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This study presents a detailed quantitative analysis of kinetic cooling in methane photoacoustic spectroscopy, leveraging the capabilities of a digital twin model. Using a quantum cascade laser tuned to 1210.01 cm⁻¹, we investigated the effects of varying nitrogen-oxygen matrix compositions on the photoacoustic signals of 15 ppmV methane. Notably, the photoacoustic signal amplitude decreased with increasing oxygen concentration, even falling below the background signal at oxygen levels higher than approximately 6 %V. This phenomenon was attributed to kinetic cooling, where thermal energy is extracted from the surrounding gas molecules rather than added, as validated by complex vector analysis using a previously published digital twin model. The model accurately reproduced complex signal patterns through simulations, providing insights into the underlying molecular mechanisms by quantifying individual collision contributions. These findings underscore the importance of digital twins in understanding the fundamentals of photoacoustic signal generation at the molecular level.

Copyright of Perspectives on Culture / Perspektywy Kultury is the property of Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Perspectives on Culture / Perspektywy Kultury is the property of Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been praised for its critique of European colonialism in Africa and blamed for its racial stereotypes in depicting the victims of this enterprise. Its complex narrative strategies have likewise have provoked mixed reception. Conrad’s short story, “An Outpost of Progress,” written earlier than Heart, provides a clearer and more direct depiction of Europe’s role in Africa by focusing on two feckless and idle colonial agents who mindlessly repeat the alibis for ivory extraction while all the real work is performed by the indigenous foreman. When made aware of the role of slavery in this business, their friendship deteriorates amidst mutual recriminations to a point where they are of fighting over scarce supplies. The earlier portrayal of comic doubles exhibits Conrad’s debt to Flaubert, while the denouement consists in a struggle of violent doubles that ends up with one of them shooting the other and hanging himself thereafter, an outcome portrayed in a manner that accentuates the sacrificial dynamics working through their dealings with the native population. Oppression and self-destruction, murder and suicide, are Conrad’s unambiguous emblem for the colonial scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Foreign Literature Studies is the property of Foreign Literature Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Acta Neophilologica is the property of Acta Neophilologica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses revelations of patriarchal along with colonial discourse and practice as poignantly adumbrated to coalesce and interact in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In this respect, the misogynistic representation of female characters who are sketched as insubstantial mystified stereotypes in a heterosexist men’s world constitutes an important aspect of the narrative. Besides, the connotative depiction of the river – characterized by an antagonistic aura ascribable to the hinted juxtaposition of the Congo and the Thames – as a symbolically evocative topographical element encourages keen reflection. Last but not least, the implication of language as an influential instrument serving to the endorsement of colonialist as well as patriarchal causes is worth exploring from a psychoanalytic perspective featured by feminist sensitivity.

In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist Kurtz, of whom we do not, in fact, see much, is shown as connected with a native “sorcerer,” a “witch-man,” who had “antelope horns” on his head. Antelopes, or goats, are typical sacrificial animals, and the protagonist of this novella is a European who perishes in the midst of tropical forests, in spite of the high hopes that accompany his decision to try his luck in an exotic environment. Kurtz has promising beginnings, but later he gradually degenerates, carrying out what may be called a reversal of the ritual of initiation, comparable to the inverted ritual, to use V. Propp’s term, in folklore. In this sense, he may be regarded as a counterpoint to Conrad himself whose life can easily be described as a modern and uncommonly successful enactment of the same ritual. Meanwhile, Kurtz’s, and to a lesser extent also Marlow’s, failure as initiates is inscribed in the failure of the European civilization to construct a European empire in Africa.

Recensione del libro Estetica e comparatistica di Giampiero Moretti.

