Symbolic Transformation Research Articles

Nałkowska i Komornicka, czyli kto zawinił

The author analyses the love-hate relationship between Zofia Nałkowska and her seven years’ senior, the legendary painter Maria Komornicka, who was for a time romantically ivolved with Zofia’s father — Wacław Nałkowski — and her friend — Cezary Jellenta. The relationship between the two writers has excited emotional reponses from researchers for many years. Two critics specializing in Komornicka have shown their interest most explicitly: Izabela Filipiak and Edward Boniecki. They accuse Nałkowska of not maginalizing Komornicka’s role in women’s literature of early 20th century, of unfeeling attitude for Komornicka’s tragic fate, even though Nałkowska was inspired by her in the early age, and of the failure to help Komornicka, when she was declared insane and disempowered after her symbolic transformation into a man. Researchers have so far seen Komornicka as a lost and harmed person, whereas Nałkowska was perceived as the morally questionable winner. However, Hanna Kirchner, who specializes in Nałkowska, has recently shown interesting sources of Nałkowska’s dislike for Komornicka, pointing out to a forgotten juvenile poem called Historia „For­poczt”. The author of the article, who also wrote a monograph about Maria Komornicka, analyses the arguments presented by critics of both writers, observing the relation between Nałkowska and Komornicka from a neutral ground, without sharing the dynamic of hasty accusations.

Barbey d’Aurevilly et l’écriture: formes et signes by Pascale Auraix-Jonchière

Reviews 211 Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger Auraix-Jonchière, Pascale. Barbey d’Aurevilly et l’écriture: formes et signes. Caen: Minard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-85210-068-8. Pp. 314. 46 a. This volume explores two tropes in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s œuvre. The first section introduces his concept of symbolic transformation and highlights his subversion of images commonly associated with the French Revolution through a series of comparisons with his contemporaries. The second section explores how a study of ‘transformation’in d’Aurevilly’s œuvre cannot be limited to specific themes or images in his texts, but must include a larger consideration of transformation manifested in the manipulation of genre. In the first section, close textual analyses are both sensitive and strong,teasing out the subversion of historically-charged symbols.Auraix-Jonchière demonstrates how images used to depict the Revolution positively or progressively in other authors’ works (Michelet, Quinet, and Vallès in particular) are transformed by d’Aurevilly to highlight its disruptive and damaging effects on French society. To this end, the first and second parts of chapter two are centered on scenes of decapitation and disfigurement in numerous works by d’Aurevilly. Auraix-Jonchière argues that while for Michelet and Quinet the Revolution and the symbols associated with it, notably the guillotine,“découp[ent] pour mieux construire” (77), these same images are transformed in d’Aurevilly’s writing to reinforce fragmentation and destruction, symbolizing an irreparable loss of order and cohesion of pre-Revolutionary France. Furthermore,Auraix-Jonchière reads this fracturing on thematic and narrative levels. She highlights the polyphony and discord of d’Aurevilly’s use of multiple narrators from different classes (L’ensorcelée) and the stitching together of disparate time periods, leaving irresolvable lacunae in the plot (Le chevalier des Touches) as evidence of the irreparable trauma of the Revolution. The second section pertains to the theme of transformation but no longer takes the chaos of Revolutionary France as the central transforming agent in d’Aurevilly’s work. Rather, it focuses on the hybridization of genre and intertextuality that shapes his œuvre, and claims that both literary forms and movements (particularly the epic and the gothic novel) are revived, reinvested with new meaning, and mobilized to critique nineteenth-century French society. However , the most compelling chapter in this section,“Des Memoranda à la Correspondance (les voix croisées de la mélancholie),” strays from an explicit critique of society to address the question of le mal du siècle. The chapter appeals to intertextuality in its most literal form, demonstrating that an understanding of melancholy in d’Aurevilly’s work may only be achieved through mutual consideration of both his journal (Memoranda) and his correspondence. Auraix-Jonchière aptly reads silences in the correspondence on the subject of melancholy (for instance, lapses in letters sent, or a relegating of the topic of melancholy to paratextual elements) as a performance of Aurevillian spleen, which is more fully elaborated in the Memoranda. Such an original reading strategy of the two texts together is one of the strongest elements of the book. The strength of the textual analyses, however, dovetails with the text’s primary weakness, the lack of a theoretical framework to support and enhance otherwise incisive close-readings, undercutting the authority of certain analyses. Specifically, in“Violence et événement dans Une histoire sans nom,” Auraix-Jonchière posits the paradox inherent in the title of the text with respect to the concept of the‘event,’“qui se définit par sa propre impossibilit é” (121). The brutal event, rape, is narratable only through its symptoms. The analysis rests on knowledge of Derrida’s concept of the event, but it is mentioned only in passing, and its absence weakens the reading. Overall, however, the study is well conceived and will be useful to nineteenth-century specialists interested both in d’Aurevilly and in questions of symbolic transformation and intertextuality. Harvard University (MA) Kathryn Rose Beaulieu, Jean-Philippe, et Andrea Oberhuber, éd. Jeu de masques: les femmes et le travestissement textuel (1500–1940). Saint-Étienne: PU de Saint-Étienne, 2011. ISBN 978-2-86272-578-9. Pp. 284. 27 a...

