Recurrent Motifs Research Articles

Identity Crisis at the Party

. The present contribution offers a comparative analysis of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and Virginia Woolf’s “The New Dress”, reflecting on the possible reasons that could explain the inexistence of previous critical comparisons of two texts written by two authors whose work has been amply studied and who have been frequently related by criticism. Considering the recurrent motif and context of the party in modernist literature, the study focuses on the identity crises experienced by the protagonists of both short stories. Taking into account Anthony Elliott’s reflections on the agents involved in the construction of the self, as well as recalling Joyce’s concept of “epiphany” and Woolf’s notion of “moment of being”, we analyse the concomitances detected in two stories that deal with the identity crises suffered by their respective protagonists, that deploy an analogous structure and share the use of similar symbolism.

Symbolic Meanings of Cooking in Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five Series

Food and food preparation are the elements that usually reveals in works of literature. Its recurrent motif raises the assumption that they must contain some meanings in social and cultural realm. This paper analyses the symbolic meanings of cooking, as part of food preparation, in the British children work of literature, The Famous Five, written by Enid Blyton. The analysis uses theory of semiology proposed by Roland Barthes on denotative and connotative meanings and it is conducted through close-reading. The analysis results in how cooking becomes: first, a routine obligation, where the women cook mostly spend their time doing their work in the kitchen and work orderly to please; second, cooking as a marker of maturity for coming-of-age girls, in which teenage becomes the time marker that a girl must be able to cook; third, cooking as a marker of gender-based job division, where women should involve in domestic works, while men dedicate in public sphere. The children’s literature becomes one of the effective tools to embed the values and beliefs in children’s mind as childhood is the golden age to receive any information through the children’s senses.

„Schnee. Und mehr noch des Weißen“. Paul Celans ortlose Orte

As many commentators have already pointed out “snow” is one of the main recurrent motifs in Celan’s poetry, hence the need to place it in the proper exegetical context. This implies at least for the first creative phase—i.e., prior to the publication of the volume Atemwende (1966)—, that “snow” remains closely related to the biographic experience and a sign of topographic uncertainty or even a judicial “non-lieu” —a non-place, in terms of a dismissed case—for horrific unpunished crimes of the past for which Celan’s poetry is struggling to testify. Thus, in Celan’s symbolical language, “snow” gradually becomes—just like the motifs of “ash” or “stone”—a silent witness of the Holocaust.

Flown Away: Eva Bezwoda’s Life, Death and Poetry

Eva Bezwoda was a prominent poet in the 1960s and 1970s, who contributed to several South African journals, as well as publishing One Hundred and Three Poems in 1973. Her death by suicide three years later seems congruen with the themes and preoccupations of her work, and was a loss to South Africa’s literary culture at the time. Despite critical attention to her work, after her death her legacy seems to have been forgotten, and her poetry neglected. In this article, I outline what is known of her biography, with a focus on her most productive years as a writer, and the development of her career in relation to recurrent motifs, prominent themes, and relevant details from her poems. I consider the critical reception of her work and engage with archival material, including correspondence from the year before her death with Ad Donker and personal responses to her death by Sheila Fugard and Lionel Abrahams.

Pachakuti, an Indigenous Perspective on Collapse and Extinction

This work aims to examine pachakuti as the patent mytheme found in three poems written by different indigenous poets: “Todo está dicho” (“Everything has been said”) by Fredy Chakangana, “La Tórtola, pájaro melancólico” (“The turtledove, melancholic bird”) by Lorenzo Ayllapán, and “Vivir-Morir” (“To live-to die”) by Vito Apüshana. Pachakuti is a key concept in Andean literature, both in mythological and cosmological tales, and in contemporary indigenous narrative. Pachakuti is interpreted to symbolize a re-balancing of the world through a chaotic chain of events that manifests itself as a catastrophe or an upheaval of the order of things. As pachakuti becomes a recurrent motif (patent mytheme) in the chosen poems, it is explored to show a different narrative perspective of collapse and extinction, as well as to expose how earth-beings (latent mytheme) acquire their own agency in the poems and denounce modern forms of extractivism (such as deforestation and water contamination). Through the earth-beings’ voices the poems contribute to reveal new perspectives about collapse and extinction anchored in indigenous narratives from the Global South.

