Excavating the remains of empire: War and postimperial trauma in the twentieth-century novel

In Excavating the Remains of Empire: War and Postimperial Trauma in the Twentieth-Century Novel, I investigate the implications of the residual presence of empire in the contemporary novel set in England, by questioning that if it is generally accepted that in the age of imperialism novels co-produced empire, what do they now, in this historical moment of the late twentieth-century, produce in its stead? Do shame and nostalgia for empire and the trauma of empire\u27s dissolution coexist in the postimperial, postwar novel? I use war as the key point of entry into the empire and novel connection, and claim that war operates in the novel on three essential fronts: as resulting from and encoding imperial tensions, as the traumatic event which magnifies empire\u27s dissolution, and as the only acceptable model for a nation in crisis. Because war both results from and encodes imperial tensions, and novels are so often the battleground on which these imperial tensions wrestle for signification and reformulation, then war in novels can serve as the double lens which magnifies the residual workings of empire and the novel. I begin with Virginia Woolf\u27s Mrs. Dalloway, and claim that in it she reveals the limitations of the binaries of war and empire, while also portraying the anxieties regarding empire that have been raised by the First World War; I show how Pat Barker\u27s Regeneration trilogy incorporates these two aspects as well, yet also furthers the connection between war and empire by using war to work out the traumas caused by v empire\u27s loss; I claim that Margaret Drabble has a similar project in The Gates of Ivory , in which she too explicates this traumatic loss of cultural identity resulting from the end of empire; and then I proceed to an examination of how Amitav Ghosh shows the restrictions of war as the narrative of a nation in The Shadow Lines, while also proving war to itself be a significant means of empire\u27s perpetuation. Despite the fact that the British Empire has been officially dismantled, imperialism and the novel are still inter-connected

Space-Time Separation During Obstacle-Avoidance Learning in Monkeys

Is the movement duration time known before we move? To answer this question, a new experimental paradigm is introduced that for the first time monitors the acquisition of a new motor skill in rhesus monkeys. Straight reaches were interleaved with reaches around physical obstacles that elicited a different path geometry. Curved and longer spatial paths were immediately resolved and consistent over months of training. A new temporal strategy separately evolved over repetitions from multiple to a single velocity peak. We propose that the obstacle-avoidance spatial paths were resolved before motion execution and used as reference in the computation of the new dynamics. Path conservation from the first trial occurred both at the hand and at the joint angle levels, whereas the speed profile dramatically changed over time. The spatial solution required no learning and was anticipated by the spontaneous repositioning of the initial arm posture. The learning was in the temporal domain, involving the adjustment of the speed during the motion's first impulse. Within the movement initiation, the partial distance traveled by the hand up to the first velocity peak was finely tuned under a constant time. For a given space location, the time of the first impulse remained robust to learning, but significantly shifted for different targets and obstacle configurations. Differences in the temporal-related parameters across time provided a clear distinction between learning and automatic behavior

Is Lawfare Worth Defining - Report of the Cleveland Experts Meeting - September 11, 2010

This is the report of the Cleveland Experts Meeting

Ghost and the Machine: Bringing Untold Personal Spiritual and Cultural Experiences to Life Through the Medium of Digital Storytelling.

This study examines learners’ perceptions of the experiences of transformation from the storytelling experience of digital stories within a graduate class on spirituality and culture, by means of the lenses of both transformative learning theory and storytelling theory

Is Lawfare Worth Defining - Report of the Cleveland Experts Meeting - September 11, 2010

This is the report of the Cleveland Experts Meeting

Convergence of Aberrant Electrophysiological Correlates of Salience, Affective Processing and Stress Reactivity in Patients with Schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia exhibit debilitating deficits in attention and affective processing, which are often resistant to treatment and associated with poor functional outcomes. Attentional and affective processing relies on a distributed neural network of fronto-limbic circuits, which enable cognitive control and affective processing, and assist in their interaction to regulate emotional responses. Despite evidence of intact affective valence processing, schizophrenia patients are often unable to employ cognitive change strategies to reduce attentional capture by emotionally salient stimuli, or modulate neurophysiological responses to aversive stimuli. Aberrant neurophysiological correlates of orienting to task-relevant emotional stimuli are also present in unaffected first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients, suggesting they may represent vulnerability markers. However, less is known about the attentional processing of emotionally salient, task-irrelevant information in these groups, which is examined in Experiment 1 (Chapter 2). Results suggest that despite intact novelty detection, schizophrenia patients and relatives shared deficiencies in attentional processing of emotionally salient information. First-degree relatives exhibited a unique enhancement of the electrophysiological correlate underlying salience evaluation, possibly indicating a compensatory engagement of neural circuitry. While fronto-limbic circuits are fundamental for affective processing and its modulation by higher order cognitive control, this network also plays a critical role in stress regulation, and is disproportionally affected by the deleterious effects of stress. To understand the efficiency and resilience of fronto-limbic circuitry in adapting and recovering from stress exposure in schizophrenia, Experiment 2 (Chapter 3) investigated the effect of an acute experimental psychosocial stressor on neurophysiological indices of fronto-limbic-mediated emotional regulation processes. Results suggest that stress exposure modified electrophysiological correlates of affective processing in patients and controls. Furthermore, patients demonstrated aberrant fronto-limbic oscillatory indices of affective processing, as indicated by exaggerated neural excitability and inefficient frontal cognitive control, and maladaptive stress function. This imbalance between heightened neural responsivity and inefficient frontal regulation may reflect an atypical arousal state that may in turn interfere with fronto-limbic processing and promote symptomatology. Elucidating the neurophysiological correlates underlying salience detection, affective processing, and their modification by stress, will be crucial for identifying vulnerability markers, and for developing innovative treatment strategies targeting the fronto-limbic circuitry to relieve psychopathology.Doctor of Philosoph