Philip Larkin has been considered primarily in terms of his contribution to the Movement of the Fifties; this thesis considers Larkin as an artist in his own right. His novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and his first volume of poetry, The North Ship, have received very little critical attention. Larkin's last two volumes of poetry, The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings, have been considered as two very similar works with little or no relation to his earlier work. This thesis is an attempt to demonstrate that there is a very clear line of development running through Larkin's work, in which the novels play as important a part as the poetry. The North Ship contains in embryonic form those themes which become important in the later work; it is different in technique, largely because it is immature and influenced very strongly by the poetry which Larkin was reading at the time of writing. The lyric element in this volume of poetry anticipates the later development in Larkin's poetic technique. The novels are considered as novel-poems and their poetic quality is demonstrated through close analysis which reveals their closely patterned quality and that the narrative level is important only as it mirrors the internal action of the central characters. The novels develop ideas which are present in The North Ship and they represent a considerable advance in the writer's confidence in handling his material in his own way. The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings use many of the techniques of the novels and are very closely linked with them in their basic themes. The Less Deceived shows Larkin becoming increasingly self-aware and from this awareness examining his society in a new light. In The Whitsun Weddings his self-awareness is increased and he is more tolerant of his own failings. His tolerance is extended also to his society and the volume as a whole represents Larkin's attempt to view man and society clearly and to accept them as they are. Both the novels and the later poetry contain lyric elements of an unusual nature. The development throughout his work is based on his ability to develop his technique to express his changing ideas. He moves from the use of totally conventional forms to express conventional ideas to the use of individualistic forms, developed from traditional material including the lyric, to express his sense of a society looking for, but not finding, order in traditional values. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis addresses the work of Philip Larkin in the light of critical positions, stemming from mainly modernist perspectives, which characterize it as the opposite of what counts as innovatory, experimental and progressive in twentieth-century poetry. It aims to critique this assumption without, however, trying to prove that Larkin’s work is modernist or experimental. Rather, understanding ‘form’ in modernism as an entity that resists subjectivity and ostensibly includes otherness within its self-reflexive boundaries, it aims to offer readings of Larkin’s work that do not begin from these parameters but from an understanding of otherness as relational. Additionally, it gives extended consideration to Larkin’s prose with the aim of initiating a reconsideration of Larkin’s contribution to literature in English from a perspective that includes the essays and the novels. My introduction sets out the reasons and precedents for thinking about otherness in Larkin’s work in a different way from that found in modernism-inclined literary criticism. I show that such criticism diagnoses an aesthetic regression in Larkin’s poems on the basis that they rely on the projection of personality rather than the foregrounding of form. I argue that recent critical work on modernism privileges form because of its ostensible ability to present otherness in art, but that this critical heuristic is inadequate for dealing with Larkin’s work. I then outline an alternative more suited to Larkin’s work: a way of conceptualising otherness that locates it in the relation of the work to subjectivities external to it (such as readers’), which, I argue, is not susceptible of capture through what is designated as ‘form’. The first chapter attends closely to the theme of failure to relate to otherness in Larkin’s two novels; I argue that it is this failure that Larkin’s fictions meditate on by creating fantasized love-objects that their protagonists desire and yet seek to arrest in non-response and self-identity. Building on this, the second chapter examines Larkin’s polemical deployment of the idea of ‘pleasure’ as what the reader coming from a position of otherness to the art is entitled to seek in it. Comparing Larkin’s position with Adorno’s in Aesthetic Theory, a major twentieth-century work on aesthetics in the capitalist age, I try to locate Larkin’s difference from Adorno and develop the perspective he offers in his essays and poems to show that it allows readers to approach literary writing without being constrained by formal prescriptions. The last three chapters are studies of three themes that have been the focus of special attention in Larkin criticism: subjective voice, place and death. In the third chapter, I argue that Larkin’s poetry makes use of (what I identify as) a ‘Romantic’ register that is undercut by a ‘personal’ one. I do this by examining how a Romantic voice – one that constructs the self and projects it into the world in symbolic and lyrical forms – is at odds with a personal voice which sees these forms as prisons. The result, I argue, is an art that explores the idea of being ‘different from oneself’. Chapter four, on the significance of place in Larkin, argues that while he does subscribe to certain notions of belonging to England, and more importantly, to the idea of belonging as a poetic imperative, he also problematizes what belonging means, treating it not as identification with a place, but as an unsettled and sometimes defamiliarizing relation with it. The last chapter, on the theme of death in Larkin’s work, shows that it uses ‘death’ not as a fixed point of annihilation, but one that moves backwards and forwards in life, informing its sense of possibility, and constituting an experience of something that is always present and yet always beyond experience.

This essay focuses on Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived, a collection of poems published in 1955, and tries to demonstrate how the poems within it can be organized and understood according to a contrast between more and less deceived. Through close reading and comparative analysis this overarching contrast is shown to be expressed by recurrences of imagery and thematic material as well as by a series of related opposing terms which inform many of the viewpoints expressed within the collection. These oppositions include those between illusion and disillusion, distance and proximity, surface and depth, artifice and reality as well as innocence and guilt. The essay also concludes that the overarching categories of greater and lesser deception are expressed to varying degrees by the different poems and that neither category can thus be considered as favoured above the other.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 79). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 79). Also available on the Internet.