Psychological Constructs and Defensive Transformations: Yeats’s Mythic Poetry as a Response to Political and Cultural Dilemmas

Yeats's mythic poetry has often been approached from two distinct perspectives: either as an tribute to Ireland and its people or as a mirror reflecting the political turbulence of his times. Nonetheless, this study veers onto a distinct course, probing the psychological constituents manifested in Yeats's engagement with myths. The focal point of this investigation is Yeats's application of ego mechanisms as a method to sail around the sociopolitical obstacles he faced. The central argument posited here is the necessity to discern the recurrent psychological motifs when dissecting Yeats's mythological work. Drawing substantially on Freud's hypotheses about ego defense mechanisms, this study's objective is to shed light on how Yeats employed myths and folklore as a form of psychological defense to grapple with Ireland's contemporary political and existential uncertainties. A thorough analysis of selected mythological poems from diverse stages of Yeats's career unveils his recurrent utilization of defensive strategies embedded within Irish narratives, while concurrently endeavoring to rekindle a sense of national pride and identity amidst Ireland's unstable state. Yeats's poetic endeavors exceed mere storytelling; they constitute a conduit for psychological metamorphosis, aspiring to intertwine the ingrained tradition of legends with the intricate realities of modern Irish existence.

Direct Arylation of Thiophenes in Continuous Flow

AbstractSynthetic methodologies involving direct C−H functionalization are promising to improve sustainability in organic synthesis. However, these newly developed strategies may have a scarce appeal for larger scale applications due to the high catalyst loading, harsh conditions or their typically long reaction times that affect severely the process productivity. Flow chemistry technology is a recognized tool to improve both the efficiency and scalability in organic synthesis that can overcome these issues. In the present paper we studied an “in flow” method for the direct arylation of thiophene derivatives with aromatic bromides to promptly afford heteroaromatic biaryls, which are recurrent motifs both in biologically active molecules and in functional materials. By using a packed‐bed reactor containing potassium carbonate as the solid base and an automated system, we could develop a reliable methodology for thiophene arylation in flow with yields up to 90 % within a residence time of 30–60 minutes. This strategy is suitable for a wide variety of substrates and allowed the reaction to be carried out at gram‐scale reaching a productivity value of 1.1 g h−1.

BACE1 in PV interneuron tunes hippocampal CA1 local circuits and resets priming of fear memory extinction.

BACE1 is the rate-limiting enzyme for β-amyloid (Aβ) production and therefore is considered a prime drug target for treating Alzheimer's disease (AD). Nevertheless, the BACE1 inhibitors failed in clinical trials, even exhibiting cognitive worsening, implying that BACE1 may function in regulating cognition-relevant neural circuits. Here, we found that parvalbumin-positive inhibitory interneurons (PV INs) in hippocampal CA1 express BACE1 at a high level. We designed and developed a mouse strain with conditional knockout of BACE1 in PV neurons. The CA1 fast-spiking PV INs with BACE1 deletion exhibited an enhanced response of postsynaptic N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors to local stimulation on CA1 oriens, with average intrinsic electrical properties and fidelity in synaptic integration. Intriguingly, the BACE1 deletion reorganized the CA1 recurrent inhibitory motif assembled by the heterogeneous pyramidal neurons (PNs) and the adjacent fast-spiking PV INs from the superficial to the deep layer. Moreover, the conditional BACE1 deletion impaired the AMPARs-mediated excitatory transmission of deep CA1 PNs. Further rescue experiments confirmed that these phenotypes require the enzymatic activity of BACE1. Above all, the BACE1 deletion resets the priming of the fear memory extinction. Our findings suggest a neuron-specific working model of BACE1 in regulating learning and memory circuits. The study may provide a potential path of targeting BACE1 and NMDAR together to circumvent cognitive worsening due to a single application of BACE1 inhibitor in AD patients.

