Ordinary Characters Research Articles

“The Strength of The(Ir) Illusion” (Macbeth 3.5.27): Transmission of Magic and the Ambiguity of Magical Spaces in Macbeth and The Tempest

“The strength of the(ir) illusion” (Macbeth 3.5.27): Transmission of Magic and the Ambiguity of Magical Spaces in Macbeth and The Tempest. Starting from Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen’s 2016 taxonomy of space in Shakespearean drama, our paper focuses on setting and social/ gendered space. What we aim to discuss is how two of Shakespeare’s plays involving magic—namely Macbeth and The Tempest—associate various settings with witchcraft and magic, while also constructing space simultaneously as magical and political, a topophrenic “thirdspace” (cf. Tally, 2019; Soja, 1996), where disorder rules and where power relations in general, and gender relations in particular, are negotiated between ordinary characters and magic-wielding ones (the witches and Hecate vs. Prospero and Ariel, as well as Sycorax). The paper also discusses what “rough” magic is in these plays (a term used in The Tempest, first addressed critically by Robert Egan, 1972), roughness being, on the one hand, a reference to the impurity of the art employed, and, on the other, a nod to the transgression(s) implied by magic practices. Keywords: gender, performance, magic, thirdspace, transgression, transmission

‘All true histories contain instruction’: Truth and Everyday Heroism in Agnes Grey

The writings of the Brontës have frequently been studied in relation to conceptions of heroism. More specifically, critics have focused on the influence of war heroes such as the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon in the early writings of the siblings, principally those authored by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë. This article, however, explores the conception of ‘everyday heroism’ in Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey (1847). It argues that the ordinary characters portrayed in Brontë’s work embody qualities usually associated with the heroic. Further, the analysis of heroism can reveal new insights into the representation of gender roles and class relations in the novel.

‘I need readers to trust that this can happen’: relational realism in Catherine Bush’s and Doreen Vanderstoop’s climate crisis novels

This article demonstrates how, challenged by Amitav Ghosh’s claim that realist fiction is ill-suited to deal with the climate crisis, and inspired by Indigenous relational thinking, Catherine Bush and Doreen Vanderstoop turn to ‘relational realism’ in their recent novels. I argue that they use realist narrative strategies creatively to represent climate catastrophes as a symptom of the carbon economy. But rather than portraying a world that is radically different, Blaze Island and Watershed are concerned with everyday reality, are set in clearly identifiable Canadian geographies, and focus on the eco-anxieties of ordinary characters. In addition to discussing intergenerational climate justice and emphasising the need for Indigenous leadership in combating global warming, the two novels enter into conversation with Shakespeare’s The Tempest and early twentieth-century prairie realist novels respectively to tease out their ecological undercurrents and implications. In so doing, they foreground the interplay of realist narrative strategies and relational thinking to emphasise the creative potential of the novel in addressing climate change and the need for communities to come together to save the planet.

PROJECTIVE CHARACTER VALUES ON REAL AND RATIONAL ELEMENTS

Abstract Let $\alpha $ be a complex-valued $2$ -cocycle of a finite group G with $\alpha $ chosen so that the $\alpha $ -characters of G are class functions and analogues of the orthogonality relations for ordinary characters are valid. Then the real or rational elements of G that are also $\alpha $ -regular are characterised by the values that the irreducible $\alpha $ -characters of G take on those respective elements. These new results generalise two known facts concerning such elements and irreducible ordinary characters of $G;$ however, the initial choice of $\alpha $ from its cohomology class is not unique in general and it is shown the results can vary for a different choice.

Ambivalence, division, and critique: The collaborator in British Palestinian political thrillers

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of the collaborator as a literary figure and a critical tool in Mischa Hiller’s Shake Off and Ahmed Masoud’s Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda. I argue that Hiller’s and Masoud’s political thrillers reclaim the collaborator as a figure of division and ambivalence, which facilitates engagement with local subtleties. These include the issue of collaboration and its implications for individuals as well as the Palestinian national struggle; the straightforward path from resistance to liberation and statehood; and the idea of a unified Palestinian ideology to which Palestinians, including Palestinian authors in the diaspora, need to be loyal. In this sense, Hiller’s and Masoud’s works offer important insights into wider trends in Palestinian writing, including an emphasis on non-heroic and ordinary characters, while using the political thriller, as a popular anglophone genre, to bring awareness of the Palestinian cause, in all its ambivalence and complexity.

