Nobel Lecture Research Articles

Nobel Lecture: Genesis and applications of attosecond pulse trains

Nobel Lecture: Genesis and applications of attosecond pulse trains

Nobel Lecture: The route to attosecond pulses

Nobel Lecture: The route to attosecond pulses

A Tale of Two Laureates

Abstract Focusing on the reception of the two Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, this article investigates the literature prize as a national, and indeed Stockholm-based, phenomenon in Sweden. It makes two general claims. The first is that the press exercises a co-consecrating authority that both rivals and depends on the authority of the Swedish Academy. This becomes evident not least in occasional attempts by critics to deconsecrate a laureate. The second claim is that the dramaturgy of the literature prize, beginning with the announcement in October and ending with the award ceremony in December, culminates shortly before the ceremony with the Nobel lecture, when the laureate is heard in their own voice. In an analysis of Gordimer’s and Coetzee’s lectures, the article concludes that they present sharply different attempts at performatively resolving the tension between literary autonomy and heteronomy.

Inside/Outdoor Sign Savvy in Morrison’s “Recitatif” and Paradise

Abstract: In her 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature , Toni Morrison asserts: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives” (22). The Dancing Mind (1996), her extended meditation on the art of reading and writing, laments language proficiency as an imperiled survival skill. A Mercy ’s (2008) Florens confirms, however, that locating “[w] hich is the true reading” matters less than the reading itself since language itself is “a way” (139). If we adopt a neo-domestic/eco-critical approach, we not only address Morrison’s disparagement toward a state of modern criticism that talks about itself as though it were the work of art (LeClair, 376–77), but adhere to her directive that the critic should trail the writer. Tracking her use of ordinary inside/outdoor imagery allows us to solve the respective riddles of “Recitatif” (1983) and Paradise (1998): which girl is what race and who is the shot white girl.

The Tender Narrator In Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha

The main assertion in this paper is that the tender narrator, whom the Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk, made the subject of her Nobel Lecture, can convey the author’s perspective in such a way that all readers can find themselves in it. Using the example of Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha, the author of this paper demonstrates how tender narration brings out the titular character’s defenselessness as a quality of the human condition. The author ponders what distinguishes Yakhina’s novel among other examples of camp or historical literature and also addresses Hélène Cixous’s concept of l’écriture feminine, concluding that the perspective of tender narration is coextensive with the feminine narration that is open to voices arriving from a multitude of perspectives. The author also demonstrates that Yakhina’s Zuleikha is an example of literature that highlights and explores the experience of a human being’s internal freedom, which is inalienable, even though its external freedom may be endangered by fate, the laws of history or political machinations.

Nobel Lecture: Financial Intermediaries and Financial Crises

Nobel Lecture: Financial Intermediaries and Financial Crises

Sudden bio-mathematical self-similarity and the uniqueness of human mass societies: from T-patterns and T-strings to T-societies.

With the explosive growth of human knowledge especially in the twenteeth century with even greater facilitation of access to knowledge, the world of even relatively recent great thinkers becomes daunting as seen from a modern viewpoint. Recently, humans ignored the existence of the complex intracellular world of cell organs, giant information molecules such as DNA, societies of specialized worker molecules (proteins), and generally the surprising nanoscale world visible to humanity since only a few decades ago. Moreover, computational power and video technology were inaccessible to all scientists from, for example, Aristotle to Freud, so new views and ideas seem to be expected about phenomena at all scales including nano and human. Some have arrived very recently. Thus urgently needed knowledge about the biology of animal and human behavior received the first Nobel Prize as late as 1973, in Physiology and Medicine, shared by Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Niko Tinbergen. Lorenz's Nobel lecture was entitled "Analogy as a Source of Knowledge" which did not mention self-analogy (self-similarity) as none of the species studied were part of others and knowledge of the nanoscale phenomena at the heart of this article had barely become available. The views and empirical findings presented in this article depend on such recent intracellular nanoscale insights and the development of a set of mathematical patterns, called T-system, of which only two are considered, the self-similar (i.e., parts having a structure similar to the whole) T-pattern and the derived T-string, a T-patterned material string (here, polymer or text). Specially developed algorithms implemented in the THEMETM software for T-pattern detection and analysis (TPA) allowed the detection of interaction T-patterns in humans, animals, and brain neuronal networks, showing self-similarity between animal interaction patterns and neuronal interaction patterns in their brains. TPA of DNA and text also showed unique self-similarity between modern human literate mass societies and the protein societies of their body cells, both with Giant Extra-Individual Purely Informational T-strings (GEIPIT; genomes or textomes) defining the behavioral potentials of their specialized citizens. This kind of society is here called T-society and only exists in humans and proteins, while the self-similarity between them only exists in human T-societies.

