Complicated Characters Research Articles

Through Archetypal Criticism in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

This paper presents a brief overview of archetypal criticism, a literary theory that seeks to identify universal patterns and themes in literature rooted in the human psyche. It is based on the idea of archetypes, symbols and motifs in the collective unconscious of humanity, popularized by Carl Jung. As applied to literature, the theory of archetypal criticism involves exploring these universal themes and symbols in work and how they reflect the human condition. The paper aims to analyze William Shakespeare's tragedy The Merchant of Venice through the lens of archetypal criticism to uncover deeper meanings in the literature. The play explores themes of justice, mercy, and true love through its complicated characters and dramatic plot. Through archetypal criticism, the play delves deeper into its universal meaning. It reveals psychological and emotional truths about the human condition, inviting reflection on beliefs and values that shape our experiences in the world. The paper explores the play by applying archetypal criticism. There are archetype characters of Shylock and Jessica that embody the outsider archetype as Jews in a predominantly Christian society and moneylenders. The archetypal criticism also explores different forms of love, including romantic love between Bassanio and Portia, the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, and the complex relationship between Shylock and Jessica. The theme of revenge is embodied by Shylock and depicts an archetype. The play features archetypal symbols, including the casket challenge, the green-eyed monster, the test of worthiness, and the trickster. Some situations in the play and the play's ending are also significant from an archetypal perspective.

Biochemical Mechanism Unlocking Their Potential Role in Salt Tolerance Mechanism of Zizyphus Germplasm

Salinity is one of the major constraints reducing plant growth and yield. Irrigation with poor quality and brackish water to orchards is a major cause of stunted growth and low yield. The salt tolerance mechanism is one of the complicated genomic characters that is very problematic to develop in fruit trees and becomes much more severe at any growth and developmental stage. Osmotic stress and hormonal imbalances are major constraints causing low biomass production. Fruit tree tolerance/sensitivity is chiefly based on the activation of a defense system comprised of super-oxidase dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD) and catalases (CAT), non-enzymatic compounds including ascorbic acid, phenolics, flavonoids, stress indicators [i.e., hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), lipid peroxidation, malondialdehyde (MDA), reactive oxygen species (ROS) and osmolytes containing proline, glycine-betaine (GB), ascorbates (APX), glutathione peroxidase (GPX) and glutathione reductase (GR)]. Tolerant genotypes must have higher antioxidant assays to cope with the adverse effects of salinity stress because their defense system had the potential to scavenge toxic ROS and protect from membrane leakage. Some work is conducted on agronomic and horticultural crops; however, underutilized fruit crops are still neglected and need serious consideration from plant researchers. Minor fruit crops especially Zizyphus had excellent nutritional aspects. The current study provides detailed insights into the physiological and biochemical mechanisms of Zizyphus species to cope with the adverse effects of salinity by improving their plant defense system. The development of salt-tolerant germplasm is a requisite and can be developed by utilization of physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms. Application of different molecular approaches (i.e., genome mapping, genome editing, genetic transformation, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolites) are effective for higher yield by improving tolerance mechanisms.

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Literature has always been considered as the reflection of human life because of its involvement with human behavior, thoughts, activity, development, progress, etc. Sometimes while reading a literary text, readers often face complicated characters that are quite troublesome and create difficulty to understand but at the same time, these characters generate curiosity in the mind of the readers to know more about them. Such a character is Changez from the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This article aims to explain the behavior of Changez, the protagonist of the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist who narrates and shares his experiences about his time in America to an American stranger. To analyze his personality, this paper uses the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. This paper upholds psychological pressure and its consequence on Changes as an individual who faces a sudden and unexpected social change in America. All the methods that are applied to conduct this paper are the qualitative method and the analytic descriptive method. Finally, this study serves a relation between psychoanalysis and literature.

Dignity, Respect, and Freedom

This paper looks at Irene Redfield, a character from Nella Larsen's Passing, analyzing how dignity is prioritized above all else in her life. Viewing Irene through the lenses of race, sexuality, and class, this paper delves into the intricacies of Irene's mind, attempting to contextualize her by her overt and repressed desires. Passing is a nuanced novel with complicated characters. Many scholars have attempted to understand the symbolism Larsen has imbued the novel with, producing insightful works to challenge the reader's initial perceptions of the novel and the characters. Through taking a deep-dive into Irene's mind, readers can become more familiar with the important of race, sexuality, and class as Larsen viewed them at her time of writing the novel. This paper claims that dignity and respect are Irene's main motivations throughout Passing, and gives insight into the consequences this had for Irene as a character.

