Cognitive Liminalism

Beckett’s fictional minds are pensive and tensive cognitive agents. If rumination feels to many of them a task to be performed or a “pensum to discharge” (U, 304), it is the way they think, however, that sparks a sustained and unsolvable cognitive differential or tension: a state of liminality due to the fact that they are not yet, or not anymore, endowed with what it takes to navigate the world effortlessly and meaningfully. The twilight atmosphere of Beckett’s boundary storyworlds or innerscapes therefore exponentially resonates with the wavering cognitive processes of what this chapter will define as liminal minds. After an overture section reinforcing how liminality is a structural principle that applies to many of Beckett’s storyworlds on several domains, the chapter heads on to the cognitive functioning of Beckett’s fictional minds. The second section focuses on Beckett’s alteration of the enactive scaffolding co-operation of language, narrative, and motility in human development. The third section analyzes his lesioning of human teleological dispositions on the motivational and emotional level, as well as the malfunctioning of predictive processes. In the final section, it addresses what kind of readerly experience results from engaging with cognitive liminalism, where liminal minds are constantly occupied by the activity of sense-making without the functional possibility of making sense.

Strong intrinsic room-temperature ferromagnetism in freestanding non-van der Waals ultrathin 2D crystals

Control of ferromagnetism is of critical importance for a variety of proposed spintronic and topological quantum technologies. Inducing long-range ferromagnetic order in ultrathin 2D crystals will provide more functional possibility to combine their unique electronic, optical and mechanical properties to develop new multifunctional coupled applications. Recently discovered intrinsic 2D ferromagnetic crystals such as Cr2Ge2Te6, CrI3 and Fe3GeTe2 are intrinsically ferromagnetic only below room temperature, mostly far below room temperature (Curie temperature, ~20–207 K). Here we develop a scalable method to prepare freestanding non-van der Waals ultrathin 2D crystals down to mono- and few unit cells (UC) and report unexpected strong, intrinsic, ambient-air-robust, room-temperature ferromagnetism with TC up to ~367 K in freestanding non-van der Waals 2D CrTe crystals. Freestanding 2D CrTe crystals show comparable or better ferromagnetic properties to widely-used Fe, Co, Ni and BaFe12O19, promising as new platforms for room-temperature intrinsically-ferromagnetic 2D crystals and integrated 2D devices.

Object Transformation and the Spectacle of Scrap

This chapter considers metamorphosis and object transformation as underlying elements of animation’s specificity and representational orthodoxy. However it argues that objects in the computer-animated film are altogether more stable, prized instead according to their utilitarian value—that is, their constructive worth or usefulness—whilst animators seek to preserve physical relationships and properties. This assertion runs counter to animation’s more conventional collapsing of an object’s material honesty within the spectacle of metamorphosis. Focusing on the genre’s fascination with everyday mess, this chapter discusses the emergent importance of an aesthetics of trash within the computer-animated film, and situate their formal and narrative preoccupation with rubbish, scrap and cultural detritus within wider traditions of junk art. Several computer-animated films redeem waste products as plentiful bounty, and their attraction to scrap provides the pleasurable recuperation of trash (as art) through its practical inscription as a fully-functioning cityspaces. By connecting the industrious behaviour of characters and inventors (as they manipulate and repurpose everyday junk) to cognitive and social activities of object substitution, this chapter argues that computer-animated films invite spectators to formulate new responses to recognisable objects, and to become acquainted with the widening of junk’s functional possibility.