Tender Transgressions: Olga Tokarczuk’s Exercises in Postsecular Imagination

ABSTRACT The article demonstrates how Olga Tokarczuk inscribes diverse religious traditions in her novels and creates new theological ideas to offer readers literary tools for exercising their imagination. In this way, Tokarczuk’s prose exposes the arbitrariness of religiously legitimized worldviews and destabilizes the existing cultural imaginary. An analysis of Tokarczuk’s methods for constructing beliefs, rituals and metaphysical frameworks of the world that consolidate the communities she describes allows us to perceive her writing as postsecular. Each of her published works of fiction is briefly presented in chronological order, providing an insight into both the continuities and transformations of her approach to contemporary fiction. Juxtaposing these analyses with Tokarczuk’s views on the social role of literature presented in her essays and self-commentaries and the concept of the “tender narrator” from her Nobel lecture, allow us to identify the political and ethical motivations for such a creative strategy.

Nobel Lecture: Banking, Credit, and Economic Fluctuations

Credit markets, including the market for bank loans, are characterized by imperfect and asymmetric information. These informational frictions can interact with other economic forces to produce periods of credit-market stress, in which intermediation is unusually costly and households and businesses have difficulty obtaining credit. A high level of credit-market stress, as in a severe financial crisis, may in turn produce a deep and prolonged recession. I present evidence that financial distress and disrupted credit markets were important sources of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Changes in the state of credit markets also play a role in “ garden-variety” business cycles and in the transmission of monetary policy to the economy. (JEL D82, E32, E44, E52, G21, N22)

Nobel Lecture: Physical modeling of Earth’s climate

5 MoreReceived 26 January 2022DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.95.010501© 2023 Nobel Foundation, Published by the American Physical Society*The 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi. This paper is the text of the address given in conjunction with the award.Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasClimate researchInterdisciplinary Physics

Japan, the Ambiguous, and My Fragile, Complex and Evolving Self

ABSTRACT This essay takes literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel lecture from 1994, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, as a point of departure for thinking about Japan, the ambiguous and how the already fragile and complex narrator that is I has evolved ambiguously over time in relation to a similarly ambiguous and changing imagination of Japan. Based on aikido practice—the narrator’s gateway to Japan—the essay ends up proposing a different understanding of and approach to ambiguity to Oe’s.

Co zyskujemy żyjąc pomiędzy? Czułość według Olgi Tokarczuk w przekładzie na inne języki

Ethnolinguistic inquiry makes ample use of insights proposed in translation studies: one of them is to consider the original and its translations as a coherent body of texts. However, if in most cases the original–translation relationship is viewed in terms of the inevitable loss that occurs in the process, this study proposes to search for semantic gains in the original–translation configuration, in the sense that the translation complements or develops the original. Three categories of such gain are proposed: (1) extension of the original’s semantics (which is effected through profiling as a parameter of cognitive salience), (2) retrieval of the multiple viewpoints present in the original, and (3) enhancement of the original’s meaning (effected through the “loudness” of the speaking “voice”). The three categories of gain are illustrated here with the various ways in which the concept of tenderness is profiled in the English, French, Portuguese, and Russian translations of Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel lecture.

“I inhabited the Land of Ulro long before Blake taught me its proper name”: Czesław Miłosz’s <i>Ziemia Ulro</i>/<i>The Land of Ulro</i>

Olga Tokarczuk, in her Nobel lecture of 7 December 2019, observed that the public nowadays prefers facts to fiction. This is an auspicious remark for my purposes, as my theme will be the autobiographical book of Czesław Miłosz, another Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who received his award in 1980, a year after Tokarczuk’s literary debut. The Blake of Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is part of a fictional world, a curious addition to the story: Agnieszka Holland’s film Spoor, adapted from the book and cowritten by the novelist, eliminates the Blake references without much (or perhaps any) loss to the plot. Conversely, the Blake of Miłosz’s Ziemia Ulro, initially published in 1977 (a round anniversary of Blake’s birth and death), is a vital part of life. I will first recall a few relevant details from Miłosz’s bi(bli)ography, then reflect on the character and quality of his tribute to William Blake. Unlike my chapter for The Reception of William Blake in Europe, whose profile dictated the method (that is, an overview) and the narrow focus on the role Miłosz’s book played in the history of the reception of Blake in Poland, I will engage here more intensively with Ziemia Ulro and, by doing so, postulate a much more extensive appeal of Miłosz’s work. In particular, I will be pointing to the importance and value of this book—​translated into English by Louis Iribarne as The Land of Ulro—​for international Blake circles.

Remarks by Maria Ressa

I became a journalist because information is power, and that leads to justice. If you do not have the facts, you cannot have rule of law. Part of what is happening today is that impunity reigns precisely because we have now made facts debatable. In the Nobel lecture, I talked about how disinformation exploded like an atom bomb in our ecosystem. Unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it did not kill 140,000 people immediately, but it is having that same impact. This is the last six years we have lived through.