Development and application of a digital humanities research platform for biographies of Malaysian personalities

PurposeDigital humanities research platform for biographies of Malaysia personalities (DHRP-BMP) was collaboratively developed by the Research Center for Chinese Cultural Subjectivity in Taiwan, the Federation of Heng Ann Association Malaysia, and the Malaysian Chinese Research Center of Universiti Malaya in this study. Using The Biographies of Malaysia Henghua Personalities as the main archival sources, DHRP-BMP adopted the Omeka S, which is a next-generation Web publishing platform for institutions interested in connecting digital cultural heritage collections with other resources online, as the basic development system of the platform, to develop the functions of close reading and distant reading both combined together as the foundation of its digital humanities tools.Design/methodology/approachThe results of the first-stage development are introduced in this study, and a case study of qualitative analysis is provided to describe the research process by a humanist scholar who used DHRP-BMP to discover the character relationships and contexts hidden in The Biographies of Malaysia Henghua Personalities.FindingsClose reading provided by DHRP-BMP was able to support humanities scholars on comprehending full text contents through a user-friendly reading interface while distant reading developed in DHRP-BMP could assist humanities scholars on interpreting texts from a rather macro perspective through text analysis, with the functions such as keyword search, geographic information and social networks analysis for humanities scholars to master on the character relationships and geographic distribution from personality biographies, thus accelerating their text interpretation efficiency and uncovering the hidden context.Originality/valueAt present, a digital humanities research platform with real-time characters’ relationships analysis tool that can automatically generate visualized character relationship graphs based on Chinese named entity recognition (CNER) and character relationship identification technologies to effectively assist humanities scholars in interpreting characters’ relationships for digital humanities research is still lacking so far. This study thus presents the DHRP-BMP that offers the key features that can automatically identify characters’ names and characters’ relationships from personality biographies and provide a user-friendly visualization interface of characters’ relationships for supporting digital humanities research, so that humanities scholars could more efficiently and accurately explore characters’ relationships from the analyzed texts to explore complicated characters’ relationships and find out useful research findings.

A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood

A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood

Re-reading Noir

ABSTRACT This article considers Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader in relation to the author's current research on Cold-War American women's crime fiction. The dominant critical framework about this fiction from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is noir, a masculinist genre about male loners / outsiders that often embraces a cynical or nihilistic worldview. Many of these books objectify women and feature a spider woman or femme fatale, who is punished for her pursuit of self-interest and use of her sexuality to attain power. The lesser-known female crime writers of the period were–in many ways–resisting readers of this tradition. Their re-readings and rewritings often privileged community and connection over isolation and offered more complicated female characters. The author uses the case of Charlotte Armstrong's A Dram of Poison (1956) to make this case.

Deep Learning-Based Forgery Attack on Document Images

With the ongoing popularization of online services, the digital document images have been used in various applications. Meanwhile, there have emerged some deep learning-based text editing algorithms which alter the textual information of an image . In this work, we present a document forgery algorithm to edit practical document images. To achieve this goal, the limitations of existing text editing algorithms towards complicated characters and complex background are addressed by a set of network design strategies. First, the unnecessary confusion in the supervision data is avoided by disentangling the textual and background information in the source images. Second, to capture the structure of some complicated components, the text skeleton is provided as auxiliary information and the continuity in texture is considered explicitly in the loss function. Third, the forgery traces induced by the text editing operation are mitigated by some post-processing operations which consider the distortions from the print-and-scan channel. Quantitative comparisons of the proposed method and the exiting approach have shown the advantages of our design by reducing the about 2/3 reconstruction error measured in MSE, improving reconstruction quality measured in PSNR and in SSIM by 4 dB and 0.21, respectively. Qualitative experiments have confirmed that the reconstruction results of the proposed method are visually better than the existing approach. More importantly, we have demonstrated the performance of the proposed document forgery algorithm under a practical scenario where an attacker is able to alter the textual information in an identity document using only one sample in the target domain. The forged-and-recaptured samples created by the proposed text editing attack and recapturing operation have successfully fooled some existing document authentication systems.

