abstract: Due to depletion of oil resources, increasing fuel prices and environmental issues associated with burning of fossil fuels, extensive research has been performed in biofuel production and dramatic progress has been made. But still problems exist in economically production of biofuels. One major problem is recovery of biofuels from fermentation broth with the relatively low product titer achieved. A lot of in situ product recovery techniques including liquid-liquid extraction, membrane extraction, pervaporation, gas stripping and adsorption have been developed and adsorption is shown to be the most promising one compared to other methods. Yet adsorption is not perfect due to defect in adsorbents and operation method used. So laurate adsorption using polymer resins was first investigated by doing adsorption isotherm, kinetic, breakthrough curve experiment and column adsorption of laurate from culture. The results indicate that polymer resins have good capacity for laurate with the highest capacity of 430 g/kg achieved by IRA-402 and can successfully recover laurate from culture without causing problem to Synechocystis sp.. Another research of this paper focused on a novel adsorbent: magnetic particles by doing adsorption equilibrium, kinetic and toxicity experiment. Preliminary results showed excellent performance on both adsorption capacity and kinetics. But further experiment revealed that magnetic particles were toxicity and inhibited growth of all kinds of cell tested severely, toxicity probably comes from Co (III) in magnetic particles. This problem might be solved by either using biocompatible coatings or immobilization of cells, which needs more investigation. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Chemical Engineering 2012

The connection between social change and marriage is of critical concern for nineteenth century English novelists, and the progression of both class shifts and alterations in marriage are discernable through these novelists' respective works. Due to the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, England's social hierarchy began to shift allowing for the rise of a middle class; with the professional class's ascension came the decline of the landed gentry. These social changes blurred class boundaries and created an increasing socially mobile society. Additionally, they coincided with changes to marriage framework, as matrimony was moving towards being based on love rather than the traditional socioeconomic foundation. As both class lines and the love-revolution took place around the same time historically, there was a key change in marriage suitability, making cross-class and love-based marriages more of a reality. Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy are two of the most notable authors from the nineteenth century who chronicle this tension between marriage and class in their respective novels. This thesis focuses specifically on Austen's Persuasion and Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, arguing that they both visualize a successful marriage that is predicated on both love and socioeconomic status. Their similar image of the sustainable marriage gives value to both the socioeconomic-based and love-based marriages, depicting a realistic conceptualization of marriage.

My dissertation charts the transatlantic nineteenth-century novel's subtle revisions to the traditional marriage plot, in terms of both narrative and form, identifying a gradual shift in the way marriage was fictionalized. I argue that incremental revisions to the marriage plot reconstruct positive representations of female marital experience into negative depictions that transform marriage into a form of institutionalization that leads to psychological and bodily trauma. I reveal the development of a collective trauma narrative that underscores the nineteenth-century woman's experience living inside society's oppressive marital culture. The novel serves as the body of cultural work that both represents and shapes women's marital experiences inside a society that legally forced them to surrender their identity, person, and property to their husband, as well as socially holding them to a much higher standard of propriety and obedience. In specific chapters, I create transatlantic pairings that trace the novel's troubled efforts to free itself and its heroines from the constraints of the marriage plot which reflect women's inability to do so in real life.

My dissertation interrogates Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s representation of African women in her literary oeuvre. I argue that her female characters bear witness to intersecting oppressions of African women portraying them as being extremely marginalized at home and lacking achievable alternate homes. This study also interrogates Adichie’s feminist philosophy and posits that she typically agitates for equality for all regardless of sex, gender, race, and/or other defining identities. Lastly, I argue that Adichie uses the practice of the African novel to rewrite the character of African women in African literature where her uniqueness hinges on her interrogation of the place of Africans in contemporary world culture, in turn, uses the novel to critique society’s hierarchies of privilege and oppression and of stereotypical representation of Africa and Africans in the world arena.

In FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED, unwilling refugees from an alternate universe find their place in our New York City, making peace with what they have lost.

Senchimentaru na tabi fuyu no tabi or Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey, a photobook created and published by photographer Araki Nobuyoshi in 1991, documented two highly personal events of the photographer's life. The first section consists of twenty-two images of Araki's 1971 honeymoon with his wife Yōko Aoki, while the second section features ninety-one images and an essay documenting the last six months of Yōko's life in 1989-90. This thesis measures SJ/WJ against a Japanese literary tradition invoked by Araki in his opening manifesto: the shishōsetsu. A genre of writing from the early 1900's that read like a confessional or personal diary, the shishōsetsu was regarded as a `true' story insofar as it revealed a totally transparent `author' within a totally transparent `text.' Given these criteria, this thesis determines the success of Araki's SJ/WJ as a true-to-life autobiography.