Mujhay Na Kha Jana! : Women and Food in Faseeh Bari Khan’s "Burns Road Ki Nilofer"

This paper is a materialist feminist study of Pakistani writer, Faseeh Bari Khan’s comedic telefilm, “Burns Road Ki Nilofer”, translated as “Nilofer of Burns Road”. A recurrent motif in Pakistani comedic telefilms is of women, both married and single, portrayed as beasts with voracious appetites and insatiable consumption patterns. This paper expounds how Khan’s female characters are portrayed as women of agency who, by claiming the right to comment on the desiring, economy and distribution of food, rise beyond their stereotypical representations of gluttonous eaters. Following Lisa Angelella’s scholarship on food and feminism, I posit that both Nilofer and her mother, Saeeda, try to negotiate their sense of selfhood and approach what it means to be a woman and a human via their conversations on food in the telefilm. My research aims to unravel the underlying dominant factor in their crippled sense of self while also retaining within it a muffled identification of female agency when the female characters consume as per their desiring. The void that women wish to fill while devouring great amounts of food, is occasioned by the absence of women’s positionality as a class in a patriarchal capitalist society where, as materialist feminist scholar Christine Delphy propounds, they are not made part of the system of “exchange of values” despite their domestic “labor” (“The Main Enemy” 73). Thus, this research reimagines womanhood and women’s exploitation in a domestic mode of production within Pakistani patriarchal capitalist cartographies.Keywords: Materialist feminism, feminist food studies, Pakistani television, female selfhood, female appetite

Angela Carter and the “Sociology of clothes” in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

ABSTRACT The richly allusive tapestry of Carter’s fictional costumes – comprising varying fabrics, face-paint, tattoos, and other forms of bodily modifications – invites closer examination of the complex politics that undergird them. This paper examines Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman to understand how the novel uses dress not only to foreground gender-coded sartorial practices but also to draw attention to the ways in which it indexes colonial, cultural, and moral politics. The proposed paper thus, aims to analyze how Carter employs dress as a recurrent motif in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman to examine its role in signaling and shaping socio-cultural identities.

TransCRISPR-sgRNA design tool for CRISPR/Cas9 experiments targeting specific sequence motifs.

Eukaryotic genomes contain several types of recurrent sequence motifs, e.g. transcription factor motifs, miRNA binding sites, repetitive elements. CRISPR/Cas9 can facilitate identification and study of crucial motifs. We present transCRISPR, the first online tool dedicated to search for sequence motifs in the user-provided genomic regions and design optimal sgRNAs targeting them. Users can obtain sgRNAs for chosen motifs, for up to tens of thousands of target regions in 30 genomes, either for the Cas9 or dCas9 system. TransCRISPR provides user-friendly tables and visualizations, summarizing features of identified motifs and designed sgRNAs such as genomic localization, quality scores, closest transcription start sitesand others. Experimental validation of sgRNAs for MYC binding sites designed with transCRISPR confirmed efficient disruption of the targeted motifs and effect on expression of MYC-regulated genes. TransCRISPR is available from https://transcrispr.igcz.poznan.pl/transcrispr/.

Photoenzymatic Hydrosulfonylation for the Stereoselective Synthesis of Chiral Sulfones.

Chiral sulfones are recurrent motifs in pharmaceuticals and bioactive molecules. Although chemical methods have been developed to afford α- or β- chiral sulfones, these protocols rely heavily on the pre-synthesis of structurally complicated starting materials and chiral metal complexes. Herein, we described a photoenzymatic approach for the radical-mediated stereoselective hydrosulfonylation. Engineered variants of ene reductases provide efficient biocatalysts for this transformation, enabling to achieve a series of β-chiral sulfonyl compounds with high yields (up to 92%) and excellent e.r. values (up to 99:1).

