ТРИ ТЕОРЕТИКА БИОГРАФИИ: ВИНОКУР, ЛОТМАН, ДУБИН

The article compares theoretical works written at different times by three Russian scholars and focusing on the problem of biography as experience and text: Biography and Culture by Grigory Vinokur, "Literary Biography in Historical and Cultural Context" by Yuri Lotman and "Biography, Reputation, Questionnaire" by Boris Dubin. Biography, that is, the narrative textualization of an one’s life, presupposes a three-phase process: first, one lives his or her life in a special way, then society evaluates, “reads” this life as a coherent plot, and finally later (or modern) historians tell this life in a narrative form. Grigory Vinokur, later a well-known linguist, in 1927 published a small monograph Biography and Culture, where the problem indicated in the title is posed not in philological, but in philosophical terms, based on the recent phenomenological philosophy (Vinokur refers to Edmund Husserl and especially to Gustav Shpet, with whom he worked closely in those years). From an objective description of events, the author transfers attention to the personal experience lived out by the hero. Yuri Lotman in his article "Literary Biography in a Historical and Cultural Context" (1986) studies not the phenomenological, but the cultural and semiotic aspect of biography - the conditions under which someone's life, and especially creative life in literature, can become a subject of public attention and a story in which a writer becomes a "writer with a biography." Boris Dubin's article "Biography, Reputation, Questionnaire" (1995) notes the possibility of non-biographical forms of cultural integration of individual life experience: questionnaires (cf. Lotman's "track record") and reputation (generalized image of a given person). In such forms, one’s life is interpreted from the outside, from the point of view of administrative authorities or public opinion, and cannot unfold into a narrative. Dubin singles out some objective social factors that allow people to oppose themselves to the dominant social structures: unofficial, dissident communities, various types of ludic behavior that deny accepted norms in the very act of playing with them. The comparison of the three authors tends to show a continuity of ideas, and at the same time a methodological difference in their approaches, due to the disciplinary affiliation of the three scholars (respectively philosophical phenomenology, semiotics of culture, sociology of culture).В статье сопоставлены теоретические работы, созданные в разное время тремя русскими учеными и посвященные проблеме биографии как опыта и текста: «Биография и культура» Григория Винокура, «Литературная биография в историко-культурном контексте» Юрия Лотмана и «Биография, репутация, анкета» Бориса Дубина. Биография, то есть нарративная текстуализация жизни индивида, предполагает трехфазный процесс: сначала человек сам каким-то особым способом проживает свою жизнь, затем общество оценивает, «прочитывает» его жизнь как связный сюжет, и наконец позднейшие (или современные) историки излагают ту же жизнь в повествовательной форме. Григорий Винокур, впоследствии известный лингвист, в 1927 году опубликовал небольшую монографию «Биография и культура», где указанная в заглавии проблема поставлена не в филологическом, а в философском плане, с опорой на новейшую феноменологическую философию (Винокур ссылается на Эдмунда Гуссерля и особенно на Густава Шпета, с которым он близко сотрудничал в те годы). С объективного описания событий автор переносит внимание на личный опыт, переживаемый героем. Юрий Лотман в статье «Литературная биография в историко-культурном контексте» (1986) изучает не феноменологический, а культурно-семиотический аспект биографии – условия, при которых чья-то индивидуальная жизнь, и прежде всего творческая жизнь в литературе, может стать предметом общественного внимания и рассказа, при которых литератор становится «писателем с биографией». Статья Бориса Дубина «Биография, репутация, анкета» (1995) отмечает возможность других – не-биографических – форм культурной интеграции индивидуального жизненного опыта: анкеты (ср. «послужной список» у Лотмана) и репутации (обобщенного образа данного лица; ср. «образ» биографируемого лица по Винокуру). В таких формах жизнь человека осмысливается извне, с точки зрения административных инстанций или же общественного мнения, и не может развернуться в повествование. Дубин выделяет некоторые объективно-социальные факторы, позволяющие людям противопоставлять себя господствующим общественным структурам: неофициальные, диссидентские общности, в рамках которых утверждают себя их члены, различные виды игрового поведения, отрицающего принятые нормы в самом акте их обыгрывания. Сопоставление трех теоретиков призвано показать преемственность идей, а вместе с тем методологическое различие подходов, обусловленное дисциплинарной принадлежностью трех ученых (в данном случае это соответственно философская феноменология, семиотика культуры, социология культуры)