Pleasure, power, and pathology—between two worlds: Killing Eve’s queer/feminist post-Cold War appraisal

ABSTRACT Since a resurgence on the world stage by a post-Soviet capitalist Russian state, fictional media representations of Russians in the U.S. and Britain have become increasingly commonplace. In order to examine both U.S.–Russia relations and the crime genre in television through a queer and feminist lens, I engage with the BBC America series Killing Eve (2018-), which presents viewers with a powerful and confusing narrative of antiquated clashing ideals, unrequited eternal love, and palpable antipathy to hetero-patriarchal values. Methods join textual analysis of the show with discourse analysis of its themes at their intersection with the current political moment. As a critical voice, Killing Eve sets out to deconstruct the spy thriller subgenre from within, consistently presenting strong and complicated female characters who are not only uniquely entertaining, but catalyze timely conversations around difficult topics tied to gender, sexuality, and geopolitics. The work I present here expands on those conversations in light of conservative backlash against queer and feminist political progress, and at a time—three decades after the end of the Cold War—when the relationship between the U.S. and Russia seems no longer to have any discernible set of rules.

Joint Radar-Communication Relying on Spread Spectrum: A Hybrid Chaotic Sequence Design

This paper investigates a novel design for joint radar-communication (JRC) waveform, which is capable of improving the network’s performance by solving the phase shift mutation of the Chirp-BPSK waveform. We aim for jointly designing chirp waveform and improving Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK), as well as the hybrid chaotic spread spectrum code (CSSC). As a benefit, the JRC waveform can be successfully decoded, and the accumulation of phase shift can be suppressed by hybrid CSSC. The detailed deduction on the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) of the JRC waveform is adopted to analyse the complicated AF characters. Our analytical results demonstrate that the proposed JRC signal has superior spectrum performance, ambiguity function (AF), and transmission rate than conventional Chirp and Chirp-BPSK waveform. Numerical results are provided to confirm that (i) the proposed waveform is capable of providing better communication and radar performance; (ii) the performance of AF is not affected by the transmission rate for the proposed waveform.

The Age of the Antihero in Contemporary American TV Dramas

Over the past two decades, we have seen a surge of antiheroes in American TV dramas. Ranging from Tony Soprano to Dexter Morgan, from Piper Chapman to Claire Underwood, the antiheroes are morally, ethically, and often legally problematic figures to say the least. Despite their controversies, it seems they replaced the imaginary position of the more traditional heroes in TV with the allure of the dark side. Why do people love the antiheroes, the people with flaws and mixed morals? What do they represent as a whole? This paper analyzes the rise of the antihero in contemporary American TV dramas from multiple perspectives. It argues that the antiheroes are not only a result of the rapidly changing society but also of the advent of the post-network era. The antiheroes in popular TV shows, such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, Dexter, to name a few, basically represent the contemporary societal changes and politico-economic crises which challenge and even deconstruct the existing values systems. In doing so, they often embody highly critical views on the contemporary world. However, they are also an essential part of the radically transformed American TV industry, in which complicated characters as well as complex narratives could flourish so successfully. Simply put, the rise of the antihero was necessary for the evolution and global expansion of the American TV industry. In conclusion, this paper argues that, to understand the rise of the antihero and the impact it could have, these two sides behind the rise of the antihero have to receive due consideration.

AutoSkin: Skeleton-based Human Skinning with Deep Neural Networks

Articulated character animation has received increasing attention in applications like game or film production. One of the main challenges is the task of skinning that animator should specify the association between skeleton structure and skin surface which involves large amounts of manual weight painting and deformation tuning. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based framework for skinning. By using our framework, the skinning is seen as a multi-regression task and the network can infer the skeleton-skin association and compute the accurate weights automatically while only requiring minimal manual tuning. One significant advantage of our framework is that the impressive performance can be also achieved while dealing with complicated 3D characters, even these characters exist over a hundred bones or dress delicately. Our experiments have indicated that our framework could generate competitive results compared with the commercial software and we aim to apply it in the industry such as games or video applications.

Spin-polarized exciton formation in Co-doped GaN nanowires

Diluted magnetic semiconductors often show a spin-dependent interaction and induced ferromagnetism with high Curie temperature which is a desirable feature to be utilized for magneto-electronic devices. However, the origin of ferromagnetism and optical emission dynamics has not yet been well-understood due to their complicated microstructural and compositional characters. Herein, un-doped and Co-doped GaN nanowires have been synthesized by chemical vapor deposition and the effect of Co dopant on structural, magnetic and optical properties has been investigated. Electron-phonon couple caused by Co dopant, plays a dominant role for enhancement and shift of LO- phonon mode toward higher wavenumber. The incorporation of Co (II) ion in GaN lattice is attributed to the presence of room temperature ferromagnetism which influences their optical properties through exciton-spin interactions. It happens when the Co atom prefers to substitute on Ga sites and induces coupling with neighboring Co atoms to align ferromagnetically, leading to the formation of independent exciton magnetic polarons, as a new elementary excitation that is one of the origins of the bosonic lasing. These findings can pave new way in the future solid-state optoelectronic quantum information technology.

