Bloch's Principle Research Articles

Sabry Musa's Lord of the Spinach Field (1987): A Critique of Post-Colonial Utopianism

The present study examines the aesthetic features of Sabry Musa's Lord of the Spinach Field (1987) through Karl-Heinz Bohrer's “Utopia of the Subject” to foreground Homo's quest for a wished-for yet unattainable reality. Post-Colonial Utopianism depicts man's inner turmoil to force an act of willful rethinking to enhance the “anticipatory consciousness” of a better life, a point interrogated within Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope to propose the concept of the “Not-Yet-Become”: the not realized futuristic reality. Therefore, the interest is in utopia/dystopia historicities as analytical markers of historical inquiry to analyze specific space/time coordinates; post-colonial pitfalls of a technoscience dystopia. As such, the remarkable characteristic of Post-Colonial Utopianism is critique, and “Subjective Utopia” strives to achieve a breach in the teleological ideology of historical structures; thereby, transformation is the central aesthetic strategy of post-colonial critique.

Introduction

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood In this issue of The Lion and Unicorn, we spend time with literature set in China, India, alternative versions of the United States, Australia, and the Nordic countries of Scandinavia. Lisa Chu Shen's "Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers" examines the works of two popular male Chinese authors, Cao Wenxuan and Zhao Lihong, to illustrate the transforming treatment of male characters in Chinese children's literature. Influenced by both economic, political, and cultural changes over the past several decades, Chinese children's books (like children's literature everywhere) are grappling with gender portrayal (notably stereotyping). Prior to the arrival of Western influences, the Chinese concept of masculinity exalted the wen (that is, the mind and intellect) over the wu (physical strength and prowess). But this began to shift toward the Western model of the domineering, macho male, a culturally antithetical view. And then, with the rise of Maoism in the twentieth century, Chinese manhood underwent a "second emasculation," when the government advocated the underplaying of gender distinctions, the consequences of which were dubbed, interestingly, yinsheng yangchuai ("the rise of women and the decline of men"). As Chen notes, "In contemporary Chinese popular fiction for children, the figure of the boy is invested with competing adult desires and anxieties around the changing notions of masculinity." Focusing on the works of two of China's most celebrated children's authors, Chen illustrates the transforming treatment of male characters in Chinese children's literature. Specifically, the author argues that "examining how masculinity is constructed in contemporary Chinese fiction for young readers reveals the continuous struggle between tradition and modernity, a topic of paramount importance in studies of Chinese literature and culture." We might add that this struggle is not peculiar to China, and that societies around the world are grappling with this, genuinely transformative, social phenomenon. Of Chinese children's literature, Chen sees hope in that, [End Page v] "[e]ncouragingly, alongside hegemonic masculinity that is widely perceived to be the ideal path toward manhood, into which male children are expected to grow, there have emerged nuanced and layered depictions of boyhood." Sharon Murphy's essay "'I think I shall die soon, Boosy': Child Illness and Morality in The History of Little Henry and His Bearer" analyzes a widely disseminated story by Evangelical writer Mary Martha Sherwood, based on her experiences as an English officer's wife serving the East India Company in early nineteenth-century India. Sherwood lost two children to tropical illnesses while in India and adopted several orphaned children in addition to caring for her own. In Murphy's reading of Little Henry and His Bearer, she connects the staggering infant mortality rate among English children in India—more than twice the rate of children in England—with stated and unspoken conflicts about the role of the English in India. Murphy provides a detailed context for those conflicts to illustrate the deep contradictions in England's Christian missionary projects, which could not mitigate the great costs to mothers and children of the "British appetite for India." Sam Morris, in "'Anything be better than this': Utopian Impulses in The Hunger Games Series and Orleans," pairs the well-known dystopian trilogy by Suzanne Collins with an unsparing and timely dystopia by Sherri L. Smith, set in a future New Orleans that has been expelled from the Outer States of America because of an intransigent and deadly disease, Delta Fever. Morris examines these dystopias and how they speak to the adolescent chronotopes of possibility and hope through the lens of Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope, which stresses the unfinished and unfinishable quality of all utopian aspiration as the "Not-Yet." In both works the adolescent protagonists push toward utopian ideals, despite failure and even retrenchment. It is the "Not-yet" of hope that propels each to move away from the concept of utopia as a place and toward a utopian frame of mind that can disrupt complacency and acquiescence. In "Forging Truth from Facts: Trauma, Historicity and Australian Children's Picture Books," Martin Kerby and Margaret Baguley remind us how children's books about traumatic...

