The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

Modeling the Bulk and Nanometric Dielectric Functions of Au and Ag

In this work, we model the dielectric functions of gold (Au) and silver (Ag) which are typically used in photonics and plasmonics. The modeling has been performed on Au and Ag in bulk and in nanometric states. The dielectric function is presented as a complex number with a real part and an imaginary part. First, we will model the experimental measurements of the dielectric constant as a function of the pulsation ω by appropriate mathematical functions in an explicit way. In the second part we will highlight the contributions to the dielectric constant value due to intraband and interband electronic transitions. In the last part of this work we model the dielectric constant of these metals in the nanometric state using several complex theoretical models such as the Drude Lorentz theory, the Drude two-point critical model, and the Drude three-point critical model. We shall comment on which model fits the experimental dielectric function best over a range of pulsation.

Unitary matrix models and random partitions: Universality and multi-criticality

The generating functions for the gauge theory observables are often represented in terms of the unitary matrix integrals. In this work, the perturbative and non-perturbative aspects of the generic multi-critical unitary matrix models are studied by adopting the integrable operator formalism, and the multi-critical generalization of the Tracy-Widom distribution in the context of random partitions. We obtain the universal results for the multi-critical model in the weak and strong coupling phases. The free energy of the instanton sector in the weak coupling regime, and the genus expansion of the free energy in the strong coupling regime are explicitly computed and the universal multi-critical phase structure of the model is explored. Finally, we apply our results in concrete examples of supersymmetric indices of gauge theories in the large N limit.

Migrant Workers Empowerment through Productive Migrant Village Programs in Banyumas, Indonesia

This study explains empowering Indonesian Migrant Workers (IMW) through Productive Migrant Village Programs (PMVP) in the Banyumas Regency. PMVP is a program of the Ministry of Manpower of the Republic of Indonesia held since 2016. The program aims are to empower, improve services and protection for IMWs starting from the village. The paradigm of the study is a constructivist paradigm by using a critical model. The research method used is a qualitative method with a phenomenological approach, which explores data to get the meaning of the basic and essential things of the empirical phenomena experienced by the research subject. The results of the research are 1). In providing information about the process of migrant workers faced with challenges from recruitment agencies/recruitment companies (Private Indonesian Migrant Worker Placement Agency). 2). In the stage of the production process, there are obstacles that the equipment provided by the Ministry cannot use. 3). The care of children of migrant workers is still individual only to their families. The community even still stigmatizes them as children who deserve problems since their parents abandoned them. 4). Late initiation of the migrant workers’ cooperatives. Procedures for establishing migrant workers cooperatives, mentoring, and guidance specifically related to migrant workers are needed.

Reproducing asymmetrical spine shape fluctuations in a model of actin dynamics predicts self-organized criticality

Dendritic spines change their size and shape spontaneously, but the function of this remains unclear. Here, we address this in a biophysical model of spine fluctuations, which reproduces experimentally measured spine fluctuations. For this, we characterize size- and shape fluctuations from confocal microscopy image sequences using autoregressive models and a new set of shape descriptors derived from circular statistics. Using the biophysical model, we extrapolate into longer temporal intervals and find the presence of 1/f noise. When investigating its origins, the model predicts that the actin dynamics underlying shape fluctuations self-organizes into a critical state, which creates a fine balance between static actin filaments and free monomers. In a comparison against a non-critical model, we show that this state facilitates spine enlargement, which happens after LTP induction. Thus, ongoing spine shape fluctuations might be necessary to react quickly to plasticity events.

Thermal dissipation as both the strength and weakness of matter. A material failure prediction by monitoring creep

We discuss the ability of a thermally activated sub-critical model, which includes the auto-induced thermal evolution of cracks tips and relies on the monitoring of slow creep, to predict the catastrophic failure threshold of a vast range of materials.