Crosses Boundaries Research Articles

Organizational brilliance: on blinding visions in organizations

PurposeSeeing, one might say, is everything between black blindness and white blindness: between not seeing because of the absence of light and not seeing because of the blinding quality of light; between seeing nothing and “seeing” only that which produces vision (usually the sun or God). Within organizational literature, organizations have often been linked to black blindness. The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of organizations as places of white blindness.Design/methodology/approachThis paper finds its inspiration in Saramago's novelBlindnessbut it does not offer an analysis or interpretation of the novel. It seeks an understanding of contemporary organizational phenomena by freely drawing upon some of Saramago's literary achievements.FindingsBlack blindness, e.g. the absence of vision through an extreme division of labour, is an important phenomenon in organizations but white blindness is getting more prevalent. Three causes of white blindness are identified and briefly discussed: the brilliant leader, the brilliant product and the brilliant employee.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the literature on vision in and outside of organizations and crosses boundaries between a variety of disciplines, most notably leadership studies, consumer behaviour, Human Resource Management, philosophy and theology.

Charting the microworld territory over time: design and construction in mathematics education

The study discusses the development of theoretical ideas and constructs related to digital microworlds within the mathematics education community and their implications for interpretations of mathematics learning. Starting from Papert’s introduction of the concept during ICME 2 in 1972, we trace the evolution of theoretical approaches concerning the essence of the idea in an attempt to situate the notion of constructionism in the light of contemporary frameworks. We argue that microworlds, and the search for a learnable mathematics, have a continued relevance to mathematics education, but that the lens research attention has shifted over time, with the current foci on communal design, situated and embodied approaches and artefacts whose use crosses boundaries between different practices. To illustrate these shifts and the challenges that still remain, we present examples from our current work involving the use of microworlds for learning and teaching through communication, design and construction.

Looking for the Good Fight: William T. Vollmann's An Afghanistan Picture Show

William T. Vollmann is one of the most ambitious U.S novelists and essayists of the past twenty-five years. At his most admirable, Vollmann is a writer who crosses boundaries of nation, class, culture, and doctrine to understand and represent those on the other side, while acknowledging how those same boundaries protect his own privileges. Yet Vollmann's work is often troubling. Both his investment in the exotic and his tendency to generalize contradict his desire to empathetically represent “others,” and they are linked to another troubling aspect of Vollmann's work, which is the focus of this essay: how the way he represents himself—his border-crossing, empathetic narrative persona—is invested in the symbol and myth of American character, and especially the American character abroad. I argue that Vollmann both critiques and reinvents this archetypal character in a book based on a trip he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan when he was twenty-two years old: An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World. I suggest that Vollmann's narrative persona, which he develops in Picture Show, is a reflexive representation of the American abroad as a well-intentioned failure, a character that resonates with the contemporary imagination of U.S. foreign relations.

Wildfire Activities

The article argues for a historical perspective on mobility and learning. In social production or peer production, mobility takes the shape of expansive swarming, sideways transitions and boundary-crossing. The notion of wildfire activities is proposed to point out that activities such as birding, skateboarding, and disaster relief of the Red Cross have characteristics similar to those of peer production but predate internet and take place mainly outside the sphere of digital virtuality. Wildfire activities pop up in unexpected locations at unexpected times and expand very rapidly. They become extinguished from time to time, yet they reappear and flare up again. Learning in wildfire activities is learning by swarming that crosses boundaries and ties knots between actors. It is also learning by building mycorrhizae communities by means of cognitive trails and social bonds that make the terrains knowable and livable. The mechanism of stigmergy is foundational in mycorrhizae communities.

Travels with Tooy: history, memory, and the African American imagination

Thirty-five years into his research among the descendants of rebel slaves living in the South American rain forest, anthropologist Richard Price encountered Tooy, a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a rough shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. is a time traveler who crosses boundaries between centuries, continents, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the visible and invisible. With an innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship, Travels with Tooy recounts the mutually enlightening and mind-expanding journeys of these two intellectuals. Included on the itinerary for this hallucinatory expedition: forays into the eighteenth century to talk with slaves newly arrived from Africa; leaps into the midst of battles against colonial armies; close encounters with double agents and femme fatale forest spirits; and trips underwater to speak to the comely sea gods who control the world's money supply. This enchanting book draws on Price's long-term ethnographic and archival research, but above all on Tooy's teachings, songs, stories, and secret languages to explore how Africans in the Americas have created marvelous new worlds of the imagination.