Distinguishing Oracle Variants Based on the Isomorphism and Symmetry Invariances of Oracle-Bone Inscriptions

Oracle bone inscriptions are the earliest mature writing system discovered in China. Oracle is usually published in the form of glyphs and pictures, and the related oracle font database environment is closed and limited. Due to the lack of standardization of ancient oracle bone inscriptions, the structure and glyph of the same characters are not unified, and a large number of different shapes and complicated characters coexist. Even ancient character devotees need to complete the basic recognition of oracle with the help of professional reference books and experts. In addition, in the field of traditional literature, distinguishing variant characters of oracle-bone inscriptions needs strong expert knowledge and lacks efficiency. The recognition process consists of two stages. According to the characteristics of oracle-bone inscriptions, such as left-right symmetry, up-down symmetry and positive and negative coexistence, the corresponding data enhancement methods are used to get sufficient training samples in the first stage. In the second stage, the recognition candidate set under each threshold condition in the first stage are used to select the recognition candidate set which is empty under the specific threshold condition, and introduce the prior knowledge to distinguish the oracle variants. In the first stage, computer related methods are used to identify oracle variants. In the second stage, on the basis of the first stage, a set of recognition results that cannot be determined roughly is selected, and a priori knowledge is introduced to integrate multi-domain methods to identify oracle variants. The method proposed in this paper has achieved great results in the recognition of oracle variant characters.

Script as Method

Abstract This essay argues that the two main types of contemporary Chinese scripts, complicated characters (fantizi 繁體字) and simplified characters (jiantizi 簡體字), are sites of heavy cultural and political contestation. The two script systems witness the internal bifurcation of the Chinese written language, which should not be considered as unified vis-à-vis the diversification of the verbal languages. Supported with many concrete examples, the essay demonstrates the different kinds of political struggles involved in the publication of the same materials in the two different scripts. These cases also illustrate the heavy censorship involved in contemporary PRC literature, and the authors are particularly interested in demonstrating the meanings of the option of fantizi publication toward many PRC writers. The two scripts could not be understood as simple variations of the same set of language, but the shifts between them involve actual translations, which in turn would help us gain new insights on the idea of world literature.

Difficult Women: Changing Representations of Female Characters in Contemporary Television Series

AbstractStarting out with a brief overview of recent TV series that feature complex and complicated female characters – or, as we call them, ‘difficult women’ – this introduction investigates the changing manner in which women have been represented on TV in previous decades. Demonstrating that especially TV shows of the 2010s undermine and work against traditional and stereotypical portrayals of women on TV and instead establish feminist discourses, we argue that this time period can be defined as a pivotal moment with regard to changing representations of women on TV. Using Netflix’sOrange Is the New Blackas an example, we also show that TV series that feature difficult women make use of the very techniques and conventions of what Jason Mittell has described as ‘Complex TV’ in order to consciously engage with questions of female representation on TV and to create a feminist discourse that works against sexist tropes and stereotypes.

Six Faces of Odysseus: Genre and Characterization Strategies in Four Late Antique Greek “Epyllia”

In the first line of the new Odyssey translation (2017) by Emily Wilson “Ἄνδρα […] πολύτροπον” is translated as “a complicated man”, and, for sure, Odysseus is one of the most fascinating, multifarious and complicated characters of Greek literature. This contribution traces different forms of engagement with the figure of Odysseus in the way the male protagonists of four late antique poems are characterized. As shorter narrative hexameter poems, Triphiodorus' Sack of Troy, Musaeus’ Hero and Leander and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen are sometimes called “epyllia”. The (slightly longer) anonymous Orphic Argonautica is generally not. The engagement with the Homeric (and post-Homeric) character of Odysseus, as will be argued, can tell us more about these poems’ position within and vis-à-vis the epic tradition than any modern generic label ever could.