This thesis examines time, death, and choice in Philip Larkin's poetry, arguing that his approach to these themes is not deterministic, but existential. The argument is based on the similarity between Larkin's views and those of three existential philosophers. Larkin's view of time, like Heidegger's, is that men live not in long stretches of time, but in processions of unconnected yet similar moments. A constant underlying sadness, like Kierkegaard's despair, makes each moment reminiscent of death. Like Sartre, Larkin finds meaning in his choices, and struggles to live authentically without expectation. Although Thomas Hardy influenced Larkin, given these similarities, Larkin's poetry cannot rightly be called deterministic. It is an attempt to preserve experience for its own sake.

Ultracold atomic gases have emerged as an ideal laboratory system to emulate many-body physics in an unprecedentedly controllable manner. Numerous many-body quantum states and phases have been experimentally explored and characterized using the ultracold atomic gases, offering new insights into many exciting physics ranging from condensed matters to cosmology. In this thesis, we will present a systematic numerical study of a novel experimental system, population imbalanced two-component ultracold Fermi gases. We explore the phase diagram of this system in both 3D and 1D especially focusing on the exotic Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase, which is characterized by a spatially oscillating order parameter. In 3D, we solve for the stationary states of trapped imbalanced Fermi gases in a wide range of parameter space with a home-made parallel eigen-solver for Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equations. Our results show that there exists a metastable state with a FFLO type oscillating order parameter. In 1D, we simulate the dynamical expansion of the population imbalanced Fermi gases from the trap. A numerically quasi-exact scheme, time-evolving block decimation (TEBD), is introduced for the comparative studies with the solution of the time-dependent BdG equation. Our results predict that the existence of FFLO states will leave conspicuous signatures in the density profiles during the expansion. For further understanding of the interplay between the population imbalance and two-body pairing interaction between two spin components, we also study the spin transport properties through trapped ultracold Fermi gases. The preliminary results will be discussed.

Thesis (M.A.)--Wheaton College, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

U6Fe has the highest superconducting transition temperature TSC ~ 4 K out of all of the U-based compounds. Unusually, the Pauli limit (1:84TSC = 7:36 T) is less than the observed critical field for both the a and c axes in this tetragonal material. Neither Pauli or usual BCS orbital limit is apparently respected. In order to explain why superconductivity exceeds the Pauli limit, it must be considered that either the superconducting state is unaffected by paramagnetic effects, or there is a large amount of spin-orbit scattering. Superconductivity is in the dirty limit for typical samples of U6Fe, which means that the latter cannot be precluded. Another unusual property of the superconducting state of U6Fe is that TSC has a positive dependence on the applied pressure P, for P < 4 kbar. This combined with other subtle signals in various measurements have led to the suggestion that a Charge Density Wave (CDW) state may exist in U6Fe below 110 K. The CDW state is typically favoured by materials with low-dimensional structural features such as chains of atoms. Such materials, if superconductors, are also candidates to exhibit the sought-after Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state, an unusual state in which the superconducting order parameter is modulated in real space. The FFLO is expected to be suppressed except in clean, Pauli limited materials. Therefore if U6Fe can be produced at high enough quality to bring the superconducting state into the clean limit, it would be a potential candidate for an FFLO state. Part of this project discusses apparatus and techniques applied with the goal of producing such quality samples of U6Fe. We have succeeded in the application of the Solid State Electrotransport (SSE) method to purifying samples, and have been able to replicate the highest Residual Resistivity Ratios (RRRs) achieved (~9, compared to 4 for typical samples), but for single crystals instead of the polycrystals produced in the past. In parallel with the progress made towards higher quality samples of U6Fe, a new X-ray scanner has been developed for grain mapping of samples. This has found application in the course of our synthesis studies. The best quality samples have been studied by X-ray diffraction on the XMaS beamline at the ESRF in Grenoble, France. Below TCDW ~ 10 K, satellites at (δH; δK; 0) = (±0:11;±0:11; 0) were observed that confirm a CDW state, albeit at much lower temperatures than anticipated. By examination of systematic satellite absences we have determined that the displacement vector → u is perpendicular to the modulation direction in k-space. Additionally it has been found that the symmetry of the lattice below TCDW is reduced from that of the room temperature I4=mcm structure. The appearance of additional Bragg peaks below ~110 K during these experiments were later cast into doubt by multiple scattering. We have, however, detected a signal in the form of a jump at ~110 K in specific heat measurements of our samples. These measurements also show a kink near to TCDW. We have additionally extended the investigation of the effect of pressure on the superconducting state. The maximum of TSC is confirmed in our samples, and the subsequent suppression of TSC and Hc2 is investigated up to 8 GPa. We have analysed our Hc2(T) curves at different pressures under a simple two-band model that fits the observed trends well and suggest that at the highest pressures U6Fe is approaching even more unusually enhanced Hc2 values.

Habil. : Lit. : Zürich : 1989. / Bibliogr.: p. 281-299.