Variational principles in classical fluid mechanics and electromagnetism have sprinkled the literature since the eighteenth century. Even so, no adequate variational principle in the Eulerian description of matter was had until 1968 when an Eulerian variational principle was introduced which reproduces Euler's equation of fluid dynamics. Although it successfully produces the appropriate equation of motion for a perfect fluid, the variational principle requires imposition of a constraint which was not fully understood at the time the variational principle was introduced. That constraint is the Lin constraint. The Lin constraint has subsequently been utilized by a number of authors who have sought to develop Eulerian variational principles in both fluid mechanics and electromagnetics (or plasmadynamics). How-ever, few have sought to fully understand the constraint. This dissertation first reviews the work of earlier authors concerning the development of variational principles in both the Eulerian and Lagrangian nomenclatures. In the process, it is shown rigorously whether or not the Euler-Lagrange equations which result from the variational principles are equivalent to the generally accepted equations of motion. In particular, it is shown in the case of several Eulerian variational principles that imposition of the Lin constraint results in Euler-Lagrange equations which are equivalent to the generally accepted equations of motion. On the other hand, it is shown that neglect of the Lin constraint results in Euler-Lagrange equations restrictive of the generally accepted equations of motion. In an effort to improve the physical motivation behind introduction of the Lin constraint a new variational constraint is developed based on the concept of surface forces within a fluid. The new constraint has the advantage of producing Euler-Lagrange equations which are globally correct whereas the Lin constraint itself allows only local equivalence to the standard classical equations of fluid motion. Several additional items of interest regarding variational principles are presented. It is shown that a quantity often referred to as "the canonical momentum" of a charged fluid is not always a constant of the motion of the fluid. This corrects an error which has previously appeared in the literature. In addition, it is demonstrated that there does not exist an unconstrained Eulerian variational principle giving rise to the generally accepted equations of motion for both a perfect fluid and a cold, electromagnetic fluid.

This dissertation examines the renderings into poetry of the life and works of the American Modernist painter, Georgia O’Keeffe. This study intends to show how these poems have interpreted, de-codified and translated O’Keeffe’s subjects into words by making room for new meaningful images, thereby expanding what O’Keeffe meant to do with her art, and thus nourishing her artistic legacy. It borrows the term radicant from Nicolas Bourriaud to capture the essence of O’Keeffe, as an artist who set her roots in motion in order to approach art in heterogeneous contexts and formats, transplanting and thus sharing new creative behaviors. The introduction presents the development of ekphrastic writing, a summary of the principal aesthetic and critical theories I have adopted, a reflection on the reasons why O’Keeffe often showed a certain reticence to the world of words, and the explanation of the materials and methodology that support this study. A section of four chapters analyzes the extent to which poetry prompted by O’Keeffe’s paintings provides not only accurate and eulogistic descriptions of her art but also an encounter between what W. J. T. Mitchell called two “paragonal” media that expand the interpretation of her art on the one hand, and the scope of ekphrastic poetry on the other. The first chapter explores the poems related to the places where O’Keeffe lived and from which she drew inspiration, and aims at confirming her idea that her legacy depends on what she made of these spaces. The second chapter examines the poems that refer to O’Keeffe’s living and still natures whose close-up study echoes her idea of realizing the Great American Painting as the celebration of the vastness and miracle of the world in which we live. The third chapter concentrates on the poems inspired by O’Keeffe’s painted human artifacts that emphasize the importance of a poetry of common things, an attitude that O’Keeffe shared with poet William Carlos Williams. The fourth chapter presents poems inspired by photographs that portray O’Keeffe, and intends to assert photography as the tertium quid in the complementary relationship between painting and poetry, thus reaffirming the connecting and radicant power of the arts. I conclude this study by arguing that in visual art as well as in poetry the shared process of selecting and emphasizing helps the artists to get at the essence of things, and thus to disentangle the complicated facets of existence. The analysis of the resistance of meanings in the dialogue between the artist’s artwork and the poet’s composition appears to define the intangible that artist, poet and viewer/reader have tried to articulate. May Swenson’s “O’Keeffe Retrospective” functions as a final poetic gallery through which the poet conducts the reader/viewer in a radicant lyrical portrait of the painter, where the thingness of O’Keeffe’s things is fully celebrated, and the readers can clearly see what they have merely looked at. The two appendices include the reproductions of the visual references analyzed in this study, and a selection of three poems with my Italian translation.