Joseph Conrad wrote Nostromo (1904) at the crucial moment that witnessed the clash between the retreating nineteenth and the ensuing twentieth century. The period encompassed the point of no return towards the logical perfection of the Golden Age and ushered the world towards the meaningless chaos of modernity. The paper argues that being conscious of the approaching subservience of the traditional treatment of history to the random collection of histories typical of the twentieth century modernity, Joseph Conrad's Nostromo is expressive of the persistent longing for the meaningful, solid, epic-like occurrences from the past, as opposed to the absurd mutability of contemporary histories. Yet, this yearning is devoid of any traces of hope and is, therefore, indicative of Conrad's prophesy regarding the impossibility of certainty and meaningful history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the collapse of Empire in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is troped as the erosion of textuality. Five key instances of this textual collapse occur in the novel: the maps Marlow reads as a child, the accounting books, the seaman's manual, the Kurtz Report and the Company papers. There are also a few minor instances of similar textual collapses, which also come to attention here. The essay notes that in each case the text's significance is lost or altered in specific ways, and this contributes to the erosion of the authority of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist Kurtz, of whom we do not, in fact, see much, is shown as connected with a native "sorcerer," a "witch-man," who had "antelope horns" on his head. Antelopes, or goats, are typical sacrificial animals, and the protagonist of this novella is a European who perishes in the midst of tropical forests, in spite of the high hopes that accompany his decision to try his luck in an exotic environment. Kurtz has promising beginnings, but later he gradually degenerates, carrying out what may be called a reversal of the ritual of initiation, comparable to the inverted ritual, to use V. Propp's term, in folklore. In this sense, he may be regarded as a counterpoint to Conrad himself whose life can easily be described as a modern and uncommonly successful enactment of the same ritual. Meanwhile, Kurtz's, and to a lesser extent also Marlow's, failure as initiates is inscribed in the failure of the European civilization to construct a European empire in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Southeastern European Studies / Güneydoğu Avrupa Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Journal of Southeastern European Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines two works by Jacek Dukaj Serce mroku and Serce ciemności. The former is Dukaj's short story inspired by Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness while the latter is an experimental translation of it. The author argues that in both cases Dukaj uses similar methods for experiential transference. The techniques comprise amplification, explication and condensation, among others. Dukaj called his form of translation „transfiguration or transfusion" whereas the author proposes for this the term transcreation. Transcreation is an aesthetic reinterpretation of the original work suited to a new target language audience. In other words, it is an authorial version of Heart of Darkness which leaves no space for interpretative indeterminacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along the edge of a straight razor. Apocalypse Now between cinema and philosophy: a Frazerian interpretation This short paper aims to propose a philosophical reading of the Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now. Not settling with the traditional interpretation of the movie as a cinematographic free transposition of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the paper try to put in evidence the cultural background of the Coppola’s movie using a multi-level approach, in which philosophy and literature converge: in particular the analysis will be brought through the mythological perspective used by of James G. Frazer in his famous book The Golden Bough. From this point of view the movie seems to show a very evocative painting in which are represented the myths collected in The Golden Bough; a painting, the one sketched by Coppola, of which Heart of Darkness is only the frame.

Against common postcolonial and historical readings, this article argues that the rise of the primitive urge to dominate and exploit others is what drives Kurtz and Mustafa Sa’eed, the two main characters in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1966), respectively, to act as primal fathers and thus commit violence on others. Adopting Freud’s theory on the primal-horde and notions like “hypnosis” and “suggestion,” this article reveals the universal theme of the primal father as disguised in an imperial mask in the two novels under discussion. The article argues that the recurrence of the primal father is manifest in narcissistic, paranoid, and sexually rapacious yet apparently gifted characters who act as the Nietzschean “superman.” It then sheds light on the infectious germ of the primal father as reactivated in the narrators of the novels, i.e. in the form of rival Oedipal sons in Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness and the anonymous narrator of Season of Migration to the North. Each narrator (Oedipal son) identifies with the respective protagonist (primal father), and both are fascinated yet repelled by such an affinity. This study is thus an attempt to justify the prevalent darkness haunting the human psyche by arguing that the germ of primitivism recurs in history and world cultures. Though it can lay dormant, it is ready to resurface anytime among the uncivilized or even “the civilized” who claim the white man’s burden. Therefore, this article provides an essential psychoanalytic and comparative intervention to understand the underlying motivations behind imperialism and master/slave power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Conrad's classic novella Heart of Darkness has been the object of a controversy, and harsh condemnations were formulated against the work. Notably, it was targeted as an example of colonialist as well as racist prejudice and prominent author like Achebe and influential theorists like Eagleton and Said have launched far reaching criticisms again this work long considered as part of modern literary canon. This paper argues that these criticisms failed to demonstrate their relevance as literary analysis and ignored crucial features of the novella as a work of art. If we put the story in the context of its creation and read the text in the way as Conrad intended much of the accusations would appear superficial and wide of the mark. Moreover, it is argued that literary figures should be judged by themselves for their aesthetic values as literary creation and not as prototypes of some social category. The specificity of a literary work lies in the fact that it is fundamentally different from political and sociological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Maritima is the property of University of Szczecin Press / Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-Seq) has been widely adopted to study gene expression of the human testis. Several datasets of scRNA-Seq from human testis have been generated from different groups processed with different informatics pipelines. An integrated atlas of scRNA-Seq expression constructed from multiple donors, developmental ages, and fertility states would be widely useful for the testis research community., Objective: To describe the generation and use of the human infertility single-cell testis atlas (HISTA), an interactive web tool for understanding human spermatogenesis through scRNA-Seq analysis., Methods: We obtained scRNA-Seq datasets derived from 12 donors, including healthy adult controls, juveniles, and several infertility cases, and reprocessed these data using methods to remove batch effects. Using Shiny, an open-source environment for data visualization, we created numerous interactive tools for exploring the data, some of which support simple statistical hypothesis testing. We used the resulting HISTA browser and its underlying data to demonstrate HISTA's value for testis researchers., Results: A primary application of HISTA is to search by a single gene or a set of genes; thus, we present various analyses that quantify and visualize gene expression across the testis cells and pathology. HISTA also contains machine-learning-derived gene modules ("components") that capture the entire transcriptional landscape of the testis tissue. We show how the use of these components can simplify the highly complex data in HISTA and assist with the interpretation of genes with unknown functions. Finally, we demonstrate the diverse ways HISTA can be used for new data analysis, including hypothesis testing., Discussion and Conclusions: HISTA is a research environment that can help scientists organize and understand the high-dimensional transcriptional landscape of the human testis. HISTA has already contributed to published testis research and can be updated as needed with input from the research community or downloaded and modified for individual needs., (© 2024 American Society of Andrology and European Academy of Andrology.)

