Alexander Ostrovsky vis-a-vis Fyodor Dostoevsky: the omedy “Rich Brides” and the novel “The Idiot”

The comedy “Rich Brides” by Alexander Ostrovsky and the novel “The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky are close in staging the main plot move – the fate of a woman who sinned due to life circumstances. The main characters of both works fell victims to wealthy patrons who were going to marry them off. They have different personalities, and the heroine of “Rich Brides” Valentina Belyosova, unlike Fyodor Dostoevsky's heroine Nastasya Barashkova, at first glance seems frivolous, but the women, being accused of immorality, transformed, as female pride and a desire to defend themselves awakened in them. Impressed by Yuriy Tsyplunov's bitter emotional accusations, Valentina Belyosova is imbued with respect for him and even confesses her love. The characters in “Rich Brides” are melodramatic and comic with unexpected turns of events. Alexander Ostrovsky does not parody or imitate the author of the novel “The Idiot”, but the metamorphosis that occurred in the feelings and behaviour of Valentina Belyosova (partly in Yuriy Tsyplunov) testifies to the playwright's ability to portray complex characters, which brings his talent closer to Fyodor Dostoevsky's ability to artistically represent the dialectic of personality.

Music to My Ears: Developing Kanji Stroke Knowledge through an Educational Music Game

Millions of people worldwide are taking up foreign languages with logographic writing systems, such as Japanese or Chinese. Learning thousands of characters necessary for literacy in those languages is a unique challenge to those coming from alphabetic backgrounds, and sustaining motivation in the face of such a momentous task is a struggle for many students. Many games exist for this purpose, but few offer production memory practice such as writing, and the vast majority are thinly veiled flashcards. To address this gap, we created Radical Tunes—a musical kanji-writing game—which combines production practice with musical mnemonic by assigning a melody to each element of a character. We chose to utilize music as it is a powerful tool that can be employed to enhance learning and memory. In this article, we explore whether incorporating melodies into a kanji learning game can positively affect the memorization of the stroke order/direction and overall shape of several Japanese characters, similar to the mnemonic effect of adding music to text. Specifically, we conducted two experimental studies, finding that (1) music improved immersion—an important factor related to learning; and (2) there was a positive correlation between melody presence and character production, particularly for more complex characters.

LUCAN'S CICERO: DISMEMBERING A LEGEND

This paper proposes a new synthetic account of the presence of Cicero as both character and source in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile. Lucan's treatment is derived primarily from Virgil's technique for creating intertextually complex characters, but further builds on Sallust's displacement of Cicero in his narrative of the Catilinarian conspiracy and on the declamatory practice of reducing the orator to a few prominent and recognizable traits. Cicero the character, as he briefly appears at the opening of the seventh book, is not simply an ahistorical caricature: he is constructed through a careful series of allusions designed to indict his use of violence in the suppression of Catiline. Other prominent aspects of Cicero in the tradition are displaced and transferred to other characters more important to Lucan's design, Cato and Pompey. Lucan's depiction of Pompey, especially his death and decapitation, draws on the language and affect of the tradition associated with Cicero, using Cicero's own words and the obituary of Cicero in the lost historical epic of Cornelius Severus. Finally, the language of Cicero's peace-making efforts in his correspondence, suppressed in Lucan's depiction of him as a warmonger, forms an important part of the narrator's own emotional evocations of the impending catastrophe of civil war. The combination of models Lucan uses is more broadly reflective of his technique in composing a historical epic.

On the realization of the Gelfand character of a finite group as a twisted trace

We show that the Gelfand character χ G \chi_{G} of a finite group 𝐺 (i.e. the sum of all irreducible complex characters of 𝐺) may be realized as a “twisted trace” g ↦ Tr ⁡ ( ρ g ∘ T ) g\mapsto\operatorname{Tr}(\rho_{g}\circ T) for a suitable involutive linear automorphism 𝑇 of L 2 ⁢ ( G ) L^{2}(G) , where ( L 2 ⁢ ( G ) , ρ ) (L^{2}(G),\rho) is the right regular representation of 𝐺. Moreover, we prove that, under certain hypotheses, we have T ⁢ ( f ) = f ∘ L T(f)=f\circ L ( f ∈ L 2 ⁢ ( G ) f\in L^{2}(G) ), where 𝐿 is an involutive anti-automorphism of 𝐺. The natural representation 𝜏 of 𝐺 associated to the natural 𝐿-conjugacy action of 𝐺 in the fixed point set Fix G ⁡ ( L ) \operatorname{Fix}_{G}(L) of 𝐿 turns out to be a Gelfand model for 𝐺 in some cases. We show that ( L 2 ⁢ ( Fix G ⁡ ( L ) ) , τ ) (L^{2}(\operatorname{Fix}_{G}(L)),\tau) fails to be a Gelfand model if 𝐺 admits non-trivial central involutions.