Ordinary Genius in Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love”

CAREY WALL San Diego State University Ordinary Genius in Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love” IN“WRITINGANDANALYZINGA STORY,”THEESSAYEUDORAWELTYWROTE about writing “No Place for You, My Love,” she states, “This third character’s role was that of hypnosis—it was what a relationship can do, be it however brief, tentative, potential, happy or sinister, ordinary or extraordinary” (777). In other words, a relationship does develop between the two central characters, and the relationship is active. In fact, the couple-for-half-a-dozen-hours in “No Place” act together very successfully. They quickly feel their fellowship in love-suffering; they are both bogged down in useless but unended personal relationships, she seemingly in a relationship to a married man, he in a worn-out marriage. Inspired by sharing the condition, they take their roles in a ritual of renewal, the kind of ritual that Welty’s characters successfully enact in many of her stories, the kind that reveals the characters’ drive for life, their ordinary genius at turning the flow of their lives from stagnation into a flow into the future (Wall, “June,” “Ritual,” “Burning,” “Eudora”). The woman from Toledo, performing, works up the love-suffering so that it can be handled. The man, taking the lead as a man of that time should do, drives them into the place of yet greater generative heat—light and strong impressions that instigate the woman’s work and later draw the two of them, in dancing, together. When they kiss, the woman passes the worked-up, dilated love-suffering to the man, then falls asleep, her work done and her trust in him to complete the action firm. They are a team and he will do his part, as he does. (Perhaps she senses that if he is alone, with her asleep, he will have greater occasion to do his envisioning.) The man, driving, sees the smudge fires for mosquitoes, and acting with a mind primed for symbolic transformation, casts the augmented love-suffering out of the two of them and back into the world. He sees the great face that they seem to be driving over and the great flaming figure in the sky. We barely glimpse the relief the couple’s trip, their time together, and their action may afford the woman, but we do see the man’s renewal of his youthful expectation of life and love in the story’s final paragraph. He is not reminiscing; he is restored to the capacity for that feeling. 238 Carey Wall “No Place” and “Writing and Analyzing” have puzzled Welty critics, seeming at odds with one another, leaving many silent on the story. Most of the relatively few critics to address the story allow their everyday social knowledge to determine that the man and woman do not make a connection. Noel Polk praises the story highly, acknowledges its mystery, but cannot see the relationship because, he notices, the man and woman do not even try to get to know one another: “Returning to New Orleans he stops the car and kisses her, but it is as though he feels obliged to; it is a meaningless, perfunctory gesture; he doesn’t even know whether he kisses her ‘gently or harshly’” (108). Ruth M. Vande Kieft argues, Miss Welty accomplished what she set out to do, but it was a perilous undertaking. She took a human feeling—a panicky, raw-nerved sense of exposure—and invested an entire landscape and journey with that feeling; she rendered a strong emotional effect without supplying much information about its cause. The vivid impressionism of this method is strangely exciting, but the story is not as fully and solidly alive as is a story like “A Worn Path.” (154) Michael Kreyling sees the man refusing to respond to “important calls of the heart” and argues, “Together, the man and woman are nevertheless separate; a radical difference or antipathy keeps them apart” (Eudora 121). They have “pretended an intimacy but never released themselves to it” (122). In a second approach to the story, as he reads “No Place” for thematic continuity with other stories in The Bride of the Innisfallen, Kreyling reveals one of his...

