Yann Apperry’s third novel, Diabolus in musica, is a pastiche of diabolic and gothic tropes that tells of a musical genius who composes a ballade that kills. Resurrections, doppelgangers and triads are reoccurring themes. Although the narrator kills his doppelganger on the first page, the name of this double, Lazarus, haunts the narrative with the threat of resurrection. Similarly, the threefold tritone, the “diabolus in musica,” is not only echoed in the numerical structure of Apperry’s novel but also in the familial triad: the father’s presence is dark and demoniac, provoking the cruel music that the son in turn forces onto the exterior world; the mother is a ghostly distillation of the Eternal Feminine. In terms of comparative readings, Diabolus can be read alongside Suskind’s Perfume as the Bildungsroman of an outsider raised without love who turns astounding genius to homicidal ends. It shares narrative and structural similarities with Mann’s Doctor Faustus: each tells of a prodigy who composes music and a faithful sidekick who composes narrative; each arranges his novel according to number. Nabokov’s influence on Apperry’s work is also significant; many parallels are to be found with his third novel, The Defense. Approaches to translation diverge according to their foundational conceptions of language: do we create language or does language create us? To conclude the former is to adopt an approach that focuses on the meanings of source texts while to conclude the latter is to focus more on their formal properties. Caught between these differing conceptions, the translator must choose between domestication and foreignization; I favour the latter for literary translation. I define the literary through a reading of the aesthetic in Dauenhauer and Kristeva, and then I review the arguments that Benjamin, Derrida, Berman and Venuti make in favour of word-based translation. From this I conclude that translation can, in refusing to hide its foreign origins, lead readers into the unknown territory of a strange language, author and text, where they become strangers, and where their language and culture become foreign. With this partial translation of Diabolus, I seek to provoke such an encounter with foreignness.

Yann Apperrys third novel, Diabolus in musica, is a pastiche of diabolic and gothic tropes that tells of a musical genius who composes a ballade that kills. Resurrections, doppelgangers and triads are reoccurring themes. Although the narrator kills his doppelganger on the first page, the name of this double, Lazarus, haunts the narrative with the threat of resurrection. Similarly, the threefold tritone, the diabolus in musica, is not only echoed in the numerical structure of Apperrys novel but also in the familial triad: the fathers presence is dark and demoniac, provoking the cruel music that the son in turn forces onto the exterior world; the mother is a ghostly distillation of the Eternal Feminine. In terms of comparative readings, Diabolus can be read alongside Suskinds Perfume as the Bildungsroman of an outsider raised without love who turns astounding genius to homicidal ends. It shares narrative and structural similarities with Manns Doctor Faustus: each tells of a prodigy who composes music and a faithful sidekick who composes narrative; each arranges his novel according to number. Nabokovs influence on Apperrys work is also significant; many parallels are to be found with his third novel, The Defense. Approaches to translation diverge according to their foundational conceptions of language: do we create language or does language create us? To conclude the former is to adopt an approach that focuses on the meanings of source texts while to conclude the latter is to focus more on their formal properties. Caught between these differing conceptions, the translator must choose between domestication and foreignization; I favour the latter for literary translation. I define the literary through a reading of the aesthetic in Dauenhauer and Kristeva, and then I review the arguments that Benjamin, Derrida, Berman and Venuti make in favour of word-based translation. From this I conclude that translation can, in refusing to hide its foreign origins, lead readers into the unknown territory of a strange language, author and text, where they become strangers, and where their language and culture become foreign. With this partial translation of Diabolus, I seek to provoke such an encounter with foreignness.

This thesis theoretically and experimentally studies the characteristics of integrated microresonators (MRs) built by passive (no gain) and non-magnetic materials and characterized by both Hermitian and non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. In particular, I have studied three different microresonators: a typical Microring Resonator (MR), a Taiji Microresonator (TJMR), which consists of a microresonator with an embedded S-shaped waveguide, and a new geometry called the Infinity-Loop Microresonator (ILMR), which is characterized by a microresonator shaped like the infinity symbol coupled at two points to the bus waveguide. To get an accurate picture of the three devices, they were modeled using both the transfer matrix method and the temporal coupled mode theory. Neglecting propagation losses, the MR is described by a Hermitian Hamiltonian, while the TJMR and the ILMR are described by a non-Hermitian one. An important difference between Hermitian and non-Hermitian systems concerns their degeneracies. Hermitian degeneracies are called Diabolic Points (DPs) and are characterized by coincident eigenvalues and mutually orthogonal eigenvectors. In contrast, non-Hermitian degeneracies are called Exceptional Points (EPs). At the EP, both the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors coalesce. The MR is at a DP instead, and the TJMR and the ILMR are at an EP. Since the TJMR and ILMR are at an EP, they have interesting features such as the possibility of being unidirectional reflectors. Here, it is shown experimentally how in the case of the TJMR this degeneracy can also be used to break Lorentz reciprocity in the nonlinear regime (high incident laser powers), discussing the effect of the Fabry-Perot of the bus waveguide facets. The effect of backscattering, mainly due to the waveguide surface-wall roughness, on the microresonators is also studied. This phenomenon induces simultaneous excitation of the clockwise and counterclockwise modes, leading to eigenvalue splitting. This splitting makes the use of typical quality factor estimation methods unfeasible. To overcome this problem and mitigate the negative effects of backscattering, a new experimental technique called interferometric excitation is introduced. This technique involves coherent excitation of the microresonator from both sides of the bus waveguide, allowing selective excitation of a single supermode. By adjusting the relative phase and amplitude between the excitation fields, the splitting in the transmission spectrum can be eliminated, resulting in improved quality factors and eigenvalue measurements. It is shown that this interferometric technique can be exploited under both stationary and dynamic conditions of time evolution. The thesis also investigates the sensing performance of the three microresonators as a function of a backscattering perturbation, which could be caused, for example, by the presence of a molecule or particle near the microresonator waveguide. It is shown that the ILMR has better performance in terms of responsivity and sensitivity than the other two microresonators. In fact, it has both the enhanced sensitivity due to the square root dependence of the splitting on the perturbation (characteristic of EPs) and the ability to completely eliminate the region of insensitivity as the backscattering perturbation approaches zero, which is present in both the other two microresonators. To validate the models used, they were compared with experimental measurements both in the linear regime and, for TJMR, also in the nonlinear regime, with excellent agreement.