The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport by Elaine Forman Crane

Reviewed by: The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport by Elaine Forman Crane Catherine Decesare Elaine Forman Crane, The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). Pp. 257. $32.95 cloth. In an increasingly polarized United States, in which the lines between truth and lies, fact and fake are murky at best, Elaine Forman Crane's most recent Cornell University Press publication, The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport tackles this theme in a cleverly constructed micro-history set in colonial Newport, Rhode Island. A distinguished professor emeritus of history at Fordham University, Crane uses Chaucer as her muse to cultivate a cast of complicated characters implicated in a scandalous crime. The declining health and ultimately untimely death of Benedict Arnold, grandfather of the famous traitor and grandson of the first governor of Rhode Island, is at the heart of this legal history. Arnold's wife, Mary, is charged with attempting to poison him in order to secure his wealth. His resulting divorce petition, submitted to the Rhode Island General Assembly, charges her not only with attempted murder, but with adultery, sexually transmitted disease, and theft—claims that rivet Newport society in winter 1738–39. Crane reconstructs the household dynamics of the extended Arnold clan and other Newport families in ways that might shock or delight the reader. In the process, she reveals in Newport a community network anchored firmly in the Atlantic world, and a society increasingly dependent upon an entangled consumer culture. Crane maintains that Mary's potential attempted murder of her husband "becomes an allegory in which a woman was seduced by global commerce and succumbed to her craving for imported luxuries during the consumer revolution" (7). Was Mary Arnold's shopping addiction or desire for imported luxury items enough motivation to poison her husband? Crane raises fundamental questions about how to best present and analyze the available historical evidence. Recognizing that there is a glaring discrepancy in the historical record due to the absence of female written documentation, and in this case the absence of Mary's voice, Crane seeks to rectify this gender imbalance. Consequently, Mary and other women in the community play featured roles in Crane's retelling of the tale. Indeed, Crane argues that the purpose of this work is to challenge assumptions taken for granted about concepts of morality and trust in colonial society. Fundamentally, this true story demonstrates how women defied the restrictive legal status of coverture and how the realities of economic security or insecurity impacted their daily lives. Over the course of her in-depth research, Crane reveals a community that was not only tightly knit but intimately intertwined with the Atlantic World's commercial [End Page 366] economic network. The publication is divided into three distinct parts. The first section details the story of Benedict and Mary Arnold. The family resided in the core of urban colonial Newport. During the early eighteenth century, Newport was an expanding commercial port, and Crane convincingly draws the reader into the sights and sounds of the community. She introduces us to the main characters and their life challenges, which feature a fifteen-year marriage in a state of decline. The second section focuses on the people in the community whose lives are closely connected to the Arnold family. The third part delves into the legal realm, and it examines the institution of marriage through the extremes of marital age discrepancy and extra-marital affairs, and the use and abuses of poison. The endnotes are particularly useful in retracing the steps taken by Crane in her quest to reconstruct the tragic history of Benedict and Mary Arnold. Crane's The Poison Plot not only makes significant contributions to American colonial legal history, but is a welcome addition to the scholarship of Rhode Island and Newport history. At the same time, The Poison Plot exposes the complexities of the emerging medical profession as it developed in colonial Newport and the larger Atlantic World. Crane identifies a network of entrepreneurial male and female apothecaries and shopkeepers, people most likely to have known Benedict and Mary...

Complicated sisterhood: A generous reading of Leah and Rachel’s story

Often, both our similarities with and differences from the experiences of Leah and Rachel lead us to unfair and overly critical interpretations of their saga. In such interpretations, we continue the unhealthy competition begun in their story, pitting characters against one another in an endless cycle of hurt. What if, instead, we could find ways to read their stories with generosity, trying to assume the best of these complicated characters who lived in a complicated context? This generous reading will explore the relationship of Leah and Rachel as sisters, wives, and mothers, and will recognize them as both opponents and allies. The article ends by suggesting ways we might use what we learn from Leah and Rachel to cultivate our own generosity.

Note-Taking Assisted with Computers—A Practical Method to Build a Connection between Chinese Pinyin & Characters

Chinese beginners often find themselves in struggling for learning complicated Chinese characters (also known as Hanzi), after the acquisition of Chinese pronunciation (Chinese Phonetic Alphabets, also called Pinyin). Actual experience of living and studying in China exposes a fact that people on daily basis are not using Pinyin to assist pronunciation. All means of social media only have Hanzi for people to recognize. The connection between Pinyin and Hanzi is a difficult part to accomplish for Chinese language beginners. Based on several years of teaching experience of Chinese language to speakers of other languages and working memory drill in English-Chinese interpretation, the author explores a practical way to build this connection between Pinyin and Hanzi by taking-notes using computers and mobile phones in class. In alliance with fun language teaching methodologies, i.e., the Audiolingual method, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) to reassure the memory rehearsal drill in association with imaginary situations. The research experiment results show that this method can stimulate beginners’ learning enthusiasm and arouse their confidence and initiative in the long-run Chinese language learning process and it can facilitate Chinese beginners to better communicate in the fast-changing social media.