Ethnic Trauma in the Traveller’s Eye: On Naipaul’s "The Masque of Africa", Including a Comparison with Bi Shumin’s "30,000 Miles of Africa"

Abstract: Insisting on the role of spectator in his travel writing, V.S. Naipaul claims he is merely the “manager of narrative”, who retells objective truths told by the people among whom he travels. Nonetheless, an examination of the ethnic trauma of post-apartheid South Africa in Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010) reveals that his voice dominates the narrative. Naipaul’s negative view of post-apartheid South Africa is consistent with his previous views of the “dark continent”. Contrary to other writers’ optimistic attitudes toward South Africa, Naipaul holds a negative view of the Rainbow Nation. For Naipaul, South Africa is still trapped in the mess of ethnic trauma: the ‘coloured’ population fears a lack of identity; the white people fear inverted black racism; and the black populace fear a lack of possibility. This article seeks to explore the reasons for Naipaul’s pessimistic perspective on South Africa by reading his related travelogues, African writings, interviews, authorised biography and Nobel lecture. These works reveal two main reasons for his opinion of South Africa: his Western bias against the “dark continent”, and his encounters with various local ‘elites’. A comparison with a travelogue by Bi Shumin further supports the argument that Naipaul’s view of Africa in general and South Africa in particular is selective and one-sided.

Tłumaczenie symultaniczne mowy noblowskiej w dydaktyce przekładu konferencyjnego

Simultaneous Interpreting of a Nobel Lecture in Conference Interpreter Training
 Simultaneous interpreting with text is a hybrid mode combining simultaneous with sight translation. As it constitutes an important element of the interpreter’s work, it must then be a component of conference interpreter training. Due to a scarce research in the field so far, the aim of this paper is to discuss an empirical longitudinal study of simultaneous interpreting of a Nobel lecture from Spanish into Polish. The results of the analysis show that during the preparation phase, it is not a selective analysis of such lexical items as proper names, numbers or unknown words, but rather a syntactic analysis, which enables to render compound statements in a specific register, as well as an in-depth cultural analysis, which contributes to acquiring knowledge across different fields necessary in conference interpreting.

Mental Imagery in Bertrand Russell’s Nobel Lecture “What Desires Are Politically Important?”

The article presents the analysis of the mental images of human desires and their verbalization techniques involved in Bertrand Russell’s Nobel lecture delivered in 1950. Human desires are non-material mental constructs that are not clearly defined in the dictionaries, their verbalization being complicated by the issues related to rationality, psychology of thinking, objectivity, and the variability of individual behavioral reactions. The results of the research suggest that the verbalization of desires is essentially complicated by social and cultural stereotypes. It has been noted that storytelling can be applied as one of the most effective techniques to create the required mental imagery of desires in the recipient’s mind. B. Russell’s unique manner of defining such politically important desires as acquisitiveness, vanity, glory, love of power, excitement is carefully analyzed. The use of figurative language as well as conceptual and stylistic metaphors that facilitate the process of shaping mental images of desires have also been the focus of our attention. Special consideration has been given to the analysis of the verbalization means of the politically important desires.

Toward a Tender, Decolonial, Feminine Universality in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights

Abstract Can literature re-imagine universality in a way that would not be an expression of an underlying urge toward homogeneity and totality? Beginning with the remarks from Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Lecture “The Tender Narrator” where she calls for literature to “universalize our experience” that involves—somewhat counterintuitively—a tender attunement to the fragment, this article discusses a new, paradoxical, feminine formulation of universality in Tokarczuk’s bestseller Flights. By analyzing mobilizations of flight in the novel, the article suggests its universal is woven out of “the shadows of consciousness,” untranslatable idioms of language, pagan Slavic mythologies, old Slavic sect of Bieguni that is virtually unknown in Eastern Europe, and forgotten historical figures and incidents that the narrator “tenderly” narrates. It proposes that universality in Flights emerges as an ethical and political question of reading, translating, and writing across not only national, social, historical languages and contexts, but also across itinerant and fractured subjectivities, languages, myths, and temporalities embedded within the fabrics of Tokarczuk’s novel. This universal is also structured of ambivalent capitalist presents and socialist pasts—though not explicitly addressed, post-socialist transition surfaces here as the unresolvable political, temporal, and subjective liminality. Finally, the article proposes that Tokarczuk’s unique formulation of universality in terms of attention to the fragmentary, forgotten, and fleeting informs recent decolonial, emancipatory attempts in Eastern European feminist scholarship and offers a way out of a certain deadlock created by the frequent dismissal of universality due to its association with the patriarchal status quo and the repression of difference.

A Rhetorical Criticism of Frederick Banting's Nobel Lecture: Mainly By Metaphorical Analysis

A Rhetorical Criticism of Frederick Banting's Nobel Lecture: Mainly By Metaphorical Analysis

Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978

Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978