Analisi funzionale-pragmatica di un corpus di conferenze accademiche in lingua tedesca e italiana in riferimento all'utilizzo dei commenti metatestuali

Gli underground comix nascono negli Stati Uniti nell’ambito della Controcultura degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, un periodo di grande rinnovamento culturale, lotte contro qualsiasi forma di autorità, movimenti per la libertà di parola e per i diritti civili. Quella che può dirsi a tutti gli effetti una “rivoluzione” nel mondo del fumetto accompagnò e rese possibili i grandi cambiamenti sociali legati a temi considerati tabù come il sesso, la droga, la satira politica e religiosa. A questi artisti va dunque il merito di aver riscoperto il respiro antagonista e il potere comunicativo del fumetto, liberandolo da compromessi verbali e visuali visivi, e interrogandone coraggiosamente le possibilità espressive. Nel rappresentare la realtà senza filtri e senza mai scendere a patti con i codici sociali e le autoinibizioni che questi inducono, gli underground comix si trovarono a fare i conti con il linciaggio mediatico e con diverse forme di censura, tanto preventiva quanto punitiva. Proprio a partire da questa considerazione, risulta interessante approfondire dal punto di vista linguistico-culturale e retoriconarrativo come questi fumetti sono arrivati in Italia prima attraverso la circolazione sotterranea delle pubblicazioni alternative e poi consacrata nelle edizioni “mainstream” curate dalle maggiori case editrici. Le opere di questi autori costituiscono infatti un caso di studio molto stimolante sia per le questioni sociolinguistiche (jargon) sia per la satira e lo humor impietoso e radicale espressi attraverso una grafica incisiva e dialoghi talora surreali e spesso oltraggiosi. L’obiettivo di questa ricerca è dunque sviluppare un’analisi traduttologica di tale produzione e prevede la raccolta, la disamina e il confronto delle pubblicazioni in lingua italiana di queste opere, prestando particolare attenzione alla resa degli elementi di critica sociale e di avanguardismo che ne caratterizzano lo stile. Presupposto del mio studio è che vi siano politiche editoriali, fattori sociali e ideologici che motivano la scelta di modificare, mitigare o omettere alcuni contenuti ? dialoghi, pensieri e immagini ? nel passaggio ad un’altra lingua e dunque ad un altro contesto socioculturale, nella consapevolezza che la traduzione non è mai innocente o neutrale. Lo studio si articola in tre sezioni. Nella prima parte, viene sviluppata un’indagine storicosociologica del panorama underground americano, dalle origini del fumetto americano e dai fattori che hanno reso questo medium un bersaglio della censura fino alla nascita della controcultura in seno alla quale i fumettisti underground hanno sviluppato la loro poetica. La seconda sezione prende in esame gli strumenti utilizzati per studiare il fumetto in traduzione, sviluppando un framework di riferimento che trae spunto dalle ricerche in campo multimodale, narratologico e semiotico. In particulare, viene investigata la nozione di isotopia, quale interessante strumento di analisi del fumetto come testo sincretico che si incentra sulle relazione di significazione tanto delle immagini quanto delle parole e soprattutto dell’interazione tra codice verbale e visuale. Le isotopie forniscono dunque le istruzioni di lettura (talora prodotte inconsciamente dall’autore) e di resa del profilo semantico di un testo sia in ambito critico che traduttivo. Inoltre, in quanto categoria testuale che congiunge l’aspetto formale e contenutistico, sono l’espressione più diretta dello stile dell’autore. La terza sezione presenta il corpus di fumetti in esame e sviluppa concretamente l’analisi della produzione underground tradotta in italiano seguendo quattro filoni tematici, tra i più controversi all’interno di questo panorama fumettistico: il sesso, la droga, la violenza politica e la religione. Focus dell’analisi contrastiva sono le strategie traduttive, gli approcci ideologici, le politiche editoriali e la possibile censura in traduzione.

This research investigates the extent to which diaspora can be considered a useful term of reference for the exploration and critical interrogation of the literary works written by authors of Arab origin in Europe, Canada and the United States. The aim of this study is to develop an alternative theoretical model to analyze and critically interrogate works that have been written beyond the boundaries of a national literature and that blur the opposition "migrant" vs. "national" or "ethnic" vs. "mainstream." This study makes use of an integrated methodology and draws its theoretical tools from deconstruction, post-colonial studies, feminist theory, and Edouard Glissant's poetics of creolization. It is an interdisciplinary and multilingual work that puts in dialogue literature with philosophy and sociology and explores texts written in English, French, German, and Italian.

No abstract available.

No description available.