Поэтика повседневности в творчестве С. Довлатова

The aim of the study is to identify the originality of everyday life representation, i.e., the mechanisms of reflection of everyday realities, in the creative work of S. Dovlatov based on the material of his novellas “The Compromise” (1981), “The Zone” (1982) and “Pushkin Hills” (1983), the collection “The Suitcase” (1986). The scientific originality of the paper lies in interpreting the prose writer’s works through the lens of everyday life. The results show that repeatability, closeness of space and the turn to the sphere of private life of ordinary characters represent the main features of everyday life in the analyzed works. Everyday life requires a recognizable background created by repetitive thoughts, descriptions, images in S. Dovlatov’s works, however, the routine in his writings is not monotonous, which destroys the idea of traditional everyday life as something uniform. The author highlights separate, small-scale events that are sufficient to recreate a complete picture in simple language, using similes, metaphors, euphemisms, often interspersing his works with dialogues and jokes, conveying emphasis and dyslalia. The conversational style used by S. Dovlatov to create the speech characteristics of his characters demonstrates its inherent discreteness, unfinished thoughts, incomplete syntactic constructions and brevity of utterance.

Decomposition matrices and Brauer trees of spin characters for S_25 , p=17

In this paper, we will find the Brauer trees and the decomposition matrices of the symmetric groups , when n=25 for p=17 by using -inducing for calculates modular characters from the ordinary characters of the symmetric group. Also, we find all the blocks of defect 0 and 1 and we will depend on the results of the decomposition matrices of the symmetric groups when n=24 for p=17

Navarro vertices and lifts in solvable groups

Let Q be a p-subgroup of a finite p-solvable group G, where p is a prime, and suppose that δ is a linear character of Q with the property that whenever are conjugate in G. In this situation, we show that restriction to p-regular elements defines a canonical bijection from the set of those irreducible ordinary characters of G with Navarro vertex onto the set of irreducible Brauer characters of G with Green vertex Q. Also, we use this correspondence to examine the behavior of lifts of Brauer characters with respect to normal subgroups. Communicated by Mandi Schaeffer Fry

Degree divisibility in Alperin–McKay correspondences

Let p be a prime, B a p-block of a finite group G and b its Brauer correspondent. According to the Alperin–McKay Conjecture, there exists a bijection between the set of irreducible ordinary characters of height zero of B and those of b. In this paper, we show that whenever G is p-solvable such a bijection can be found, both for ordinary and Brauer characters, with the additional property of being compatible with divisibility of character degrees. In this case, we also show that the dimension of b divides the dimension of B.

Песенные вставки в сказочном фольклоре лесных юкагиров

This paper analyzes the song inclusions in the tales of Forest Yukaghirs, the content of such pieces, their purposes, and origin. Song segments are found in animal tales, including mythological ones, fairy tales about a Fabulous Old Man-eater, and everyday fairy tales. The song inclusions mostly convey the monological speech of the characters and include lexical repetitions. The song inclusions considered are mainly the magical appeal of one hero to another, a personal story, or a real personal situation. Some of them can be characterized as personal songs. Characters endowed with supernatural powers use the song as a magical ritual. These characters include heroes with shamanic powers and the ogre giant, the Fabulous Old Man. The magical potential of the song, aimed at summoning and embodying something, can also be evoked by ordinary people, even unintentionally. Songs-appeals of some characters to others are performed in magical situations, facilitating their manifestation. The fairy tales provide indirect indications of the shamanic power of the singing characters. Alternatively, the songs addressed to other persons can be performed by ordinary characters, usually represented by animals. Songs as personal narratives or real personal situations can be found mainly in the tales about animals. The song inclusions are based on the representations of shamanic activity, magical abilities, and the song type of storytelling, as evidenced by the existence of both non-fairy and fairy tale Yukaghir prose.

Small stories and accountability of discursive action in mediated political discourse: Contextualisation and recontextualisation of ordinary and not-so-ordinary participants

This paper examines how participants in mediated political discourse use short narratives strategically to account for discursive action by contextualising and re-contextualising their discursive selves, particular discursive acts and their intended and unintended perlocutionary effects. The data analysed are pre-election data (2017) and non-election data (2018), comprising online news reports from British broadsheets, parliamentary debates, political speeches from leading British politicians, and their web-based comments' sections. The research is based on the differentiation between the generalised pragmatic premise and second-order theoretical construct of accountability2 of communicative action and its discourse-community-based particularisation, the first-order participant construct of accountability1. The discursive value of the latter is negotiated in context and in the political-discourse data further distinguished as regards accountability of and accountability for discursive acts. The analysis focuses on how ordinary and not-so-ordinary participants contextualise and recontextualise interfacing ordinary-life experience anchored in private domains and not-so-ordinary political action anchored in public and institutional domains. It considers (1) the production format comparing not-so-ordinary and ordinary story tellers; (2) stories with (a) not-so-ordinary, (b) ordinary, and (c) ordinary and not-so-ordinary characters; (3) ordinary settings and institutional settings; and (4) explicit and implicit evaluations by characters and tellers. The analysis shows that there is not only variation in the formatting of the short narratives with more-prototypical small stories and monolithic characters, settings and plot, and less-prototypical small stories with more dimensional characters, fuzzy settings and negotiated evaluations. There is also variation in the discursive function of the small stories: not-so-ordinary tellers and characters account for their discursive acts through life-world-experience-based accounts while at the same time implicating their leadership skills. They present themselves as listening to ordinary people, voicing their concerns in the public arena, initiating political action and acting on their behalf. Ordinary tellers and their ordinary characters tell their ordinary-life based stories, distancing themselves from the not-so-ordinary agents. In the mediated data, not-so-ordinary participants' references to the private-public interface generally trigger conversational implicatures targeting sincerity, credibility and ideological coherence, while ordinary participants' references to the private-public interface are used to show the effects of political decision on their real-life experience.