Predilkata so zoo-antropomorfni i demonski obeležja vo slovenskite mitski tradiciii<br>The Spinner with Zoo-Anthropomorphic and Demonic Features in the Slavic Mythic Traditions</br>

Five fragmented tiles originating from the 15th century and found in Prague are the research topic of this text. A woman and another zoo-anthropomorphic figure spinning in front of a spindle can be seen on the better preserved examples. An attempt has been made to connect the second figure with: (1) some forest or house female spirits from the Slavic folklore that are linked to the textile activities; (2) the initiation rites of girls into adult women through symbolic transformation from the natural sphere (animal, bear, forest) into the cultural (a wife, a house-socium) through the act of spinning and other textile activities.

Textual Affect Sensing and Affective Communication

Unlike sentiment analysis which detects positive, negative, or neutral sentences, textual affect sensing tries to detect more detailed affective or emotional states appearing in text, such as joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise and much more. The authors describe here their following two approaches for textual affect sensing: The first one detects nine emotions using a set of rules implemented on the basis of a linguistic compositionality principle for textual affect interpretation. This process includes symbolic cue processing, detection and transformation of abbreviations, sentence parsing, and word/phrase/sentence-level analyses. The second one challenged to recognize 22 emotion types defined in the OCC (Ortony, Clore & Collins) emotion model, which is the most comprehensive emotion model and employs several cognitive variables. In this research, we have shown how these cognitive variables of the emotion model can be computed from linguistic components in text. These two approaches have exploited detailed level analyses of text in two different ways more than ever towards textual affect sensing. Applications towards affective communication are also outlined, including affective instant messaging, affective chat in 3D virtual world, affective haptic interaction, and online news classification relying on affect.

Exposição de corpos humanos: o uso de cadáveres como entretenimento e mercadoria

"Espécimes" inodoros, secos e quase eternos, produzidos a partir de cadáveres humanos por uma técnica chamada plastinação, estão sendo amplamente usados como modelos de anatomia em exposições e faculdades de medicina. Milhões de leigos já viram corpos dissecados em uma das espetaculares exposições de anatomia pelo mundo e um novo mercado on-line de "espécimes" humanos plastinados está crescendo. Mais do que transformações físico-químicas, a plastinação, associada a outros procedimentos, também realiza uma transformação simbólica que reduz o corpo-pessoa a corpo-objeto para neutralizar a poluição e o tabu associados aos cadáveres humanos. Contudo, as circunstâncias obscuras sobre como esses corpos foram doados, comprados ou mesmo roubados traz o status de pessoa de volta aos corpos, assim como chama a nossa atenção para novas questões éticas e morais.

Approximate diagonalization of variable-coefficient differential operators through similarity transformations

Approaches to approximate diagonalization of variable-coefficient differential operators using similarity transformations are presented. These diagonalization techniques are inspired by the interpretation of the Uncertainty Principle by Fefferman, known as the SAK Principle, that suggests the location of eigenfunctions of self-adjoint differential operators in phase space. The similarity transformations are constructed using canonical transformations of symbols and anti-differential operators for making lower-order corrections. Numerical results indicate that the symbols of transformed operators can be made to closely resemble those of constant-coefficient operators, and that approximate eigenfunctions can readily be obtained.

Street names, politics of memory and social debate in Republican Barcelona (1931–1936): A theoretical reflection and case study

Public memory is an exceptional stage for social dialogue regarding the values and principles of a political community. One of its main axes is street names, which can be considered an authentic tapestry of urban memory. This article interprets street names as a communicative act of transmission and debate regarding historical and identity-based narratives. In describing a theoretical and methodological approach for studying street names and other contexts of public memory, it is argued that the nomenclature is the fruit of political and social practices in which many agents take part and debate the community’s past, present and future. This interpretation is based on a study of symbolic transformation of the map of Barcelona during the Second Republic and an analysis of the policies of memory, the roles of civil society in the public memory of the time and citizens’ reactions to the new historical accounts reflected therein.