Normal family of meromorphic functions sharing holomorphic functions and the converse of the bloch principle

In 1996, C. C. Yang and P. C. Hu [8] showed that: Let f be a transcendental meromorphic function on the complex plane, and a ≠ 0 be a complex number; then assume that n ≥ 2, n1, …,nk are nonnegative integers such that n1+⋯+nk≥1; thus fn(f′)n1⋯(f(k))nk−ahas infinitely zeros. The aim of this article is to study the value distribution of differential polynomial, which is an extension of the result of Yang and Hu for small function and all zeros of f having multiplicity at least k ≥ 2. Namely, we prove that fn(f′)n1⋯(f(k))nk−a(z) has infinitely zeros, where f is a transcendental meromorphic function on the complex plane whose all zeros have multiplicity at least k ≥ 2, and a(z) ≡ 0 is a small function of f and n ≥ 2, n1,…,nk are nonnegative integers satisfying n1+…+ nk ≥ 1. Using it, we establish some normality criterias for a family of meromorphic functions under a condition where differential polynomials generated by the members of the family share a holomorphic function with zero points. The results of this article are supplement of some problems studied by J. Yunbo and G. Zongsheng [6], and extension of some problems studied X. Wu and Y. Xu [10]. The main result of this article also leads to a counterexample to the converse of Bloch's principle.

Analysis of Longitudinal Waves in Rod-Type Piezoelectric Phononic Crystals

Phononic crystals can be used to control elastic waves due to their frequency bands. This paper analyzes the passive and active control as well as the dispersion properties of longitudinal waves in rod-type piezoelectric phononic crystals over large frequency ranges. Based on the Love rod theory for modeling the longitudinal wave motions in the constituent rods and the method of reverberation-ray matrix (MRRM) for deriving the member transfer matrices of the constituent rods, a modified transfer matrix method (MTMM) is proposed for the analysis of dispersion curves by combining with the Floquet–Bloch principle and for the calculation of transmission spectra. Numerical examples are provided to validate the proposed MTMM for analyzing the band structures in both low and high frequency ranges. The passive control of longitudinal-wave band structures is studied by discussing the influences of the electrode’s thickness, the Poisson’s effect and the elastic rod inserts in the unit cell. The influences of electrical boundaries (including electric-open, applied electric capacity, electric-short and applied feedback control conditions) on the band structures are investigated to illustrate the active control scheme. From the calculated comprehensive frequency spectra over a large frequency range, the dispersion properties of the characteristic longitudinal waves in rod-type piezoelectric phononic crystals are summarized.

Bloch principle for elliptic differential operators with periodic coefficients

Differential operators corresponding to elliptic equations of divergent type with 1-periodic coefficients are considered. The equations are put in Sobolev spaces with an arbitrary 1-periodic Borel measure on the entire space Rd. In the study of the spectrum of operators of this kind, the Bloch principle is of fundamental importance. According to this principle, all points of the desired spectrum are obtained when studying the equation on the unit cube with quasiperiodic boundary conditions. The proof of the Bloch principle for problems in the above formulation is proved, in several versions of the principle. Examples of the application of the principle to finding the spectrum of specific operators, for example, for the Laplacian in a weighted space or on a singular structure of lattice type.

Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism

Hope without OptimismTerry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015)Isaiah Berlin famously identified two kinds of thinkers: fox, who knows many small things, and hedgehog, who knows one large thing. In Hope without Optimism Eagleton tarries with both. In his rapid-fire style Eagleton rarely dwells on a single notion of for more than a few lines as reader is carried through a myriad of fragmented attempts discern light in through art, theology, philosophy, and politics. book's scope is enormous, ranging from ancient Greeks Stoics, Aquinas, Marx, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, and Bloch. In midst of Eagleton's critique of those who find our greatest cause in an unrealized or a humanist project of self-realization emerges a deeper meaning of what it means hope, one that arises from clear-sighted vision and is cheaply won. In this sense Hope without Optimism is a disquieting book. It forces reader face scattered wreckage of past in order salvage a grounded on recognition that, while history is indeed a slaughterhouse, things might be otherwise than they are.The rapid movement of Eagleton's argument reflects lecture format of original text. In first chapter, The Banality of Optimism, Eagleton sets out sever connection between and wishful thinking by showing that optimism, like pessimism, is ultimately a form of fatalism (3). One does choose be an optimist but is rather chained cheerfulness as a slave his oar. There is no room for conversation or disagreement with realist, one who sees history as it is: an unfolding wreckage of civilization scattered with fleeting moments of goodness. Optimists are conservatives, Eagleton informs us, because in a benign is rooted in their trust in essential soundness of present (4). (However, two pages later Eagleton states that it is liberals who tend former [optimism], while conservatives incline latter [pessimism].) Bleakness and dissatisfaction are far more powerful goads reform, he contends, for authentic . . . needs be underpinned by reasons (3).Yet there are plenty of progressives who think that optimism can be rational. Take Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist, for example, which promotes a healthy faith in capacity of capitalist markets secure conditions of human flourishing. Eagleton sets out show that the doctrine of progress reifies [hope] into an objective (8). He relentlessly attacks Ridley's Rational Optimist as a contemporary theodicy, a text that coldly informs paraplegic that he should look bright side of life, for his injuries might have been worse. Ridley fails to see only how damagingly past is interwoven with present, but also how it can furnish us with precious resources for a more promising age come (24). It is hubris that threatens us, Eagleton claims, not simply backwardness (16). Hope need be coupled with optimism. As Benjamin's revolutionary historical method has shown us, it is the past that furnishes us with resources of hope (32).In chapter 2, What is Hope? Eagleton examines political dimension of in order refute contemporary left's suspicion of on one hand and right's penchant for on other. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud have shown that, in past, left all too quickly turns past as a mere prologue a in which our desires are truly fulfilled. Such is laced with false-consciousness (43), for it is too easily won. This thesis sets up Eagleton's sustained critique of Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope in chapter 3, which outlines an undefeatable that is divorced from reason. Bloch absents reality from itself (104), failing see that task of leftist critique is precisely excavate past for sake of an emancipated future (106). …

Two normality criteria and counterexamples to the converse of Bloch's principle

In this paper, we prove two normality criteria for a family of meromorphic functions. The first criterion extends a result of Fang and Zalcman [Normal families and shared values of meromorphic functions II, Comput. Methods Funct. Theory, 1 (2001), 289-299] to a bigger class of differential polynomials whereas the second one leads to some counterexamples to the converse of the Bloch's principle.

The Bloch Principle for L2(R) Stabilization of Solutions to the Cauchy Problem for the Carleman Equation

Based on the Bloch principle, we obtain local equilibrium conditions for solutions to the Cauchy problem with bounded energy for the one-dimensional Carleman equation in the weighted L2 spaces. Bibliography: 5 titles. Illustrations: 1 figure.

Normal families of meromorphic functions sharing a holomorphic function and the converse of the Bloch principle

In this paper, we investigate normal families of meromorphic functions, prove some theorems of normal families sharing a holomorphic function, and give a counterexample to the converse of the Bloch principle based on the theorems.