Restrictions of irreducible characters of finite groups of Lie type to derived subgroups and regular semisimple elements

ABSTRACT In this note, we formulate an observation that “almost all” irreducible ordinary characters of finite groups of Lie type remain irreducible when restricted to the derived subgroups. To see this, key ingredients are some asymptotic results for conjugacy classes of finite groups of Lie type and strongly regular semisimple elements in dual groups.

TRENDS OF SADFISHING PHENOMENON AND DISAPPEARANCE OF SELF-PRIVACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA TIKTOK

Content creators are competing to increase viewers and enter the TikTok homepage or commonly known as FYP (For Your Page). The existence of this FYP encourages content creators to start doing something that makes their TikTok account viral, one of which is creating sad content or sadfishing. Sadfishing has become a trend where this trend occurs because artists, actors or even ordinary characters share unimportant sadness to get the attention of many people so that they will feel satisfied and are encouraged to continue to sell their sad stories to bring fame. This study uses the basic concept of sadfishing and Dramatism Theory. The approach in this research is qualitative with case study research method. The data collection technique was carried out by in-depth interviews. The data analysis technique uses a method that is carried out in three stages, namely: data reduction, data presentation, and conclusions or verification as a technique for compiling research. The results show that influencers who own TikTok accounts share sadness or Sadfishing because of the "Trend" insistence on TikTok Social Media in order to gain sympathy and empathy, content creators will increasingly look for ways to keep their content liked by many people. the point of it all is that they just want to go viral and be famous.

Traveling Europe ‘through Time and against Time’: Persuasion and Eternal Con-temporariness in Claudio Magris’s Narratives

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Claudio Magris’s reflections on time by interrogating two time-related notions from which his entire narrative oeuvre develops: the idea of eternal con-temporariness and his reworking of Carlo Michelstaedter’s concept of ‘persuasion’. Furthermore, it aims to explore the implications of these notions for the ways in which Magris revisits and represents both the familiar and the less familiar places that make up the fabric of his literary journeys. The discussion of Magris’s use of the two notions of time begins with Danube, where he recounts the experiences of the traveler-narrator on the vast itinerary from the river’s source to the Black Sea. Following the curved and sinuous path that runs parallel to the Danube’s riverbanks, the traveler-narrator records his reflections on the ways in which the historical and intellectual European figures, as well as the ordinary characters around which the book centers, have dealt with the experience of time. In his two later novels, Microcosms and Blindly, Magris picks up the theme of reflection again as it continues to shape his wanderings through global and familiar places. In the short stories of Tempo curvo a Krems [Curving time in Krems], in contrast, the aging characters have somehow come to a standstill after migrating from Central and Eastern Europe to northern Italy. Here, Magris seems to take a different perspective, since the elderly protagonists have renounced the search for persuasion and tend to withdraw from life. At the same time, however, the narrator’s conjectures from the seashore again lead the reader back to the very beginning of Magris’s long-life literary journey “through time and against time.” By evoking the image of the river’s delta and the narrator’s sense of uncertainty when the latter faces the open sea, Magris reaffirms once again the importance of preserving a sense of the beyond through which to discover the complexity and uncertainty of one’s own identity.

Principal blocks with 5 irreducible characters

We show that if the principal p-block of a finite group G contains exactly 5 irreducible ordinary characters, then a Sylow p-subgroup of G has order 5, 7 or is isomorphic to one of the non-abelian 2-groups of order 8.

The principal p‐blocks with four irreducible characters

For a prime p, we determine a Sylow p-subgroup D of a finite group G such that the principal p-block B of G has four irreducible ordinary characters. It has been determined already for the cases where the number is up to three by work by R. Brauer, J. Brandt, and V.A. Belonogov 30 years ago. Our proof relies on the classification of finite simple groups.

Writing Style of R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan was among the first Indian English writers to be taken note of the West. With a clever use of just the right amount of humour, Narayan was able to transform his seemingly ordinary characters into larger-than-lite individuals, who brought a change in the existing social and political structures of Malgudi, a microcosmic representation of our nation. And, with this, he inspired us to think, dream and write differently to delive into a magical reality for better than the one we know. His works are often considered synonymous with the innocence of childhood, and even today the social undertones of his writing echo the complexities of the Indian society.