Photoenzymatic Hydrosulfonylation for the Stereoselective Synthesis of Chiral Sulfones

AbstractChiral sulfones are recurrent motifs in pharmaceuticals and bioactive molecules. Although chemical methods have been developed to afford α‐ or β‐ chiral sulfones, these protocols rely heavily on the pre‐synthesis of structurally complicated starting materials and chiral metal complexes. Herein, we described a photoenzymatic approach for the radical‐mediated stereoselective hydrosulfonylation. Engineered variants of ene reductases provide efficient biocatalysts for this transformation, enabling to achieve a series of β‐chiral sulfonyl compounds with high yields (up to 92 %) and excellent e.r. values (up to 99 : 1).

FDA-Approved Fluorinated Heterocyclic Drugs from 2016 to 2022.

The inclusion of fluorine atoms or heterocyclic moiety into drug structures represents a recurrent motif in medicinal chemistry. The combination of these two features is constantly appearing in new molecular entities with various biological activities. This is demonstrated by the increasing number of newly synthesized fluorinated heterocyclic compounds among the Food and Drug Administration FDA-approved drugs. In this review, the biological activity, as well as the synthetic aspects, of 33 recently FDA-approved fluorinated heterocyclic drugs from 2016 to 2022 are highlighted.

A film for an older-than-school-age audience. On Anton Azarenkov’s Children’s Cinema [Detskaya sinema

The essay is concerned with detailed examination of Children’s Cinema [Detskaya sinema] (2020), a book by the contemporary poet Anton Azarenkov that contains his selected poems, including the narrative poem ‘A refuge’ [‘Ubezhishche’]. The reviewer analyses the book’s subject and motif structure, identifying key topics such as abuse, traumatisation, and a revisited childhood experience, and discusses the complexity and gradual unfolding of the collection’s images and reminiscences. Subjected to Nuzhdina’s close examination is Azarenkov’s lyrical hero and his reception in present-day poetic criticism. According to Nuzhdina, the lyrical hero of Children’s Cinema typifies an unreliable narrator who looks to childhood traumatic experiences for a source of self-identification and, therefore, professes the aesthetic of ‘talking about trauma,’ a staple of modern poetry. In Azarenkov’s case, it results in the cyclicity of the book’s subject structure and its continuous use of recurrent motifs, as well as an artistic world constructed from the same repeatedly used elements, such as the experience of surviving abuse, departing, loneliness, memories about childhood, etc.

What Performative Contradiction Reveals: Plato’s Theaetetus and Gorgias on Sophistry

Socrates’ use of performative contradiction against sophistic theories is a recurrent motif in Plato’s dialogues. In the case of Plato’s Theaetetus and Gorgias, Socrates attempts to show that Protagoras’ homo mensura doctrine and Gorgias’ doctrine of the power of logos are each performatively contradicted by the underlying activity of philosophical dialogue. In the case of the Theaetetus, Socrates’ strategy of performative contradiction hinges on Protagoras’ failure to perform in the way that he theorized the sophist performing—namely, being able to change appearances through logoi (Theaetetus 166d–167d). In parallel fashion, Gorgias’ account of the power of rhetoric is performatively contradicted by the orator’s inability to prevail over Socrates, instead resorting to insincere responses to Socrates’ questions in order to save face—a dialogical “performance” that ties directly to Socrates’ portrait of Gorgianic rhetoric as a matter of pandering to the audience (Gorgias 460a–465a). Plato’s aim in dramatizing these performative contradictions, I argue, is to illuminate both the proximity between Socrates and the great sophists, particularly with respect to Socrates’ practice of elenchos, but also the distance between Socrates and the sophists in how they conceive of our situatedness within the world of human concerns.