Identifying transcendence in educating for public service: reflections on qualifying to teach as a pedagogic example

In this critically reflective piece, I describe the design of a foundations of education course and my first year teaching experience. I discuss thematic statements of issues that emerged as I came to construct the meaning of my experience and evolving ideas about teaching for public service professions. These included that: - Questioning is not ‘normal’ for everyone; - The experience of classroom safety may be different for student participants than for teacher participants; - Reflection is a situated responsibility; and - Assessment and authority interact within the context of learning in a formal classroom. Discussing these issues helped me in framing teaching for public service as itself a transcendent public act, one that crosses boundaries of time and space and that requires embodied, rather than idealistic, understandings of qualifying to teach.

Wandering

Dr. Swain, Council members, and members of the AAP, thank you for this singular honor. It is a particular pleasure to have the Medal presented by Denny Ausiello. Denny, who was once my student, is now my chief, which is about as appropriate a sequence as I can imagine. I have titled my response “Wandering.” Wandering aptly describes my career, as Denny so well documented. I have been privileged to have moved easily across geography and professional responsibilities. Wandering is also the title of a small book by one of my favorite authors, Hermann Hesse. In this book, he describes pleasures, insights, and excitement that can come when one crosses boundaries. Those boundaries, as in my case, can be real or metaphorical. Hesse also wrote my favorite book, The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi). My father gave me the book when I finished my residency, and after reading about 50 pages of it, I told him it was boring and I didn’t know why he thought I would enjoy it. He told me that I probably was not grown up enough, nor did I have enough responsibilities to appreciate the book, but that perhaps some time in the future I would. As was so often the case, my father was right. When I reread the book a few years later, I understood that it was about Hesse’s concern that the utopian, intellectual, insulated academic community that he had long sought could not survive if that community was too isolated from social responsibility. By the time he published the book in 1943, he had seen the rise of Hitler and what he perceived to be the impotence of the detached intellectual community in combating that rise.

Ion-dispersion and rapid electron fluctuations in the cusp: a case study

Abstract. We present results from co-ordinated measurements with the low altitude REIMEI satellite and the ESR (EISCAT Svalbard Radar), together with other ground-based instruments carried out in February 2006. The results mainly relate to the dayside cusp where clear signatures of so-called ion-dispersion are seen in the satellite data. The cusp ion-dispersion is important for helping to understand the temporal and spatial structure of magnetopause reconnection. Whenever a satellite crosses boundaries of flux tubes or convection cells, cusp structures such as ion-dispersion will always be encountered. In our case we observed 3 distinct steps in the ion energy, but it includes at least 2 more steps as well, which we interpret as temporal features in relation to pulsed reconnection at the magnetopause. In addition, fast variations of the electron flux and energy occurring during these events have been studied in detail. The variations of the electron population, if interpreted as structures crossed by the REIMEI satellite, would map near the magnetopause to similar features as observed previously with the Cluster satellites. These were explained as Alfvén waves originating from an X-line of magnetic reconnection.

Passage of Lévy processes across power law boundaries at small times

We wish to characterise when a L\'{e}vy process $X_t$ crosses boundaries like $t^\kappa$, $\kappa>0$, in a one or two-sided sense, for small times $t$; thus, we enquire when $\limsup_{t\downarrow 0}|X_t|/t^{\kappa}$, $\limsup_{t\downarrow 0}X_t/t^{\kappa}$ and/or $\liminf_{t\downarrow 0}X_t/t^{\kappa}$ are almost surely (a.s.) finite or infinite. Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for these possibilities for all values of $\kappa>0$. Often (for many values of $\kappa$), when the limsups are finite a.s., they are in fact zero, as we show, but the limsups may in some circumstances take finite, nonzero, values, a.s. In general, the process crosses one or two-sided boundaries in quite different ways, but surprisingly this is not so for the case $\kappa=1/2$. An integral test is given to distinguish the possibilities in that case. Some results relating to other norming sequences for $X$, and when $X$ is centered at a nonstochastic function, are also given.