A method of detecting defects of smart meter LCD screen based on LSD and deep learning

In order to detect the defects of smart meter liquid crystal display (LCD) screen quickly and accurately, this paper proposes a method based on line segment detector (LSD) and deep learning. Characters of smart meter LCD screen can be divided into two types: ordinary characters and digital tube characters. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to locate and identify the ordinary characters. Since there may be certain missing segment in digital tube characters, conventional text detection methods are not applicable, and template matching method is used for detecting them. Compared with the whole screen, the digital tube area is very small, and the relative positions of the digital tube characters of smart meter of most manufacturers are nearly the same, so the detection rate of the template matching method is extremely high and the method can be commonly used. The whole detection process is as follows: First, horizontal straight lines got by LSD are used for tilt correction. Secondly, CNN is used to locate and identify an ordinary character of the meter screen to determine whether it is missing or not. Then, whether there are missing segments in the digital tube area is determined by template matching method. At last, the experimental results show that the accuracy of the method for detecting the character defects of LCD screen is about 96%, and the accuracy of the electric quantity identification function of the method is about 97%.

Trivial source characters in blocks with cyclic defect groups

We describe the ordinary characters of trivial source modules lying in blocks with cyclic defect groups relying on their recent classification in terms of paths on the Brauer tree by G. Hiss and the second author. In particular, we show how to recover the exceptional constituents of such characters using the source algebra of the block.

Seminar Roundtable: Eudora Welty and Mrs. Brown

Seminar Roundtable:Eudora Welty and Mrs. Brown Sarah Gilbreath Ford Like most aspects of life in 2020, my graduate class on Eudora Welty's fiction ended up being quite different from the one I had initially planned. Given the tight parameters of a summer term, I had imagined that discussing Welty's work in the context of modernism would give the class a helpful focus. Because of Covid, though, that modernist lens came with a contemporary filter. In the past, my graduate students have gravitated towards modernism's experimentation with subject matter and form. In Welty's fiction, they have found rich material in her attention to women's perspectives, her rewriting of traditional narrative structures, and her wonderful play with language. This time, however, our conversations kept returning to the modernist interest in isolation and the larger problem of one human trying to find connection with another. Certainly, the fact that we were not in the same room fueled this interest. A Zoom call may mimic a live classroom discussion, but the boxes framing each person's face on a screen highlighted that we were in separate places. Consequently, stories such as "Why I Live at the P. O." and "Clytie" took on a particularly acute tone. While Sister's choice of living alone at the post office may be laughable, it also reveals the inability of the characters to communicate through spoken or written language. Sister's loneliness felt too familiar to be only comic. Clytie's story, on the other hand, became a touchstone we returned to time and again to think about how the need for connection can be reflected in a simple human touch. In his essay, Andrew Hicks explores what happens when characters neglect the value of the tactile in establishing connections. Our attention to human connection was amplified by Virginia Woolf's "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," one of the essays I had assigned to provide that modernist context. In defending the novelists of her time against the accusation that "they are unable to create characters that are real, true, and convincing," Woolf famously claims, "on or about December 1910, human character changed" (21, 22). To illustrate her point, Woolf tells the story of entering a train car only to discover that she was interrupting a conversation between two people. As she processes the awkwardness, she becomes [End Page 213] more and more drawn to the elderly lady she decides to call Mrs. Brown. The key to Woolf's interest is that Mrs. Brown is not generally the stuff of stories. She is ordinary. Woolf, though, imagines the challenges that Mrs. Brown might be facing and decides that in all her ordinariness, Mrs. Brown should be seen as "an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety" (33). Given this context, our class began to identify the Mrs. Brown characters in Welty's stories, that is, the people who might have gone unnoticed in the "real" world but become special with the spotlight provided by the story world. Phoenix Jackson clearly fits Woolf's description of a person of "unlimited capacity," as does the motherless and overlooked Laura McRaven. Allison Scheidegger's analysis of Ran MacLain reveals how ordinary characters can become central, changing our conception of what constitutes the subject of a narrative. In asserting that modern novelists were interested in plumbing the extraordinary in the ordinary, Woolf's project values the role of a perceiver, the one who might upon entering a train car find meaning by observing a stranger. Our class then began to identify the Woolf characters, those who were watching the Mrs. Browns. Cassie Morrison and Nina Carmichael in The Golden Apples both play this role in their keen observations of Virgie and Easter. The students persistently asked, however, whether perceiving was the same as connecting, or if modern characters were, in the end, left isolated despite their interest in each other. This query finds its way into Ryan Sinni's analysis of whether perceiving equally benefits the perceiver and the subject and into Hannah Wells's analysis of the unspoken roots of the dysfunction and alienation of the Farr family. Although questions of isolation, perception, connection, and...