Frequency analysis of a heterogeneous perforated panel using a super-element formulation

Heterogeneous perforated panels represent a wide class of structural elements with holes where perforations and matrix are of dissimilar materials e.g. metallic member of a perforated hybrid joint with resin-fillings. There is a variety of objectives for introducing holes e.g. weight saving or mechanical interlock. Where there is a regular pattern to the arrangement of holes the perforated element can be assimilated to a lattice. In the present study, numerical analysis has been conducted on investigating the shock frequency filtering phenomenon encountered in two-dimensional (2D) lattice structures. A super-element of the primitive cell (unit cell) of the lattice has been formulated and applied in conjunction with the Floquet–Bloch's principle to study the shock response characteristics. Plane wave propagation is investigated by constructing the first Brillouin zone of the primitive cell in associated Fourier space ( k-space). The frequency characteristics are presented in the band structure diagram. The study emphasizes the existence of frequency pass and stop bands and the extent of this phenomenon. The frequency filtering effects of the heterogeneous perforated 2D lattice has shown its potential value to improve the structural performance of perforated hybrid joints subjected to dynamic loads.

Two normality criteria and the converse of the Bloch principle

We prove two normality criteria for a family of meromorphic functions satisfying a certain differential condition and provide a counterexample to the converse of the Bloch principle.

Komplexe Algebraische Geometrie

The Workshop Komplexe algebraische Geometrie , organized by Fabrizio Catanese (Bayreuth), Yujiro Kawamata (Tokyo), Gang Tian (Princeton), and Eckart Viehweg (Essen), drew together 50 participants. There were several young PhD students and other PostDocs in their 20's and early 30's, together with established leaders of the fields related to the thematic title of the workshop. There were 23 talks, each lasting 55 minutes or one hour, and each followed by a lively 10 minutes discussion. As usual at an Oberwolfach Meeting, the mathematical discussions continued outside the lecture room throughout the day and the night. The Conference fully fulfilled its purported aim, of setting in contact mathematicians with different specializations and non uniform background, of presenting new fashionable topics alongside with new insights on long standing classical open problems, and also cross-fertilizations with other research topics as arithmetic and physics. For the latter, cf. the talk by Bernd Siebert on the new approach to Mirror Symmetry through logarithmic geometry and toric affine Calabi Yau varieties and the one by van Straten on quantization of completely integrable Hamiltonian Systems. For the former, cf. the talks by Winkelmann on integral sets and by McQuillan on the Bloch principle. A central role was occupied by the new results around the Hodge conjecture presented by Voisin, and the new results by Hacon, McKernan et al which give an essential step towards the final solution of the Minimal Model Program, and were presented here by McKernan with a proposed approach to the Sarkisov program. There were many expositions dealing with several classical problems and classical and modern theories. It would take too long to dwell on each of the outstanding contributions presented at the Conference. For some topics there were several interrelated talks, for instance we could mention the following classical themes: There were also expositions on many other beautiful topics: The variety of striking results and the very interesting and challenging proposals made the participation in the workshop rather strenuous but certainly highly rewarding. We hope that the quality of the expositions in these abstracts will make them quite useful to the mathematical community.

Méthodes de changement d’échelles en analyse complexe

We discuss several rescaling methods in complex analysis and geometry and apply them to get elementary proofs of some classical results. The Bloch principle plays an important role in our approach and yields to a somewhat unified point of view.