For Better or For Worse: Marriage across Boundaries

For Better or For Worse:Marriage across Boundaries Elizabeth Alexander (bio) Jiemin Bao . Marital Acts: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity Among the Chinese Thai Diaspora. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. xxi + 225 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8248-2740-6 (cl); 0-8248-2879-8 (pb). Nicole Constable , ed. Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. vi + 220 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3830-3 (cl); 0-8122-1891-4 (pb). Theresa Strouth Gaul , ed. To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold & Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823–1839. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xv + 222 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8078-2941-2 (cl); 0-8078-5602-9 (pb). Mary Ting Yi Lui . The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. xiii + 298 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-691-09196-X (cl). Renee C. Romano . Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. xiii + 368 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-674-01033-7 (cl). Camilla Townsend . Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xi + 223 pp.; ill.; map. ISBN 0-8090-9530-0 (cl); 0-8090-7738-8 (pb). And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, Wilt thou go with this man? And she said, I will go. . . . And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, thou art our sister, be thou the Mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them. —Genesis 24: 57, 60 As the Biblical story of Rebekah and Isaac illustrates, marriage has often been more about getting good in-laws than about love. Traditional anthropological theory considers marriage as part of a system of alliances [End Page 213] in which the exchange of women by men creates ongoing relationships between bridegivers and bridetakers. Using marriage to forge new ties of kinship provides especially powerful bonds since it produces children who have relatives in both camps.1 This traditional view denies women's agency and portrays women as mere commodities. Yet recognizing Rebekah's willingness to leave her home complicates this interpretation by adding a new layer of analysis that requires the scholar to acknowledge her choice. The six books reviewed here expand the concept of the "foreign bride" to include marriages across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and social class, as well as distance. By exploring the ways in which marriage combinations and individual agency are shaped and limited by existing and emerging cultural, social, historical, political, and economic factors, these authors question what anthropologist Nicole Constable calls the "gendered geographies of power" that underlie all cross-boundary marriages (14). All marriages cross boundaries of some sort. Even within a geographically localized, socioeconomically stable, and racially similar group, marriages involve blending family traditions and negotiating individual expectations. Marriages across broader borders of status, distance, or ethnicity strain not only the relationship of the couple but that of their families and societies who either promote or exclude the relationship. Camilla Townsend's Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma examines a marriage that crosses boundaries of race as well as distance. By portraying the marriage between John Rolfe and Pocahontas as a series of negotiated agreements—often mystifying to both—Townsend demolishes the mythical Pocahontas as "the joyful worshipper of Englishmen or power" (xi) and repositions her as a complex woman with ideas and plans of her own. When twenty-eight-year-old John Rolfe fell in love with sixteen-year-old Pocahontas, he wrote Sir Thomas Dale, governor of the Jamestown colony, requesting permission to marry her. Rolfe recognized the implications of his desire to marry the still-unconverted Pocahontas, yet he was willing to acknowledge his love for the young Indian woman. His letter demonstrates the cultural divide he expected his union to cross. What, he wondered, "should provoke me to be in love with one, whose education hath byn rude, her manners barbarous, her generation cursed, and so discrepant in all nutriture for my selfe?" (114–15). Lust, he admitted, was the origin of his feelings for Pocahontas, and he had struggled "to...

Framing Social Values: An Experimental Study of Culture and Cognition

How and why does a given social value come to shape the way an individual thinks, feels, and acts in a specific social situation? This study links ideas from Goffman's frame analysis to other lines of research, proposing that dramatic narratives of variable content, vividness, and language-in-use produce variation in the accessibility of schematic, internal cultural frameworks, and, thereby, variation in the social value frames that gain situational primacy. Hypotheses derived from the argument are experimentally supported, and results encourage further research on the process of social value framing, which operates as a person crosses boundaries in the complex subcultural mosaic.