My dissertation argues that the study of antebellum American religious novels is hindered by the secularization narrative, the widely held conviction that modernity entails the decline of religion. Because this narrative has been refuted by the growing field of secularization theory and because the novel is associated with modernity, the novel form must be reexamined. Specifically, I challenge the common definition of the novel as a secular form. By investigating novels by Lydia Maria Child, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Hannah Bond, I show that religion and the novel form are not opposed. In fact, scholars' unexamined and unacknowledged definitions of religion and secularity cause imprecision. For example, the Marxist definition of religion as ideology causes misrepresentations of novels with evangelical purposes, such as Warner's <i>The Wide, Wide World</i> and Bond's <i>The Bondwoman's Narrative</i>. Both novels feature protagonists who submit--one to patriarchy and the other to slavery--a stance that appears masochistic to feminist scholars and critics of slave narratives, respectively. However, attending to the biblical allusions, divine interventions, and theological arguments that saturate these texts places them in another framework altogether and reveals that they are commenting not on one's relationship with other humans but with God. Likewise, unexamined definitions of the secular are problematic because critics often conflate two definitions: the etymological sense of "earthly" and the modern sense of "anti-religious." This slippage underlies the view that religious literature of the nineteenth century became less religious, when it simply became more grounded in daily life. Therefore, to label as "secular" an author like Stowe, who promoted an earthly, lived Christianity, is only accurate if one means "mundane." Finally, my dissertation demonstrates that literary criticism itself relies on the secularization narrative, perceiving itself as modern and progressive. This reliance obscures the role literature has played in constructing this narrative. For example, colonial novels like <i>Hobomok</i> and <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> rewrite American religious history to exclude Calvinism. Noting how our investment in secularity has delimited interpretive possibilities, this project opens the way for increased clarity in the study of religion in literature.

HAITI, 1965 is a historical novel set in Haiti where a struggling taxi driver, Raymond L’Eveillé, struggles to provide for his family under the rule of the infamous dictator François Duvalier Sr. Raymond’s brother Nicolas, a professor and attorney, lives a more luxurious lifestyle, and both brothers are at odds over finances. When Nicolas decides to write a book about the crimes committed by the government, the inevitable happens. The brutal Tonton Macoutes militia raid his home and find notes that are as evidence enough to send him to Haiti's most notorious gulag of the era, Fort Dimanche, It will be up to Raymond to save his brother. He will have to use his resources and street smarts to get himself arrested, infiltrate the dungeons of Fort Dimanche to find Nicolas, and plan a near-impossible escape.

This paper discusses how the author created a comic as a way to explore their personal suffering and the suffering of those around them throughout schooling. It defines the inspirations, both personal and technical for how the comic was produced and how it will expand to a graphic novel after college.

Since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences was published in 1965, there have been many attempts to define and explain the phenomenon of the "non-fiction novel" as a unified narrative genre. Some of these attempts have been highly theoretical and scholarly, but most have been rather loose definitions referring to an extremely wide range of diverse factual narratives. Over the years, so many different works have been called "non-fiction novels" that it now seems as if the notion of such a unified genre is questionable. Surely it is not generically useful to say that such functionally distinct works as Oscar Lewis's La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty (1967) and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart ot the American Dream (1971) belong in the same narrative category. The purpose of this study is to show that many of the works routinely referred to as "non-fiction novels" perform fundamentally different narrative functions and do not belong together in a unified genre. Roman Jakobson's model of communication and his notion of the "dominant function" are used to identify three functional categories into which the narratives discussed in the study logically fall: first, there are predominantly sociological works in which the referential function is the most important element of the communication; second, there are predominantly journalistic works in which the opinions of the writer or emotive function constitute the central narrative concern; and thirdly, we have works performing a dominant novelistic or aesthetic function in the sense that the secondary meanings and themes implied are the most important elements communicated. The thesis follows the following structure. In the introductory chapter, a critique of some of the major generic theories of the "non-fiction novel" as unified genre is offered. The purpose here is not to caricature what are sometimes extremely sophisticated studies. (Indeed, in my own analysis of texts, I am often indebted to the critical insights of the scholars whose theories I question in the introduction.) My purpose is merely to show that the corpus of works each writer refers to can be divided more logically between different dominant narrative functions. The introduction ends with a more detailed explanation of the adaptation of Jakobson's notion of "the dominant" and how it relates to the functional categories identified. Chapter 2 offers analyses of a group of documentary narratives that perform a dominant sociological function but have often been referred to as "non-fiction novels." The chapter starts with an analysis of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a text widely regarded as the first real American example of the "genre." This is followed by an examination of the anthropological works of Oscar Lewis: Five Families: Mexican Case Studles in the Culture of Poverty (1959), The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (1964), Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and his Family (1964) and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. I conclude the chapter with an analysis of the recent sociological works of Studs Terkel: Division Street: America (1968), Hard Times: An oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do (1974). In Chapter 3, the notion of subjective participation journalism is explained. This is followed by an analysis of three of the most famous and creative of the works that fall into this functional category: Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (1966), Michael Herr's Vietnam classic, Dispatches (1977), and Norman Mailer's account of a famous protest march, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (1968). Chapter 4 offers a discussion of three works that perform a dominant novelistic function in the realistic tradition of Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment. All three are based on actual murder cases, but the facts of the stories are subordinated to the novelistic themes the author wishes to abstract. They are: Meyer Levin's Compulsion (1957), Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979) and Capote's In Cold Blood. From this outline, it may appear as if the study is loaded in favour of the sociological works discussed in Chapter 2. This is intentional because, although many critics have referred to them as "non-fiction novels", very little systematic and detailed analysis of these works as a corpus has been forthcoming. This long chapter is an attempt to redress the balance.