Lhx genes are a sub-family of Hox genes that play important roles in animal development. In Caenorhabditis elegans there are seven Lhx genes, including the founding family member lin-11. The lin-11 gene is necessary for the specification of neuronal and reproductive tissues. My thesis work has involved understanding the mechanism of lin-11 regulation and its function in these tissues. To this end, I addressed two distinct but complementary questions, one of which focused on how transcriptional regulation of lin-11 occurs and the second on the role of LIN-11 protein domains/regions. My work on the transcriptional regulation has uncovered important roles of two of the largest lin-11 introns, intron 3 and intron 7. These introns promote lin-11 expression in non-overlapping sets of amphid neurons. Based on gene expression patterns and behavioural assays, intron 3 is capable of restoring lin-11 function in lin-11(n389 ) null mutant allele. Comparison of intron 3-driven reporter expression in the neuronal cell types between C. elegans and C. briggsae has revealed cis and trans evolutionary changes in lin-11 regulation between the two species. Functional dissection of the introns in C. elegans has led to the identification of three distinct non-overlapping enhancers, each specific for a single amphid neuron, i.e., RIC, AIZ, and AVG. I have also identified four transcription factors, SKN-1, CEH-6, CRH-1, and CES-1, that act through these enhancers to regulate neuronal expression of lin-11. Furthermore, I have characterized the function of the LIM domains and a proline-rich (PRR) C-terminus region of LIN-11 in the specification of neuronal and reproductive tissues. My work shows that while the LIM domains are required for LIN-11 function in these tissues, the PRR region is dispensable. I have also examined the functional conservation of lin-11 domains using two other Lhx genes, Drosophila melanogaster (dLim1) and Mus musculus (Lhx1 ), and found that both of these genes were able to rescue lin-11 defects. Together, my work has significantly advanced our understanding of transcriptional regulation of lin-11, the importance of LIM domains in tissue formation, and functional conservation of Lhx genes across phyla. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Self-translation is a fairly recent branch of studies. Despite its existence as a literary and linguistic phenomenon was proved to date back to ancient times, its practice in the globalized Twentieth Century has lately led scholars (concurrently with the cultural turn in translation studies) to delimit and deepen a field of enquiry that is transdisciplinary in nature, its focus being on multilingual writers who translate their literary works themselves. The phenomenology of self-translation depends on a variety of factors: the type of bilingualism of writers; the geo-political and social standing of the languages involved in their production; the literary traditions they combine; the scopes and consequent strategies for self-translation, etc. As a worldwide phenomenon, thus, self-translation is far from being satisfyingly mapped. For this reason, exhaustively investigated case studies are still needed as a preliminary step for further research leading to universal considerations. Nancy Huston is a prolific bilingual author of both fiction and non-fiction writing, born in Anglophone Canada but living in France since the early Seventies. While secondary bibliography exploring single couples of her self-translated texts presently covers a good deal of her novels, a comparative analysis of the evolution of this practice on a vast span of time was still missing. The aim of the present thesis is precisely to provide such analysis on a selection of Huston’s novels from Plainsong / Cantique des plaines (1993) to Danse noire (2013)/ Black Dance (2014). The thesis is subdivided in two main parts, each of three chapters. Chapter I provides an heuristic overview of self-translation, reporting the most influential bibliographical material that has focused, in turn, on: the theoretical debate ignited by self-translation around the dichotomic relation between ‘originals’ and ‘translations’; the existing typologies of self-translated text; the history of this practice over the centuries; its sociolinguistic assumptions and aftermaths; a short overview of scholars that discourage the thinking of self-translation as a category with its own autonomous epistemology. The last section of the chapter, instead, is devoted to presenting the theoretical and methodological devices that enabled a comparative reading of Huston’s self-translated versions. Jan Hokenson and Marcella Munson’s focus on self-translated versions as a single bilingual text, Marilyn Gaddis Rose’s stereoscopic reading, Anton Fedorov’s functional equivalence and the self-translation categories of Michaël Oustinoff set the basis to analyse Huston’s self-translations (published as autonomous texts) as ‘twin texts’ alongside a chronological axis of development of her aesthetics. Being often described by its performers as a physically and psychologically fatiguing enterprise, self-translation is usually engendered by profound intimate motivations. For this reason, Chapter II is devoted to investigate those motivations in Nancy Huston’s biography. As it is typical of the post-modern, hyper-self-aware writer, Huston has imbued her fiction and non-fiction writing with self-portrayals recounting her childhood in Calgary (e.g., Nord perdu (1999)/Losing North; Longings and Belongings. Toronto: McArthur and Co., 2005); her adolescence in the U.S.A, and the life-changing decision to move to Paris for a Junior Year abroad that actually never came to an end. Tutored by Roland Barthes at the École de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Huston became a writer in the French language: first as an essayist for feminist reviews, then, after publishing her thesis (Dire et interdire, éléments de jurologie; Paris: Payot, 1980) and after her