Introduction

Michael Haneke's Caché/Hidden (2005) is a film that seems to generate endless discussion. Part thriller, part mystery, part ghost story, it seems to haunt people long after they see it, prompting them to talk about it to the point at which one would normally expect the interpretive possibilities to be exhausted – but still, new interpretations keep bubbling up, sometimes unbidden. And yet, although this film is certainly puzzling in many respects, it resists attempts to read it as a puzzle to be decoded. Perhaps it is compelling not because it has great deal to say (in the sense that its silences are just as informative as its utterances), but because it elicits an unusually wide range of responses from so many different perspectives. Having found the film so generative ourselves, we were keen to extend this conversation and conceived of a collection of pieces drawn from writers with whom we had previously collaborated, or whose work we had drawn on or had simply admired from afar. In keeping with the film's transnational pedigree (Haneke is an Austrian director working in France and the film addresses the Franco-Algerian War and its aftermath), this dossier crosses boundaries, both geographical and disciplinary, and touches on questions of concern to fields of inquiry ranging from cultural, social and literary theory to film aesthetics, history, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Nomizo Naoko: The “eternal girl” crosses boundaries

Despite a promising start as a fiction writer in the early 1920s and a successful academic career from the 1950s onwards, Nomizo Naoko (1897–1987) was little known to the general reading public in ...

Putting Ecology to Use in the Community: An Analysis Needs Follow-up by Planning and Action, Part I: Analysis

Domestic violence, an issue faced worldwide and throughout New Zealand, creates high profile cases that may be followed by media attention and collaborative community efforts. This article illustrates the relevance of planning to cope with this issue in the community of Masterton, New Zealand. Violence crosses boundaries of age, ethnicity, economic, and educational circumstance and consequently affects a large proportion of many communities. This article details a proposed intervention strategy to provide primary prevention via the use of focus or discussion groups and psychodrama. The intervention aims to reduce the potential harmful circumstances that exist in the community, and in the lives of individuals, before new incidents of domestic violence have a chance to eventuate. The desired outcomes of the intervention proposed herein are to raise awareness; to challenge related social norms, to question values and belief systems; to enhance collaborative work; to enhance informal resources; and to build a sense of community. This intervention is presented as just one step in the equation of addressing domestic violence, and is to be viewed as an opportunity that could contribute to the collaborative and effective intervention that already exists within this community.

A sense of wonder: Samuel R. Delany, race, identity, and difference

Samuel R. Delany is one of today's most interesting writers. African-American and gay, Delany crosses boundaries - generic (science fiction, memoir, theory, pornography) and academic (literary studies, cultural studies, African-American studies, gay and lesbian studies). Critics both black and white have read Delany as a writer who downplays his racial identity in order to aspire to universal values. In contrast, A Sense of Wonder shows how Delany's works participate in African-American cultural traditions. The book begins with an analysis of Delany's Dhalgren (1975), using the novel's links to black cultural traditions as the key to unlocking its puzzling content. Jeffrey Allen Tucker's reading of the four-volume Return to Neveryon series places Delany's explorations of semiotics in dialogue with Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative and social histories on slavery in America. From there, Tucker moves to Delany's ground-breaking autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, his experimental novella Atlantis: Model, 1925, and to his pornographic novel, The Mad Man. Tucker's aim is to advance a reading of identity that acknowledges its multiplicity and permeability without emptying it of socio-political efficacy and meaning.

Sport and the Media: The Emergence of a Major Research Field

In the United States, according to Kinkema and Harris, ‘there are occasions when as many as ten sporting events are televised simultaneously’. 1 Many recent developments within mass sport have been guided by economic considerations that can easily be traced back to the media, and especially television. Sport for its part has also transformed the media. 2 The relationship between media and sport has become of particular interest to media scholars over the last decade. However, as sport itself has been of interest in a variety of other disciplines, the study of the ways in which media and sport interact crosses boundaries and can be found in literature concerned with the sociology of sport, history of sport, gender studies, cultural studies, journalism, leisure studies and beyond. For scholars interested in the media in particular, sport is important as a popular content of the media, which can also shed light on a range of related issues central to media studies. Much of the writing on sport and the media addresses general issues within media studies, such as the vast field of representation and identity (some commentators see sport’s most important contribution to society as symbolic) and globalization, as well as aspects of the political economy of the media (here the focus may well be institutional or economic, rather than concerned with symbolic processes). ‘Theory’ as a category is addressed explicitly at the end of this collection. Neil Blain suggests some approaches to theorizing the relationship between the symbolic functioning of sport and the domains of culture, and of media culture in particular. He argues that the symbolic development of sport is most satisfactorily comprehended when culture, sport, media, economics and ideology are all maintained as strong terms in the debate. This is an argument against compound constructions that subsume sport beneath the enveloping category of 1

Androgyny and Otherness: Exploring the West Through the Japanese Performative Body

