Modernism and Still Life

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It proposes that still life can be understood not only as a genre of visual art but also as a mode of attentiveness and a way of being in the world. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Modernism and Still Life reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement. The still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm, an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

Formation of Prestellar Cores via Non-Isothermal Gas Fragmentation

Sheet-like clouds are common in turbulent gas and perhaps form via collisions between turbulent gas flows. Having examined the evolution of an isothermal shocked slab in an earlier contribution, in this work we follow the evolution of a sheet-like cloud confined by (thermal) pressure and gas in it is allowed to cool. The extant purpose of this endeavour is to study the early phases of core-formation. The observed evolution of this cloud supports the conjecture that molecular clouds themselves are three-phase media (comprising viz. a stable cold and warm medium, and a third thermally unstable medium), though it appears, clouds may evolve in this manner irrespective of whether they are gravitationally bound. We report, this sheet fragments initially due to the growth of the thermal instability (TI) and some fragments are elongated, filament-like. Subsequently, relatively large fragments become gravitationally unstable and sub-fragment into smaller cores. The formation of cores appears to be a three stage process: first, growth of the TI leads to rapid fragmentation of the slab; second, relatively small fragments acquire mass via gas-accretion and/or merger and third, sufficiently massive fragments become susceptible to the gravitational instability and sub-fragment to form smaller cores. We investigate typical properties of clumps (and smaller cores) resulting from this fragmentation process. Findings of this work support the suggestion that the weak velocity field usually observed in dense clumps and smaller cores is likely seeded by the growth of dynamic instabilities. Simulations were performed using the smooth particle hydrodynamics algorithm.

Model for unstable global modes in the rotating-disk boundary layer

Recent simulations and experiments appear to show that the rotating-disk boundary layer is linearly globally stable despite the existence of local absolute instability. However, we argue that linear global instability can be created by local absolute instability at the edge of the disk. This argument is based on investigations of the linearized complex Ginzburg–Landau equation with weakly spatially varying coefficients to model the propagation of a wavepacket through a weakly inhomogeneous unstable medium. Therefore, this mechanism could operate in a variety of locally absolutely unstable flows. The corresponding nonlinear global mode has a front at the radius of onset of absolute instability when the disk edge is far from the front. This front moves radially outwards when the Reynolds number at the disk edge is reduced. It is shown that the laminar–turbulent transition front also behaves in this manner, possibly explaining the scatter in observed transitional Reynolds numbers.

___________________________: SILENCE, THE AFFECT PHRASE, THE WAIT.

The relation between experience, language and reality is not immediate or equivalent. While often conflated to demand a commensurate exchange, language is an unstable medium that can be full or empty of ‘truth’. When people have differing accounts of what may seem to be the same reality, the variability of language becomes more apparent. An event may take place before a group of witnesses and each retelling may be different. Indeed, depending on its nature, an event may have caused a trauma to the extent that the experience may never achieve adequate representation in language. Each witness may struggle to recall an experience that exceeds the capacity of conscious perception. The only testimony of such an experience may be silence or inarticulate sound that communicates more than meaning and less than sense. Does this entail that nothing happened? An absence of speech could mean that there is nothing to say or that nothing can be said – silence is indistinguishably non-language and an allusion to the limits of language. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute pursues the limits of language. Herein Lyotard asks, "How can you establish what is not without criticizing what is? The undetermined cannot be established" (Lyotard, 9). This paper will examine the potential of silence to depose the subject through Lyotard’s concepts of the differend, the affect-phrase, the event and reality.

Images of Virtue: Reading, Reformation and the Visualization of Culture in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse

This essay explores the visualization of culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by examining the spectacle surrounding the death of a beautiful woman in sentimental texts. Focusing on Rousseau’sJulie, ouLa Nouvelle Héloïse, I argue that this novel highlights the relationship between interpretation and identity formation by outlining a style of reading that concentrates on the visual aspects of interpretation. Central to my study is the idea that Rousseau considered the imagination as the primary medium through which interpretation occurred. This is an unstable medium in that the passions were believed to influence the imagination and limit one’s ability to read properly. Rousseau thus sought to repress passion and contain the imagination through an image presented in the form of a spectacle – the image of the feminine ideal. This image, stabilized in death, needed to be internalized in the reader’s heart and mind. Readers would then interpret bodies/texts/objects – and their own identity – through an imagination that is controlled by this enduring symbol, allowing them to have access to “truth,” and to regain a sense of unity and happiness that is often lost in modern society.

Front propagation in laser-tweezed lipid bilayer tubules

We study the mechanism of the ‘pearling’ instability seen recently in experiments on lipid tubules under a local applied laser intensity. We argue that the correct boundary conditions are fixed chemical potentials, or surface tensions Σ, at the laser spot and the reservoir in contact with the tubule. While most qualitative conclusions of previous studies remain the same, the ‘ramped’ control parameter (surface tension) implies several new features. We also explore some consequences of front propagation into a noisy unstable medium.