Introduction

Introduction

Context-dependence of T-loop Mediated Long-range RNA Tertiary Interactions

The architecture and folding of complex RNAs is governed by a limited set of highly recurrent structural motifs that form long-range tertiary interactions. One of these motifs is the T-loop, which was first identified in tRNA but is broadly distributed across biological RNAs. While the T-loop has been examined in detail in different biological contexts, the various receptors that it interacts with are not as well defined. In this study, we use a cell-based genetic screen in concert with bioinformatic analysis to examine three different, but related, T-loop receptor motifs found in the flavin mononucleotide (FMN) and cobalamin (Cbl) riboswitches. As a host for different T-loop receptors, we employed the env8 class-II Cbl riboswitch, an RNA that uses two T-loop motifs for both folding and supporting the ligand binding pocket. A set of libraries was created in which select nucleotides that participate in the T-loop/T-loop receptor (TL/TLR) interaction were fully randomized. Library members were screened for their ability to support Cbl-dependent expression of a reporter gene. While T-loops appear to be variable in sequence, we find that the functional sequence space is more restricted in the Cbl riboswitch, suggesting that TL/TLR interactions are context dependent. Our data reveal clear sequence signatures for the different types of receptor motifs that align with phylogenic analysis of these motifs in the FMN and Cbl riboswitches. Finally, our data suggest the functional contribution of various nucleobase-mediated long-range interactions within the riboswitch subclass of TL/TLR interactions that are distinct from those found in other RNAs.

Recurrent network interactions explain tectal response variability and experience-dependent behavior.

Response variability is an essential and universal feature of sensory processing and behavior. It arises from fluctuations in the internal state of the brain, which modulate how sensory information is represented and transformed to guide behavioral actions. In part, brain state is shaped by recent network activity, fed back through recurrent connections to modulate neuronal excitability. However, the degree to which these interactions influence response variability and the spatial and temporal scales across which they operate, are poorly understood. Here, we combined population recordings and modeling to gain insights into how neuronal activity modulates network state and thereby impacts visually evoked activity and behavior. First, we performed cellular-resolution calcium imaging of the optic tectum to monitor ongoing activity, the pattern of which is both a cause and consequence of changes in network state. We developed a minimal network model incorporating fast, short range, recurrent excitation and long-lasting, activity-dependent suppression that reproduced a hallmark property of tectal activity - intermittent bursting. We next used the model to estimate the excitability state of tectal neurons based on recent activity history and found that this explained a portion of the trial-to-trial variability in visually evoked responses, as well as spatially selective response adaptation. Moreover, these dynamics also predicted behavioral trends such as selective habituation of visually evoked prey-catching. Overall, we demonstrate that a simple recurrent interaction motif can be used to estimate the effect of activity upon the incidental state of a neural network and account for experience-dependent effects on sensory encoding and visually guided behavior.

"Even more than that, men love cars": "Car guy" memes and hegemonic masculinity.

The construction of gender identities occurs through a variety of social forces, including memes widely circulated on social media. Beyond the function of internet memes as entertainment, they also promote gender-based bonding through humor in ways that encourage performative gender roles central to self-image. Decoding memes as a form of contemporary data reveals desires and fears, both conscious and unconscious, that underlie dramaturgical performances supporting hegemonic masculinity. In the case of "car guys," car aficionados whose passion for cars is integral to their identity, memes reflect the group's aspirational presentation of self, including cars, as a symbolic physical embodiment of hegemonic masculinity. This semiotic study of 60 car guy memes shared on social media uncovered recurrent motifs centered around cars' ability to affirm men's position in the metaphorical driver's seat. Flashy cars were often portrayed as more desirable than women, a sentiment encapsulated by the meme, "Men love women, but even more than that, men love cars." This novel analysis of memes explores the ostensible male preference for fantasy cars over emotionally risky relationships. Two salient themes relevant to conceptions of masculinity emerged: (1) car guys' apprehensions about male-female interdependence and (2) frustration with women's discretion in meeting men's emotional and sexual needs. Memes as a cross-sectional, unfiltered data source provide insight into the need to reconcile car culture with gender equality.