Solutions of the Ginsparg-Wilson Relation

We analyze general solutions of the Ginsparg-Wilson relation for lattice Dirac operators and formulate a necessary condition for such operators to have non-zero index in the topologically nontrivial background gauge fields.Comment: 6 pages, latex, no figures, set T to 1 in eqs. (10)--(13

Investigation of the Domain Wall Fermion Approach to Chiral Gauge Theories on the Lattice

We investigate a recent proposal to construct chiral gauge theories on the lattice using domain wall fermions. We restrict ourselves to the finite volume case, in which two domain walls are present, with modes of opposite chirality on each of them. We couple the chiral fermions on only one of the domain walls to a gauge field. In order to preserve gauge invariance, we have to add a scalar field, which gives rise to additional light mirror fermion and scalar modes. We argue that in an anomaly free model these extra modes would decouple if our model possesses a so-called strong coupling symmetric phase. However, our numerical results indicate that such a phase most probably does not exist. ---- Note: 9 Postscript figures are appended as uuencoded compressed tar file.Comment: 27p. Latex; UCSD/PTH 93-28, Wash. U. HEP/93-6

Phosphorylation decelerates conformational dynamics in bacterial translation elongation factors

Bacterial protein synthesis is intricately connected to metabolic rate. One of the ways in which bacteria respond to environmental stress is through posttranslational modifications of translation factors. Translation elongation factor Tu (EF-Tu) is methylated and phosphorylated in response to nutrient starvation upon entering stationary phase, and its phosphorylation is a crucial step in the pathway toward sporulation. We analyze how phosphorylation leads to inactivation of Escherichia coli EF-Tu. We provide structural and biophysical evidence that phosphorylation of EF-Tu at T382 acts as an efficient switch that turns off protein synthesis by decoupling nucleotide binding from the EF-Tu conformational cycle. Direct modifications of the EF-Tu switch I region or modifications in other regions stabilizing the β-hairpin state of switch I result in an effective allosteric trap that restricts the normal dynamics of EF-Tu and enables the evasion of the control exerted by nucleotides on G proteins. These results highlight stabilization of a phosphorylation-induced conformational trap as an essential mechanism for phosphoregulation of bacterial translation and metabolism. We propose that this mechanism may lead to the multisite phosphorylation state observed during dormancy and stationary phase

Low Energy Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering with the Skyrme Model in the Geodetic Approximation

We calculate nucleon-nucleon scattering at low energies and large impact parameter in the Skyrme model within the framework for soliton scattering proposed by Manton. This corresponds to a truncation of the degrees of freedom to the twelve collective coordinates which essentially describe the rigid body motion of the pair of Skyrmions. We take to its logical conclusion the result that the induced kinetic energy for these collective coordinates in the product ansatz behaves as one over the separation and hence can dominate over the potential. This behaviour implies to leading order that we can drop the potential and the resulting motion reduces simply to geodesic motion on the manifold parametrized by the variables of the product ansatz. We formulate the semi-classical quantization of these variables to obtain the motion corresponding to the nucleonic states of the Skyrme model. This is the appropriate description for the nucleons in order to consider their scattering within Manton's framework in the semi-classical approximation. We investigate the implications for the scattering of nucleons with various initial polarizations using the approximation method of ``variation of constants''.Comment: 18 pages, UDEM-LPN-TH-94-19