The Political and Intellectual Influence of Hans Jonas

The sudden success of Hans Jonas's The Imperative of Responsibility (in German original Das Prinzip Verantwortung, published in 1984) came as a surprise to author himself and to German intellectual and philosophical community at large. Within a decade this book, in which Jonas developed a theory of ethics for technological age, had to be reprinted nine times. The author's name and book's title found their way into countless speeches and addresses given at forums as diverse as ecological groups in remote villages to Bundestag, federal parliament in Bonn. This infusion of philosophical thought into public discourse itself was surprising, because a tradition of exchange between philosophical thought and public affairs had practically ceased to exist. Not since time of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose 1807 and 1808 Reden an die deutsche Nation (Speeches to German Nation) helped to promote national feeling against Napoleonic oppression, and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, whose Nuremberg School Lectures of 1812 to 1816 informed structuring of German educational system, had work of philosophers so influenced public life. In our own times, as an exception to rule, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker, elder brother of former Bundesprasident Richard von Weizsacker, served for some years in late seventies as adviser to social-liberal government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. He had by then come close to acquiring reputation of being a praeceptor Germaniae, a person whose name was never mentioned without decorating description the physicist and philosopher. As a physicist he had explained operation of nuclear fusion reaction cycle as source of energy production in sun; as a philosopher he had published and lectured at Hamburg University on philosophy of nature. Weizsacker later became director of Max Planck Institute for Research into Future Developments and World Problems and had some influence with moderate statements on debate over nuclear energy. But even he never attained degree of attention received by Hans Jonas during 1980s. Timing, Approach, and Style The reasons for Jonas's truly spectacular popularity were not always philosophical in kind. He appeared on German scene at right moment and with right approach. At end of seventies there was a vague but widespread feeling that cultural revolution that had started in 1968 had ended in disappointment. The principle of hope expounded by neomarxist philosopher Ernst Bloch had itself proved to be only a temporarily inspiring utopia, one which faded away under realization that the new man was still not at hand and was unlikely ever to emerge. In contrast, Jonas described real dangers rather than engendering unfounded hopes. Although these dangers had already been foreseen by a number of prophets of ecological movement, Jonas developed theory and defined problem with precision: an explosion of technology driven by human intellect and boundless economic enterprise in a limited world. He was able to explain by philosophical deduction why present generation ought to preserve conditions of life for generations to come. Although need to think of future generations had become a piety of public rhetoric by that time, no cogent answer had been formulated in response to question of why present generations should be responsible for unborn, who have neither been historically represented nor been subjects with personal rights in civil legislation. Did former generations--for instance, by voting for Hitler--care for present one? Jonas avoided a short-term mentality of that kind and provided a well-founded answer with his concept of an ethics for preservation of being (das Seiende) based on nothing other than because it is. Polemicizing against Bloch's principle of hope, he proclaimed his imperative of responsibility. …

Sharing values and normality

According to Bloch's principle every condition, which reduces a meromorphic function in the plane to a constant, makes a family of meromorphic functions in a domain G normal. Although the principle is false in general ([6]), many authors proved normality criteria for families of meromorphic functions by starting from picard type theorems ([1], [7], [8]). Yang ([911 expanded such considerations to singular direcnons. It seems. however, that an attempt has not yet been made to prove normality criteria using conditions known from sharing value theorems (two meromorphic functions f and g share a e I~ iff f -1 ({a}) = 0 -1 ({a})). Nevanlinna's famous five point theorem says that two meromorphic functions in the plane which share five distinct values are identical. But if each pair f and g of meromorphic functions of a family shares five fixed values a t, the sets f-1 ({as}) are independent from f and the normality follows immediately from Montel's theorem. Therefore it is more interesting to discuss conditions, where a function f e F is not compared with all other functions in the family, but with specia! functions related to f. Mues and Steinmetz ([5]) proved

A New Joint Proof of the Theorems of Picard and Montel

Bloch's principle says that in general those prope rties. which reduce a meromorphic funct ion in Q; to a consta nt , make families of meromorphic functions in a domain G normal, with a number of special exceptions (see (3]) . Zalcman asked the quest ion . whet her t here are joint proofs for bot h, th e normality criteria and t he t heorems of Picard type. T his pape r gives a simple proof in t he wellknown case that a function omits th ree values.

Book Review: Hope and Its Hieroglyph: A Critical Decipherment of Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope

Book Review: Hope and Its Hieroglyph: A Critical Decipherment of Ernst Bloch's <i>Principle of Hope</i>