The way of the Western practitioner or scholar wishing to analyze contemporary Japanese theatre in terms of gender and culture is fraught with peril. How is it possible to apply critical theory without imposing Western perceptions or using master narratives that reduce and conquer the "foreign"? This essay focuses on a recurring figure in Japanese literature and drama--a hero of ambivalent sexuality and gender who uses a cloak of invisibility to pass through boundaries--and considers its use in three contemporary Japanese theatrical productions set in a historically distant, even "mythologized," West. This mysterious, caped man/woman character, whose antecedents can be traced to Heian-period literature (794-1185), is reflected in current Japanese pop art as well as in theatre, suggesting that gender slippage (the oscillation between received ideas of male and female within an individual body) can be used as a strategy to explore issues of cultural otherness. Such a strategy reverses the process of Western colonization of the East through representation (so vividly described in Edward Said's Orientalism). But it also provides a nondoctrinaire point of entry for the Western scholar to explore issues of gender and culture in the contemporary Japanese theatrical arena. [End Page 249] The Cloak of Invisibility Partings at Dawn, an anthology of gay Japanese literature published in 1996, takes its title from the twelfth-century courtly love story Ariake no Wakare. This tale concerns Ariake, a handsome young captain of the guards, who uses a cloak of invisibility to walk through the walls of the court residences. Ariake's secretive manner and mysterious charm attract both men and women. Indeed the emperor himself takes the captain as a lover. As their affair progresses, Ariake (who is actually a woman) feigns his own death, resurfaces as a "younger sister," is established as an imperial concubine, gives birth to the emperor's son and heir, and eventually becomes empress (Kahn 1996, 21). The androgynous figure at the center of Partings at Dawn reappears with slight variations in Japanese fiction and drama of a later era. From kabuki and no to present-day animated cartoons, a phenomenon sometimes described as "veiled gender performance" (Ridgeway 1999, 1) has been featured in theatrical performance, film, television, fashion, printed media, and contemporary drama, often through a charismatic central character who crosses boundaries of gender and geography to embody a sexual or foreign other. The tradition of a performer embodying both male and female characteristics is said to derive from indigenous religious practice as well as Buddhist observance (Leupp 1995, 174). In the seventeenth century, the new theatrical form called kabuki was initiated by the priestess Okuni, who performed a mixture of Buddhist rites and erotic comedy wearing Portuguese pants and a Christian cross. When women performers were banished from this performance art, the onnagata--men who took over the female roles--won an extraordinary degree of popularity due in no small part to the slippage between their biological gender and the roles they enacted. In The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, Watanabe and Iwata (1989) suggest that onstage androgyny in kabuki and no was a reflection of a society where sexual preference (at least for men) was not a matter of fixed polarity. The concept of sexual desire as a continuum rather than an opposition declined with the waning of samurai tradition, the dawning of the Meiji era (1868-1912), and the importation of European theories on sex and gender. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, a new form of androgyny was exhibited in the fashion, visual, and performance art of Japan. This is a period described by Donald Roden as a "transition from a civilization of character to a culture of personality" (1990, 54-55), a period reflecting many of the social changes of the gender-bending Weimar era in the West (p. 39). Today androgyny plays a central role in at least...

Resistance to Schooling and Educational Outcomes: questions of structure and agency

Abstract Resistance theory approaches questions of structure and agency as a divide. Resistance crosses boundaries of class, race and gender, but does not point to actions likely to lead to change in present social relations. There is a need to move beyond limited resistance perspectives to focus on individuals and groups as creative agents able to effect change in social structures. A more dynamic theory of individual, social and cultural change is needed to enable an understanding of how educational settings–including curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment practices–can help bring about just social outcomes for all students. This article draws, in particular, on the work of Willis, Walker, Giddens, and Bernstein to address questions of agency and structure in accounting for educational and social change.

Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Reading Women Writing Lisa J. Limburg Karen R. Lawrence. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Reading Women Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. xiv + 268 pp. “Weaver and unweaver, constructor and deconstructor, woman as traveler and storyteller might be said to break the law of boundaries,” Karen Lawrence writes in her introduction to Penelope Voyages, a significant contribution to the small—but growing—body of theory and criticism on women and travel-writing. Not only male-authored (and male-centered) travel narratives, Lawrence points out, but also most theoretical and critical work on travel has tended to “encode the traveler as a male who crosses boundaries and penetrates spaces” while mapping the female “as a place on the itinerary of the male journey.” Lawrence follows Michel Serres’s lead in using the journey/story of Odysseus as a paradigmatic starting point for thinking about all “narrative crossings and displacements,” but pushes his allegory in another direction when she focuses our attention on female agency in travel and narrative. Intrigued by the “Odyssey au feminin,” she asks, “What happens when Penelope voyages? What discourse, what figures, what maps do we use? Can Penelope, the weaver and teller of the story of male absence, trace her own itinerary instead?” The itineraries Lawrence identifies in her texts, however, have less to do with precisely “where” her female travelers voyage than with how these women transform traditionally male myths and models of travel and travel-writing for their own purposes. While avoiding sweeping generalizations about the difference gender makes in travel writing, Lawrence finds that in the main, “women writers of travel have tended to mistrust the rhetoric of mastery, conquest, and quest that has funded a good deal of male fictional and nonfictional travel.” Women’s travel-writing is marked instead by an awareness of some rather poststructuralist insights about human identity, suggesting to Lawrence “a model of the self that in many cases prefigures the lessons of psychoanalysis and deconstruction: that agency is never entirely self-willed, never purely a question of conscious desire.” Informed theoretically by an eclectic mix of feminisms ranging from Gilbert and Gubar to Cixous, as well as by a wide variety of poststructuralist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic work, Lawrence’s readings [End Page 183] strain always towards recognizing the complex and protean nature of each author’s response to the generic and stylistic options open to her. In chapters which progress (roughly) chronologically from Margaret Cavendish’s “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” (1656) through Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and Orlando (1928) and Brigid Brophy’s postmodern novel In Transit (1969), Lawrence takes pains to show “that despite the generally liberatory impulse behind most voyages out, one cannot float above the cultural vehicles available for transporting the imagination.” Conscientious about providing the extratextual information that forms the social, political, and historical backdrop to each reading, Lawrence does manage, even while ranging over four centuries in about two hundred pages, to keep the reader anchored in the time and place(s) appropriate to each author she treats. All the same, it is the “liberatory impulses” in these texts to which Lawrence responds most strongly, and about which she writes most eloquently. One gets the sense that the book crescendos from its celebration of Cavendish as an early “protofeminist” who “demonstrates the diverse energies of women’s errant imaginations” to the final chapter, “Postmodern ‘Vessels of Conception,”‘ which points to the way Brophy’s “hermaphroditic circulation launches a fantastic, punning linguistic journey” for its de-gendered, de-personified protagonist. Lawrence moves deftly in this book between performing sensitive linguistic analysis at the sentence level and developing larger thematic and structural concerns. She has provided a series of astute readings of this set of both fictional and nonfictional, canonical and less well known women’s texts. And while she avoids placing her project squarely in the camp of postcolonialist criticism, Lawrence nonetheless shows herself to be finely attuned to the ways in which, as she puts it in her analysis of The Voyage Out, “the history of colonialism is both written and effaced” in the...

Non-stationary responses of self-excited driven system

This is the first attempt to determine the effects of a broad range of linear non-stationary regimes related to the frequencies of external excitation v(t) ranging from evolving to robust, on dynamic responses of self-excited systems, governed by the Van der Pol differential equation. The results obtained, time histories and phase plane plots, are revealing. Because of continuous variations of v(t), a representative point in the (v, K) plane, where K is the amplitude of excitation, continually crosses various regions and boundaries of periodic, aperiodic, stable, and unstable system motions, thus exhibiting a variety of new dynamic forms, which lead in some cases to a possible chaotic motion. The non-stationary responses are sensitive to the sweep rates α : the faster the sweep, the earlier are the appearances of new waveforms (patterns) and the shorter are the time intervals between the changed patterns. The responses are also sensitive to the variations of other system parameters: ϵ, which indicates the degree of non-linearity; K, amplitude of external excitation; σ, detuning, and σ 0 , initial ( t=0) detuning; and p 0 , initial amplitude of the response. The Rayleigh-Van der Pol oscillator is the basis of a model for a number of physical, biological, chemical, and engineering phenomena. This paper is an initial contribution to further theoretical and applied studies in non-stationary processes.