marriage with Tzvetan Todorov in 1980, by launching into fictional writer with a debut novel Les Variations Goldberg, that Gérard Genette defines a “petit chef d'oeuvre.” For the following ten years, Huston carries on publishing in French two novels (Histoire d’Omaya. Paris: Seuil, 1985 and Trois fois septembre. Paris: Seuil, 1989), as well as intimist correspondence and essay: Lettres parisiennes. Autopsie de l’exil (Paris: J’ai lu, 1987) and Journal de la création. (Paris: Seuil, 1990). Especially in these latter works, reflections on her ‘voluntary exile’, ‘false bilingualism’ and the revolutionary discovery of motherhood abound. Together with a neurological illness and a psychological crisis in 1986/87, experiencing motherhood and facing the choice of which mother-language to teach to her own daughter, urged Huston to analyse her choice to hibernate into the French language and culture, reaching the conclusion that – although up to a point this language had endowed her with freedom and inspiration – she should nonetheless make an effort to repair the break with her native tongue. English was connected to a traumatic childhood experience: when Nancy was six her parents split up and her mother left the family. Chapter III analyses in-depth the unfolding of Huston’s reasoning on her two languages and the different place they occupy in her mind and in her writing, focusing especially on the first novel she wrote in English (Plainsong) which is incidentally also the first she chose to self-translate and the first one where Canada is recognized as a constitutional element of her identity as a writer. Expatriation and bilingualism ineluctably call for a question and redefinition of a personal sense of identity. Rather than being restricted into non-fictional writing, these phenomena are transformed into literary themes and become an essential features of her novels (in the form of varying motifs). Concurrently, the act of self-translation becomes a compulsory step in her literary aesthetics: « Il y a deux versions de tous mes romans [...] pour moi c’est important qu’il ne manque pas une page ou un paragraphe et que l’éditeur américain approuve ce que l’éditeur français approuve et inversement. Je tiens à ce que les deux versions soient identiques dans la mesure du possible. » The purpose of the Second Part of the thesis is essentially to test this declaration of translating poetics. After having preliminarily compared all the couples of self-translated works, four text where selected that varied significantly for their linguistic genesis and the way in which they were self-translated – but shared the thematic explorations fuelled by Huston’s own bilingual and expatriate standpoint. Hence, Chapter IV illustrates a comparative reading of the novels L’empreinte de l’ange (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998) – first written entirely in French and subsequently self-translated into English as The Mark of the Angel (London: Vintage, 2000). This ‘doxal’ translation exemplifies Huston’s research for equivalence: a balanced care to maintain the prosodic rhythm, the wordplays, the images of the first version whenever possible, and to compensate for those elements that are inevitably lost due to the intrinsic features of each language. In Chapter V, two differently bilingual works are analysed that show how self-translation can be exploited as a creative literary device. The first draft of what later became Instruments of Darkness (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997) and Instruments des ténèbres (Arles: Actes Sud: 1996) was written alternating chapters in English with an equivalent number of chapters in French. Limbes/Limbo. Un hommage à Samuel Beckett (Arles: Actes Sud, 2000), instead, is a side-by-side edition of two monolingual texts resulting from a bilingual pastiche inspired to Beckett’s writing style and literary poetics. The mutual influence of the two linguistic systems is evident on different textual levels: the prosodic rhythm and the diffused isomorphisms bear witness of an aesthetics of translation aimed at privileging the phonetic body of the text. Chapter VI takes into consideration one the latest twin novels by Huston, Black dance and Danse noire. Symmetrically to the first novel, the first draft was the English one (since part of the novel is set in Montreal); however, a great deal of dialogues were written in Quebec French. The double self-translation resulted in very asymmetrical products. While the Standard English text published in the U.S.A displays only few scattered interferences of the French language, the version whose narrative language is Standard French depicts a richly multilingual panorama, with interjections in German, Portuguese, Quebec French, and local varieties of English. The conclusive remarks are tripartite, focusing in turn on the texts, on the author, and on the wider picture of self-translation in global literature. From a thematic perspective, the novels share an extensive use of polyphony, the constant presence of music, multicultural sets of characters. From a translational perspective, the most evident feature is a constant attention to “phonetical rubbings and rhymings” of each language and for creating equivalent musical patterns in translation. Comparison showed, though, that strategies of self-translation are negotiated from context to context and from text to text, even within the corpus of a single author. As regards the author, self-translation can be read as an aesthetic device for healing the author’s linguistically and culturally fragmented identity: the literary corpus in fact physically redoubles (either from French to English or from English to French), thus fulfilling the fantasy of the other self in the paper, if not in the flesh. In the framework of current research on global literature, eventually, self-translation posits as a practice that overcomes national boundaries and is part of a larger ethical calling.

No description available.