Trata-se da tradução de uma palestra dada pro Hisham Matar acerca de biografia e ficção em Conrad e Said em Nova York em Outubro de 2018.

Recensione di Richard Ambrosini, Le storie di Conrad. Biografia intellettuale di un romanziere, Carocci 2019.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Marlow, the character-narrator in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, asserts that life sensation constitutes the "truth" as well as the "subtle and penetrating essence" of lived experiences, an assertion that both looks backward to problematize the Cartesian cogito, and looks forward to engage with contemporary renewed interest in affect. By shifting the focus from Marlow's linear narrative to his narrative interruptions, this paper reconsiders the text to explore the ways in which affect interacts with Marlow's storytelling. More specifically, by closely reading affectively-charged moments and scenes, I discuss how Marlow's three major narrative gaps work to convey affective experiences against the wider horizons of qualia experience, colonialism, and intersubjective affect. I also explore the dynamic interaction between Marlow's narrative crisis and his linear storytelling. As such, I argue that affect, though incommunicable to others through ordered storytelling, seeks its expression in narrative disruptions; it, above all, structures Marlow's narrative rhythm. This way, an interrogation of affect offers an alternative to understanding Marlow's silence and achronological digressions: the disrupted narrative sequence is no opposite to chronologically-ordered narration, but rather, a continuation of the latter. Ultimately, this paper highlights the complexity of affect and its expression, a central concern that is still going on in current critical explorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Maritima is the property of University of Szczecin Press / Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Enthymema is the property of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory & Philosophy of Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper focuses on the melodramatic features in Almayer's Folly, the first part of The Malay Trilogy by Joseph Conrad, and their significance for the interpretation of the novel. The poetics of melodrama and opera is reflected in various aspects of Conrad's prose, such as e.g. main plot construction, references to Verdi, characterisation of the protagonists. The melodrama and opera provide an important cultural frame of reference, which affects the narrative scope of the novel discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the questions of language, nation and literary tradition in Nostromo by Joseph Conrad and Trans-Atlanyk by Witold Gombrowicz. We intend to trace the unorthodox itinera-ries the two novels posit and their implications for national canons and translation.

Albeit late with respect to the Iberians, the English contributed in a hegemonic way to the rise of Euro-Modernity, or that geocultural identity which emerged as the central site for the control of the world. Further to the idea of East, the idea of South has been central to British cultural imagination and has helped the rise of Englishness and of the European imperial master narrative. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine - through the tool of decolonial thinking – in which way the South/North division contributed to the emergence of European and British modern identity and, at the same time, to the inoculation of its disintegration virus. I will start with some reflections on world mapping and world imaging in European cultural history, emphasizing how histor(icit)y has made geography unreal and local Western iconography has created a global fictional world, in which we all dwell even today. I will then proceed with a brief survey on the concept of “coloniality of power”. Finally, I will try to tackle the idea of South as a literary topos in Charles Dickens’ Pictures from Italy (the beginning of Victorian age apogee) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the end of it), examining to what extent they reflected the North/South dichotomy and partook of the (dis)integrating discursive formations of Meridionism and Australism.