Efficient Debugging of Large Algorithmic Modelica Applications

AbstractModelica models often contain functions with algorithmic code. The fraction of algorithmic code is increasing since Modelica, in addition to equation-based modeling, is also used for embedded system control code and symbolic model transformations in compilers using the MetaModelica language extension. Thus, debugging of algorithmic Modelica code is becoming increasingly relevant.Our earlier work in debuggers for the algorithmic subset of Modelica used trace-based techniques which are very portable but turned out to have too much overhead for very large applications.The new debugger is the first Modelica debugger that can operate without trace information. Instead it communicates with a low-level C-language symbolic debugger, the Gnu debugger GDB, to directly extract information from a running executable, set and remove breakpoints, etc. This is made possible by the new bootstrapped OpenModelica compiler which keeps track of a detailed mapping from the high level Modelica code down to the generated C code compiled to machine code.The debugger is operational, supports browsing of both standard Modelica data structures and tree/list data structures, and operates efficiently on large applications such as the OpenModelica compiler with more than 100 000 lines of code.

The Values of Water: Development Cultures and Indigenous Cultures in Highland Ecuador

This article examines the symbolic transformations and material consequences of an irrigation development project designed to empower indigenous peoples in Canar, Ecuador. It argues that the project deepened market society and reproduced colonialism more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but indigenous people found ways to ap- propriate project resources and embed the market in alternative principles of social life. Market society deepened through the neoliberal hegemony of international development policy and through the indigenous movement's incorporation of market rationalities. Colonialism recurred through hierarchical representations of knowledge and skills remi- niscent of long-standing stereotypes of natives, which local indigenous leaders internal- ized. Both processes urifolded through constructions of value arid acts of evaluation. The gap between the market ideal communicated in the irrigation development project and the conditions of actually existing markets that local indigenous people engaged after project closure limited the concrete empowerment of indigenous peoples. In 1998, Tucuy Canar Ayllucunapa Tantanacuy (Tucayta), an indigenous or- ganization in Ecuador's Canar Province, secured control of significant irrigation infrastructure. Citing this acquisition as empowerment, the organization's lead- ers asserted professional competence and market competitiveness, seemingly conforming to neoliberal principles that they had rejected four years earlier when protesting an agrarian law that subjected land access to market competition. By 1998, local indigenous leaders believed that they had discerned more success- ful ways to pursue aims and procure capabilities. In this article, I demonstrate that emergent cultures of development conditioned Tucayta's attainment of the Patococha irrigation system and labeled it a qualified success. I advance a cul- tural conception of development based on neo-Polanyian, anthropologica l, and postcolonial theory. I argue that the Patococha project deepened market society and reproduced coloniality more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but in- digenous people found ways to appropriate Patococha and embed the market in alternative projects of social life.'

A symbolic summation approach to Feynman integral calculus

Given a Feynman parameter integral, depending on a single discrete variable N and a real parameter ε, we discuss a new algorithmic framework to compute the first coefficients of its Laurent series expansion in ε. In a first step, the integrals are expressed by hypergeometric multi-sums by means of symbolic transformations. Given this sum format, we develop new summation tools to extract the first coefficients of its series expansion whenever they are expressible in terms of indefinite nested product–sum expressions. In particular, we enhance the known multi-sum algorithms to derive recurrences for sums with complicated boundary conditions, and we present new algorithms to find formal Laurent series solutions of a given recurrence relation.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs: Four Destructive Influences of Capital Punishment on American Criminal Justice

State execution is not a major part of America's system of criminal punishment, but it casts a long shadow over the principles and practices of the rest of criminal justice. This essay discusses four negative impacts of the death penalty on the larger system: (1) The hyper-extension of the substantive criminal law; (2) The symbolic transformation of harsh punishment to a private reward; (3) The creation and overuse of Life Without Possibility of Parole (LWOP) sentences; and (4) The diversion of legal and judicial resources from other pressing problems in the criminal system.

Evolution of a teaching approach for beginning algebra

The article reports aspects of the evolution of a teaching approach over repeated trials for beginning symbolic algebra. The teaching approach emphasized the structural similarity between arithmetic and algebraic expressions and aimed at supporting students in making a transition from arithmetic to beginning algebra. The study was conducted with grade 6 students over 2 years. Thirty-one students were followed for a year, and data were analysed as they participated in the three trials conducted that year. Analysis of students’ written and interview responses as the approach evolved revealed the potential of the approach in creating meaning for symbolic transformations in the context of both arithmetic and algebra as well as making connections between arithmetic and symbolic algebra. Students by the end of the trials learnt to use their understanding of both procedures and a sense of structure of expressions to evaluate/simplify expressions and reason about equality/equivalence of expressions both in the arithmetic and the algebraic contexts.