A second view on the evolution of flight in stick and leaf insects (Phasmatodea)

The re-evolution of complex characters is generally considered impossible, yet, studies of recent years have provided several examples of phenotypic reversals shown to violate Dollo's law. Along these lines, the regain of wings in stick and leaf insects (Phasmatodea) was hypothesised to have occurred several times independently after an ancestral loss, a scenario controversially discussed among evolutionary biologists. Here, we revisit the recovery of wings by reconstructing a phylogeny based on a comprehensive taxon sample of over 500 representative phasmatodean species to infer the evolutionary history of wings. We additionally explored the presence of ocelli, the photoreceptive organs used for flight stabilisation in winged insects, which might provide further information for interpreting flight evolution. Our findings support an ancestral loss of wings and that the ancestors of most major lineages were wingless. While the evolution of ocelli was estimated to be dependent on the presence of (fully-developed) wings, ocelli are nevertheless absent in the majority of all examined winged species and only appear in the members of few subordinate clades, albeit winged and volant taxa are found in every lineage. The disjunct distribution of ocelli substantiates the hypothesis on trait reacquisition and that wings were regained in Phasmatodea.

An Analysis of Hamlet from the Perspective of Aristotle's Tragedy Theories

With profound tragic significance, Hamlet is an enduringly popular tragedy by the famous British dramatist William Shakespeare. The complex characters, as well as the various artistic techniques for the creation of the tragic story in the play, especially its application of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's tragedy theories, have received extensive attention from academia. This paper intends to conduct a study on the application of Aristotle's tragedy theories in Shakespeare's Hamlet. On the basis of the analysis of Aristotle's tragedy principles related to tragic plots and characters, "Error and Frailty", "Fear and Pity" and "Purification", the paper discusses the tragedy Hamlet and its application of Aristotle's guidance, in order to help readers untie the reasons of the design for some important parts of this tragedy.

An Effective Slant Detection and Correction Method Based on the Tilted Rectangle Method for Telugu Manuscript Terms

This paper proposes an efficient method called tilted rectangle (TR) for detecting and correcting of slant angle of the manuscript Telugu words (MTW). Telugu language is one of India's common languages spoken by over 80 million individuals. The complex characters are attached with some extra marks known as “maatras” and “vatthus,” and it is challenging to detect slant angle. The proposed TR method initially performs preprocessing and identifies a connected component within the given Telugu manuscript word. Then, it estimates the slant angle of each connected component by deriving connected slant lines on the boundary of each connected component. After this process, the proposed TR method estimates the entire word's overall slant angle from the average of estimated slant angle and height of all connected components. The correction of the word's slant angle is done in the reverse direction by applying a simple shear transformation. With 1000 manuscript records of three different kinds, the algorithm is tested. Experimental findings indicate the efficacy of the approach proposed.

La construction du sentiment moral dans les romans contemporains pour la jeunesse Le Chagrin du roi mort et Le Combat d’hiver de Jean-Claude Mourlevat

In the past, literature for children and adolescents reflected society’s belief that young readers were not supposed to think for themselves. Stories were vehicles to provide direct, simple moral lessons. Those moralistic books reinforced gender and good / evil tropes, leaving little room for interpretation, moral grey areas and non-traditional gender roles. In this paper, we examine two contemporary books, Le Combat d’hiver (2006) et Le Chagrin du roi mort (2009), as examples of how youth literature has evolved. In both books, readers are presented with complex characters, plots and themes that encourage personal reflection. Morals are not something to be taught but rather felt.

Os personagens de Charlie Kaufman e os ‘não personagens’ de Eduardo Coutinho

In this article I propose to relate the works, apparently quite distinct, of two cinema professionals, the Brazilian documentarist Eduardo Coutinho and the American ficcional screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. More specifically, I will focus on the characters featured in their films. When interviewing ordinary people, Coutinho is able to reveal a certain character that those people try to create. With great ability, he exposes their souls, their truths. Fernando Andacht, Coutinho’s great scholar disagrees with the filmmaker himself by stating that his interviewees are not characters, they remain real, authentic people. Kaufman is capable of creating complex characters by nature, far removed from the typical Hollywood heroes who obey the script manuals and Christopher Vogler’s hero’s journey. Some try to show power, integrity, smartness, but in the course of the stories, the fragility and vulnerability of all of them becomes very exposed, in the same way revealing their authenticity. This way I argue that both Coutinho and Kaufman are able to reflect on human behavior. To the point that, in absolutely different ways, they reach similar goals, I even say complementary goals.

Adapting Complex Time: Story of Your Life (1998) and Arrival (2016)

In both literature and film, we’re faced with complex characters, complex plots, complex themes, complexity in narration and, occasionally, complexity in narrative structure, all of which have been long present in fictional works and all of which have been addressed extensively by scholars (we’ve witnessed a resurgence of these terms in academic circles in recent years following the rise of the puzzle film in the 1990s).But what can be inferred when we consider narrative complexity in terms of adaptation?For this study, I consider complexity in relation to nonlinear storytelling and apply stylistic methods of analysis to the blockbuster film Arrival (2016) and its source text - Ted Chiang’s short story, Story of Your Life (1998). The aim of this paper is to examine narrative complexity in adaptation and address questions surrounding what is adapted in such cases, how it is adapted, and the effects both versions of such a text can produce.The argument that I advance is based on the premise that by breaking down the text (moving image and printed text) into its narrative components, we can develop a better understanding of how complex narratives such as this operate across platforms. My analysis focuses on the nonlinear narration, narrative focalisation and the presentation of coinciding narrative frames that are present in the source text and its film adaptation.