This article presents the results of a reader response study of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and two of its Italian translations. Specifically, data from an online questionnaire are used to test whether English and Italian readers respond differently to the potential racist implications of the fictional representation of the African natives. Whereas one translator removes completely all occurrences of nigger (s) and negro, the other adds additional uses of the slurs which are not present in the original. We explore with empirical methods whether these translational alterations have an effect on the readers' perception of dehumanisation, discrimination and racism in the text, comparing responses to each translation with responses to the original. Our findings not only show evidence of significant differences in the responses between one translation and the original but also suggest that other linguistic and extra-linguistic factors could be influencing readers' response. With this article, we aim to contribute to the under-researched application of reader response approaches to translation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Ghost in the Account Book" claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic and, by extension, questions the English novel's complicity in propagating faith in that false logic. Accounting, which hadremainedunobtrusivelyimmanent to realist novels of empire such as Mansfield Park and Great Expectations, surfaces to the diegetic level and becomes available for critical scrutiny in high modernist novels such as Heart of Darkness or Absalom, Absalom! Drawing from writings by Max Weber (on guarantees of calculability) and Mary Poovey (on the accuracy effect), this essay attends to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve's recasting of Sutpen's life as a debtor's farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad bluntly equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by earlymodern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a stable fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the invention of newer forms and figures with which to express the new imperial (and later, postcolonial) world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Foreign Literature Studies is the property of Foreign Literature Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Analyses of the worldviews presented by texts have identified grammatical patterns in terms of the transitivity system outlined in systemic-functional grammar (Halliday, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014). While contributing to different interpretations of mind style and ideology in different contexts, these patterns and interpretative effects often bear fundamental similarities. In this article, I investigate this underlying similarity in transitivity analyses, or 'interpretative "lowest common denominator"' (Simpson, 1993: 105), from a cognitive stylistic perspective. This article attempts to characterise this low-level effect and test it empirically. It takes as its starting point a body of analyses in stylistics and critical discourse analysis which repeatedly link comparable sets of grammatical features (e.g. goal-less intransitive clauses and metonymic agency) to a diminished sense of intentionality, awareness and control in the human agent responsible (e.g. Halliday, 1971; Kennedy, 1991; Simpson and Canning, 2014; Trew, 1979). I argue that the shared interpretative effects of these stylistic choices can be understood in terms of cognitive grammar's model of construal (Langacker, 2008). Specifically, I propose that the effects of transitivity choices are fundamentally effects for our attribution of mental states, or 'mind-modelling' (Stockwell, 2009) of participants, as part of a construal. Finally, I describe an online reader response experiment which tests this proposal among a wider sample of readers. Combining methods from experimental studies of mind attribution in psychology with a controlled alteration of texts by Conrad and Hemingway, this research reveals predictable cognitive effects of transitivity choices across contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A perennially fruitful activity in Gothic studies is to track the development of Gothic tropes as popular literature evolves. Joseph Conrad's career, which spanned Victorianism and early Modernism, provides examples of the evolution of certain Gothic conventions between early- and late-career work. Conrad's collaboration with Ford Madox Ford on Romance (1903) is an early example of Conrad's exposure to, and use of, Gothic tropes, especially relating to Catholic ghost-seeing. This paper demonstrates similarities between Romance's uses of the trope of Catholic superstition and those of three classic Gothic novels, and also outlines the trope's lasting effect on Conrad's later work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Our study suggests an increase of both 153-4Eu(n,γ) of +4.9% and +7.1% respectively. • Our work also indicates an underestimation of 153Eu capture resonance integral. • These trends significantly improve fuel inventory depletion calculations. • Results are consistent with data from the literature. Abstract The purpose of this paper is to make the most of a large set of used nuclear fuel experiments for determining integral trends on the 153Eu(n,γ) and 154Eu(n,γ) reactions cross sections. The assimilation of the integral trends is based on a linear least-square fitting procedure relying on the Bayes' theorem. Realistic uncertainties are obtained thanks to a marginalization technique. The method is applied to the 153Eu and 154Eu capture cross sections recommended in the evaluated nuclear data library JEFF-3.1.1. Our results indicate an underestimation of both capture cross-sections of approximately 4.9% and 7.1%, respectively. For 153Eu, our study suggests to increase the capture resonance integral from I 0 = 1409 barns to I 0 = 1502 ± 68 barns. This trend is consistent with the capture resonance integral I 0 = 1560 ± 4 barns obtained from recent time-of-flight measurements carried out at the Renssealer Polytechnic Institute. The trend obtained in this work on 154Eu capture cross section is also consistent with a recent analysis that confirms its underestimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of plant species richness on the function and stability of ecosystems have been an area of focus in recent decades. Arthropod community is one of the most important components in agroecosystems and can provide multiple ecosystem services, including biocontrol and pollination. In particular, species composition and biocontrol function can be sensitive to changes in plant species richness. Here, we designed 50 plots with five levels of plant species richness to examine arthropod distribution and composition over 4 yr. Arthropod richness was found to be positively correlated with plant species richness. High plant species richness can enhance the temporal stability of the arthropod community but can also lead to a decline in the population stability of some species. The species richness and biomass of environmentally friendly insects (EFI), such as honeybees, ants and flies, were found to be positively correlated with those of the natural enemies. As such, high levels of EFI could sustain food web robustness by serving as alternative prey/hosts for natural enemies. The mediation of EFI in the interaction between crops and pests has implications for successful biocontrol practices using natural enemies. Planting diverse plant species with a certain level of spatial turnover could benefit the biocontrol function of natural enemies and safeguard multiple ecosystem services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]