Restaging World Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism

In his article Restaging World Literature in the Age of Neoliberal­ism/Neocolonia­­lism Shaobo Xie argues that Goethe\u27s notion of world literature spells a genuine universalism that contributes to resistance to neoliberal imperialism. In the age of neocolonial­ism/ne­oliberalism all conduct, and all spheres of human life are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics and neoliberalism both as a govern­ing rationality and as an economic policy is penetrating into every part of the world. The politics that is really heter­ogeneous or external to the rule of neoliberal capitalism in the neocolonial global present consists in thinking towards new possibilities of organizing our life in ways that are radi­cally different than endorsed by the hegemonic global system itself. The Goethean world-literature mode of thinking, one can argue, richly nurtures such thoughts of the outside, for, while insisting on the universal as articulated in culture-specific forms, it always sees other ways of being human, other modes of making sense, and other possibilities of organizing social life

Guoxue re et l'ambiguïté de la modernité chinoise

Cet essai aborde la signification symbolique ou socio-idéologique de ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui en Chine le guoxue re (engouement pour les études nationales). Selon l'auteur, bien que le concept de guoxue ait conservé la même morphologie, il a traversé l'histoire en changeant de contenu. Il revêt, selon les groupes sociaux, une signification différente et ne sert pas les mêmes intérêts. Le terme guoxue, employé de façon catachrètique, implose par son ambiguïté lorsqu'il est manipulé pour s'adapter aux désirs du marché en général et du marché culturel en particulier. Le vertigineux paysage kaléidoscopique qui se cache derrière le guoxue indique en fin de compte sans erreur possible une collusion entre le gouvernement, l'élite académique et le marché. Cette ambiguïté conceptuelle et discursive du guoxue s'inscrit dans la continuité de l'ambiguïté inhérente à la modernité chinoise, qui dans son état actuel constitue un mélange de capitalisme, de marxisme, de confucianisme et de développementalisme auquel s’ajoute la notion de société harmonieuse. En outre, à une époque où la vie en Chine est dominée par les règles du capital, cette fièvre du guoxue trahit un désir profondément ancré dans l'inconscient collectif chinois de changement radical de l'ordre social et de quête d'une autre humanité que celle définie par les modes de vie de la modernité capitaliste

Guoxue Re and the Ambiguity of Chinese Modernity

This essay addresses the symbolic or socio-ideological significance of what is called guoxue re in China today. In the author’s view, as a concept with a fixed morphological form, guoxue has been traversing history with a changing content, and for different people or social groups it means different things and serves different interests. The catachrestically used term guoxue acquires an imploding ambiguity when it is manipulated to accommodate different needs and desires in the contemporary Chinese culture and commodity market. The kaleidoscopic vertiginous guoxue landscape in China, the essay argues, ultimately points to an unmistakable collusion among the state government, the academic elite, and the commodity market. As such, the imploding ambiguity of the concept and discourse of guoxue bears a continuity with the ambiguity of Chinese modernity, which at present is a conglomerate of capitalism, Marxism, Confucianism, economism or developmentalism, and harmonious society. Moreover, the contemporary guoxue re betrays an innermost desire in the Chinese national unconscious for a different genuinely existing social order, and for other ways of being human than those defined by capitalist modernity while China is being dominated by the rule of capital

Pontryagin's Minimum Principle based model predictive control of energy management for a plug-in hybrid electric bus

To improve computational efficiency of energy management strategies for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), this paper proposes a stochastic model predictive controller (MPC) based on Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle (PMP), which differs from widely used dynamic programming (DP)-based predictive methods. First, short-time speed forecasting is achieved using a Markov chain model, based on real-world driving cycles. The PMP- and DP-based MPCs are compared under four preview horizons (5 s, 10 s, 15 s and 20 s), and the results show that the computational time of the DP-MPC is almost four times of that in the PMP-MPC. Moreover, the influence of predication horizon length on computational time and energy consumption is examined. Given a preview horizon of 5 s, the PMP-MPC holds a total energy consumption cost of 7.80 USD and computational time per second of 0.0130 s. When the preview horizon increases to 20 s, the total cost is 7.77 USD with the computational time per second increasing to 0.0502 s. Finally, DP, PMP, and rule-based strategies are contrasted to the PMP-MPC method, further demonstrating the promising performance and computational efficiency of the proposed methodology

Ananas comosus

In this study, we aimed to investigate the effect and action mechanisms of pineapple leaf phenols (PLPs) on liver fat metabolism in high-fat diet-fed mice. Results show that PLP significantly reduced abdominal fat and liver lipid accumulation in high-fat diet-fed mice. The effects of PLP were comparable with those of FB. Furthermore, at the protein level, PLP upregulated the expression of carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1 (CPT-1), whereas FB had no effects on CPT-1 compared with the HFD controls. Regarding mRNA expression, PLP mainly promoted the expression of CPT-1, PGC1a, UCP-1, and AMPK in the mitochondria, whereas FB mostly enhanced the expression of Ech1, Acox1, Acaa1, and Ehhadh in peroxisomes. PLP seemed to enhance fat metabolism in the mitochondria, whereas FB mainly exerted the effect in peroxisomes. In addition, p-coumaric acid (CA), one of the main components from PLP, significantly inhibited fat accumulation in oleic acid-induced HepG2 cells. CA also significantly upregulated CPT-1 mRNA and protein expressions in HepG2 cells. We, firstly, found that PLP enhanced liver fat metabolism by upregulating CPT-1 expression in the mitochondria and might be promising in treatment of fatty liver diseases as alternative natural products. CA may be one of the active components of PLP