A linear process-algebraic format with data for probabilistic automata

This paper presents a novel linear process-algebraic format for probabilistic automata. The key ingredient is a symbolic transformation of probabilistic process algebra terms that incorporate data into this linear format while preserving strong probabilistic bisimulation. This generalises similar techniques for traditional process algebras with data, and — more importantly — treats data and data-dependent probabilistic choice in a fully symbolic manner, leading to the symbolic analysis of parameterised probabilistic systems. We discuss several reduction techniques that can easily be applied to our models. A validation of our approach on two benchmark leader election protocols shows reductions of more than an order of magnitude.

“Responsibilizing” a Healthy Britain: Personal Debt, Employment, and Welfare

Growing evidence suggests that experiences of financial strain and over-indebtedness can contribute to problems of physical and mental health. This article contends that there is a need to carefully examine recent neoliberally informed symbolic and material transformations in the practices and experiences of employment, welfare, and subjectivity in order to provide an appropriately sophisticated analysis of experiences of debt and mental health. An illusion of economic growth has been based on increasing levels of often traumatic personal debt and a low-wage labor force compelled into increasingly problematic practices of employment. In recent years, a concerted neoliberal assault on subjectivity, modes of employment, minimum incomes, and practices of welfare governance has effectively constituted new forms of poverty and personal sustenance through deregulated sub-prime credit markets. The variable and multifunctional nature of personal debt has provided a substrate for neoliberal public policy by systematically reinforcing the development of a low-wage labor market and by representing a means through which to transfer collective risk into private responsibility. This article suggests that traditional ways of knowing and acting upon the mental and physical health difficulties associated with problems of debt and material deprivation fail to adequately acknowledge the political and economic role of personal debt growth.

Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (review)

Reviewed by: Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain Maria Cristina Quintero Middlebrook, Leah. Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2009. 197 pp. In the introduction to this intelligent and elegantly written book, Leah Middlebrook tells us that "the scholarly conversation about early European and global modernity has yet to fully 'place' the significance of Spain and Spanish cultural production" (1). Indeed. The continued exclusion of Spanish literature from major studies that purport to deal with the "European" Renaissance is a source of frustration to Hispanists and bespeaks an almost willful ignorance, if not intellectual laziness, on the part of many scholars. One can only hope that Middlebrook's book will be read and reviewed outside the sphere of Hispanism, as it contributes significantly to an understanding of the richness and excellence of poetic production during the 1500s in Spain. Middlebrook engages only briefly with the most celebrated sixteenth-century Spanish poet, Garcilaso de la Vega, but she does bring to the fore less-studied but important figures such as Francisco de Aldana, Hernando de Acuña, Gutierre de Cetina, and Cristóbal de Castillejo, in addition to the better known Juan Boscán and Fernando de Herrera. These were all able practitioners of the new short lyric, adapted from Italian sources, that flourished in Renaissance Spain. Middlebrook is a perceptive reader of poetry, but what is most original in her book is that the consideration of the work by these poets becomes also a study of politics, identity, subjectivity, and notions of masculinity in Spain. The book consists of four chapters, each divided into brief sections, and a coda. Throughout, in lucid and detailed close readings, the author pays close attention to form—the structure of the sonnet, tropes, rhyme patterns, elisions, etc.—while at the same time commenting on the politics of form. She is singularly adept at demonstrating how the practice and legitimation of the short lyric, especially the [End Page 508] sonnet, took place in tandem with the symbolic and actual transformation (and ultimate diminution) of the modern courtier's access to power and agency. We encounter in this poetry "the deliberate conflation of notions regarding kinds of poetry and kinds of men" (59). The new lyric, therefore, became a virtual emblem of state and imperial power; and this book traces how two generations of poets confronted the pressures and challenges presented by the consolidation of Habsburg absolutism. Middlebrook displays her talent for original readings early on in the introduction where the reader is treated to a dazzling analysis of Francisco de Aldana's Sonnet 45 ("Otro aquí no se ve que, frente a frente"). The poem portrays the aftermath of a brutal battle, and the mangled bodies of soldiers represent for Middlebrook a "reversal of Petrarchan expression … an anti-blazon" (9). In the first chapter, "Sonnetization: Acuña, Boscán, Castillejo, and the Politics of Form," the author demonstrates how the lyric rose in prestige within the context of a transformation of ideas about masculinity. Basing herself on the work of Norbert Elias, among others, Middlebrook examines two sonnets by Acuña that illustrate the change from an idealized notion of the noble warrior into a tamed courtier. These intensely self-reflective poems about the modern subject's dependency on discourse mirror the poet's submission to linguistic as well as political authority. In this chapter, the author also provides a new look at the importance of Boscán's famous 1526 letter to the Duchess of Soma, where the poet situates the era of the Reconquest firmly in the past and replaces old-style militaristic values with new codes of self-restraint and rational self-subjection. As a companion piece, Middlebrook studies Castillejo's "Reprensión contra los poetas que escriben en metro italiano," a humorous invective against writers who had abandoned the traditional Castilian forms. In Chapter Two, "Otro tiempo lloré y ahora canto: Juan Boscán Courtierizes Song," Middlebrook turns to the peculiar set of cultural and subjective meanings implied by Boscán's use of "song." She tells us that the Obras de Juan Boscán y...

Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and Chodorow

Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and Chodorow Alison Stone God the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Christ and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties. Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body. However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all. Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche. The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also...

MathPDE: A Package to Solve PDEs by Finite Differences

A package for solving time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs), MathPDE, is presented. It implements finite-difference methods. After making a sequence of symbolic transformations on the PDE and its initial and boundary conditions, MathPDE automatically generates a problem-specific set of Mathematica functions to solve the numerical problem, which is essentially a system of algebraic equations. MathPDE then internally calls MathCode, a Mathematica-to-C++ code generator, to generate a C++ program for solving the algebraic problem, and compiles it into an executable that can be run via MathLink. When the algebraic system is nonlinear, the Newton-Raphson method is used and SuperLU, a library for sparse systems, is used for matrix operations. This article discusses the wide range of PDEs that can be handled by MathPDE, the accuracy of the finite-difference schemes used, and importantly, the ability to handle both regular and irregular spatial domains. Since a standalone C++ program is generated to compute the numerical solution, the package offers portability.

Sex as a Ritual: Transforming Women’s Sexual Being from ‘Human-like’ to ‘Animal-like’ in Taiwan

This paper aims to explicate the cultural meaning of sex in the Chinese society of Taiwan with reference to marriage in the Chinese kinship system in Taiwan. Through an examination of how Taiwanese informants talk about sex and their sexual behaviours, we demonstrate that their discourse on sex involves not only the notion of active-male/passive-female but also a symbolic transformation of the ‘human-like’ woman into an ‘animal-like’ man. This is arguably the core meaning of sex in Taiwan: sex is a ritual through which women’s sexual beings are symbolically transformed from ‘human-like’ into ‘animal-like’. As we shall show, the transformative nature of sex has a significant parallel with the logic of marriage in Chinese kinship system in Taiwan. In other words, there is a significant parallel between marriage in kinship system and sexual discourses in Taiwan. In conclusion, we shall spell out the epistemological implications of this parallel to the studies of Chinese societies: the relevance of kinship studies to the understanding of Chinese societies.

Affect Analysis Model: novel rule-based approach to affect sensing from text

AbstractIn this paper, we address the tasks of recognition and interpretation of affect communicated through text messaging in online communication environments. Specifically, we focus on Instant Messaging (IM) or blogs, where people use an informal or garbled style of writing. We introduced a novel rule-based linguistic approach for affect recognition from text. Our Affect Analysis Model (AAM) was designed to deal with not only grammatically and syntactically correct textual input, but also informal messages written in an abbreviated or expressive manner. The proposed rule-based approach processes each sentence in stages, including symbolic cue processing, detection and transformation of abbreviations, sentence parsing and word/phrase/sentence-level analyses. Our method is capable of processing sentences of different complexity, including simple, compound, complex (with complement and relative clauses) and complex–compound sentences. Affect in text is classified into nine emotion categories (or neutral). The strength of the resulting emotional state depends on vectors of emotional words, relations among them, tense of the analysed sentence and availability of first person pronouns. The evaluation of the Affect Analysis Model algorithm showed promising results regarding its capability to accurately recognize fine-grained emotions reflected in sentences from diary-like blog posts (averaged accuracy is up to 77 per cent), fairy tales (averaged accuracy is up to 70.2 per cent) and news headlines (our algorithm outperformed eight other systems on several measures).