Unity Of Approach Research Articles

Literary History at Wisconsin

rrITERARY HISTORY, to the best of my knowledge, has never been the sole guiding principle of studies in the Wisconsin English Department. Even so, no one familiar with the teaching and scholarship of Helen C. White, Ruth Wallerstein, Ricardo Quintana, Merritt Hughes, Henry Pochmann, and Harry Hayden Clark can fail to recognize the legacy of historical context for study bequeathed to the present department. If was never the single mode of approach, certainly it was, and remains to a great extent, the central, perhaps dominating, focus of the department's teaching of English and American literature. Since the term literary history is sufficiently ambiguous, as the recent symposium in NLH will attest, it is preferable to speak here of literature studied in its historical context. This then, rather than the diachronic study of systemic change in form, or historical modification of audience response, or any other possible interpretation of literary is what still remains the principal focus of English programs at Wisconsin. Nevertheless, to state that literature studied in its historical context is the dominant focus of the department's English programs is not to claim a unity of approach adopted, formally or otherwise, by faculty members in their individual courses. Two sections of the same course, for example, may, and often do, differ widely in terms of format, structure, and pedagogical objective, though between the two instructors there is characteristically good agreement on the general scope of the course and its function within the larger framework of a particular degree program. Thus, although it is fair to say that history, and the further dimension of found in biography, characterize the main thrust of Wisconsin's English programs, it would be wrong to conclude that the close reading of texts, for instance, is a forgotten art, or that theories of criticism-formal or informal-are not brought to bear on the literature studied. In short, a monolithic approach to literature has probably never been characteristic of the department, and certainly is not now, but within the diversity of

State Function Formulation of Elementary Relaxation Processes

The approach to thermal equilibrium of a free particle and a harmonic oscillator interacting with a heat bath can be understood from a semiclassical point of view in terms of the time evolution of a quantum mechanical state function appropriate to each system. The state functions are parameterized such that expectation values comply with the predictions of the classical theory of Brownian motion, with the consequence that the Fokker-Planck equation for a free particle in velocity space, the Montroll-Shuler equation for a quantum oscillator in discrete energy space, and their solutions are arrived at by a common procedure. These relaxation processes become visualizable as the progressive development from a coherent, relatively ordered state to that of equilibrium, so that the loss of information as equilibrium is reached and the consequences of random phasing can be traced dynamically in some detail. The unity of approach is reinforced by the demonstration that since both equations represent Markoffian processes, the Montroll-Shuler equation predicts distributions in coordinate space and momentum space which satisfy a Fokker-Planck equation.

On laminar boundary-layer flows of a dissociated gas past catalytic surfaces

This-paper treats laminar boundary-layer flows of a dissociated gas past catalytic surfaces, particular attention being paid to situations where the surface reaction rates vary as powers of the streamwise coordinate and the reaction orders are different from unity. The gas in the boundary layer is represented by a chemically frozen binary mixture of atoms and molecules, and the usual simplifying assumptions applicable to hypersonic boundary-layer flows are used. Approximate integrals of the diffusion equation are obtained analytically with the aid of the asymptotic method. Herein this method is shown to compare very favorably with others, both with respect to simplicity of application and accuracy of results. In contrast to other approaches, it lends a definite unity of approach, little added difficulty being encountered in treating other than first order reactions or in obtaining boundary-layer profiles. Surface distributions of atoms and heat transfer are exhibited graphically and compared with published theoretical results.

Crystal Optics for Visible Light and X Rays

This summary of much of the author's work stresses the unity of approach to the understanding of the optical properties of a crystalline medium for visible light as well as for x rays. The scattering elements of the crystal are supposed to act as dipoles, and for the interior of the medium the problem is that of finding a balanced, or self-consistent state of optical field and dipole vibration. This is an eigenvalue problem, with the phase velocity as the eigenvalue. Its solution leads on to finding the forced vibrations in a crystal with a plane surface on which an external plane wave falls, and gives the theory of reflection and refraction. The physical interpretation of the various mathematical steps of the theory is stressed. It leads, as an example, to an immediate qualitative understanding of the anomalous absorption occurring for x rays near the Bragg angles (Borrmann effect). A mechanical model of this effect is discussed.

Recent Contributions to Economic History: Canada

The present state of economic history in Canada contrastswith that of a quarter century ago. It could be written sharplyin the 1930's that the most distinctive work in Canadian economics was being done by economic historians concerned with the study of transportation and tariffs, trade associations and agricultural organizations, money and banking. There was at the same time a close approach to a generally accepted framework of analysis and interpretation and more than a suggestion of synthesis in Canadian historical writings. This pre-eminence of economic history and this unity of theme are now things of the past. As to the first, the rate of progress in economic analysis and statistics, in sociology and political theory, has brought with it both a change in status and the prospect of extensive revisions, factual and interpretative, of our views of the past. Similarly, a former unity of approach resting on the economics of staple production has lost ground before the complexities of modern industrial change. For the economic historian these changes promise much for present and future research even if, at the moment, they bring small comfort.

On a Procrustean technique for the numerical transformation of slowly convergent sequences and series

1.The study of the numerical transformation of slowly convergent series and sequences permits of a certain unity of approach, since the partial sums of the former may be regarded as members of a slowly convergent sequence, while the differences of the latter may be treated as terms in a slowly convergent series. In the ensuing discussion, no essential distinction between the two problems is made, and methods devised for one relate with equal facility to the other.