, when relatively few pictures were added. Chapter VII is devoted to the 8th marquis, a collector of national importance; his book on Italian history, literature and art is also briefly examined. Chapter VIII traces the additional purchases made by his brother, the 9th marquis, with whose death the period of collecting at Newbattle came to a close. A final chapter records the recent history of the collection. Volume II contains a complete catalogue of all the pictures known to have hung at Newbattle, so far as it can be reconstructed. This volume also contain the illustrations

An Outline Introductory to Kant\u27s Critique of Pure Reason

R. M. Wenley\u27s introductory outline of Immanuel Kant\u27s Critique of Pure Reason is designed to assist the student in reading Kant\u27s work. The book is broken down into the genesis, the problem, the outline of the contents, and finally the conclusion. Please see the attached contents page.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/rarebooks/1192/thumbnail.jp