In this essay, I analyse the characters of Frodo and Aragorn in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson’s film trilogy in order to see if traits and relationships are consistent between the novel and the films. Any changes in characters and the ways they interact in relationships entail changes not only to the overarching narrative, but potentially to the most important themes of the story: friendship and heroism. This is important for the general discourse on the films as adaptations, since they have been accused of not being true to the thematic core of the source material. Peter Jackson’s claim that the intention was to always remain true to the spirit of Tolkien’s novel, then necessitates a closer comparison of the two works. Therefore, in investigating the characters I look not only for differences and similarities, but also for the repercussions these have on the story and the potential reasons behind them. By examining the characters from the perspective of the novel, the films and the filmmakers’ commentaries, I discuss how the removal of social class in the films changes the actions of the characters and consequently affects the themes of friendship and heroism. I also bring up the effects of changing from a novel to film as well as the symbiotic relationship between the character traits and the narrative as a whole. This essay shows that though the social class, character traits and the narrative flow are changed in a circular pattern. A closer look at the films reveals that the story’s core themes of friendship and heroism not only remain consistent, but are given more emphasis than in the novel.

In order to investigate if difference in personality is depended on the teat positions in piglets, Sus scrofa, 63 piglets, from 21 litters, were studied. The piglets were at an age between 9 and 31 days. 3 piglets in each of the 21 litters, one that suckled at an anterior teat, one at a middle teat, and one at a posterior teat, were studied during lactation, undisturbed activity, and introduction to a novel object respectively to new straw. In total thirteen behaviors were recorded. The only significant difference between the teat position were disputes during suckling (P=0.018). There was a tendency of playing during undisturbed activity (P=0.062) between the teat positions. There were significant differences between the litters for every behavior except for inactive piglet lying alone (P=0.108) and when exploring new straw (P=0.584). There is only evidence for behavioral differences for the frequency of disputes during suckling between piglets at different teat positions. A principal component analysis, which accounted for 64.2 % of the variance, suggested four personality traits: exploration (19.2 %), playfulness (17.5 %), interest in food (14.8 %), and interest in straw (10.9 %). However, no significant differences were found for these components for the different teat positions.

Research where personality in animals is studied is becoming more and more common. In this area there are different concepts like behavioural syndrome and animal personality and they usually talk about consistency in behaviour over time and situations. This consistent individual behaviour can be used as an indicator of how individuals can handle and adjust to new situations in the environment. Because of this, personality studies in animals are very important in animal welfare. In this study personality in dairy cattle in lose housing were studied. 28 cows of the breeds Swedish black and white cattle (SLB) and Swedish red and white cattle (SRB) was studied during three observation situations (milking, undisturbed behaviour and novel object). With the help of Principal component analysis four components that together explained 72% of the variation in data were found. The two first components could then be interpreted. The first component corresponds to the dimension extraversion in the”Big five” model that is used in personality studies in humans. The second component was the opposite of the first one, which means that it showed low activity and low sociability. This low activity could indicate fear dependent on why the cows were standing so much. T-tests only showed significant differences in the behaviour based on the age of the cows, which indicates that the personality trait becomes more typical with higher age. The conclusion is that there are individual differences in dairy cattle which could be interpreted as personality traits.

Abstract The family can be viewed as a reflector of culture, which becomes increasingly rich and varied as time goes by. It is like a person who undergoes all the vicissitudes of human beings' experiences, so it is not only a valuable specimen for us to have a better understanding of the course of human history but also an important basis for us to know ourselves. For this reason, the family novels have always been a extremely flexible and rich narrative genre, which represent complex social performance and the culture world in both eastern and western literature. This thesis is focused on Mo Yan's four novels related to the family. They were "Red Sorghum Family", " herbivorous Family", " Big Breasts & Wide Hips", and " Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out". For one thing, we deconstructed the survival ethics masked in these novels, analyzed the heroic image described in these novels, and discussed the issue of "degradation of species ". In what follows, we explored the underlying love ethic in these novels from the two perspectives: the suspension of moral and the reversion of tradition. Previous studies have demonstrated that in Mo Yan's family novels, making the flesh public is used as a method of unfolding primitive vitality. Third, we delved into the connotation after the pleasure of making love (body of pleasure) through an analysis of Mo Yan's praising body and preference over the land and lower body. Mo Yan's family novels are also filled with the plots about hunger and violence. Finally, we attempted to investigate the narrative skills and moral of Mo Yan's family novels. With the fact that Mo Yan elaborated the plots, his works about the family are one of the most brilliant novels. These novels describe the lifeblood of both paternal and maternal family system; they also revealed the implications about Mo Yan's viewpoints on the relationship between nation and country in the society intertwined with war, hunger, and violence.

My thesis aims to explore the conflict between bourgeois and romance ideologies in Charlotte Lennox¡¦s The Female Quixote in terms of women¡¦s reading, power, and marriage in the eighteenth century. In chapter one, I focus on Arabella¡¦s access to romantic fantasies, offering an overview of women¡¦s position and reading in bourgeois society. Through examining the society¡¦s attitude to and concerns with reading, we can see that in the bourgeois ideal women are voiceless and restrained within the domestic domain, the one that offers no opportunities for the significance that romance heroines enjoy. Also, both women¡¦s motives to read and the society¡¦s eagerness to prohibit it reflect the economical and capitalistic sides of the bourgeoisie. Then, Arabella¡¦s exclusive reading of romance makes her totally subject to it; the canonized romances become the female tradition for Arabella. By comparing the quasi-classicism of romance to the contemporaneity of novel, the discrepancy between Arabella and the outside world is clearly shown. She endeavors to yearn for significance in the prosaic reality which offers no opportunity. Consequently, chapter two examines Arabella¡¦s power on two levels. Arabella, trying to mediate the gap, constructs her romantic counter-reality with the help of the power of imagination. Arabella manipulates her surroundings to make them meet the requirements of the romantic world, which appears to be an autonomous domain governed by love, excluding the laws, morality, and secularity of the reality. Furthermore, in the love-ruled realm the power structure of bourgeois society seems to be reversed. Women have power over their submissive and constant suitors. The typical images of both genders are reversed. However, heroines¡¦ possession of power is at the expense of rejecting and denying female sexuality and desire. Therefore the autonomy and the reversal of power structure proposed by romance are actually illusive; the power only exists by sacrificing female subjectivity. In chapter three I will probe into the double-edged role marriage plays. The marriage between Arabella and Glanville can be seen as the compromise between romance and bourgeois ideologies. With the help of her manipulation of the reality, Arabella¡¦s marriage does exemplify the romantic ideal. Glanville is romantically presented as a hero performing countless actions to win his lover. Their marriage is depicted as an amatory union, which is the essential ending in romances wherein love is sanctified. On the other hand, the marriage ending also satisfies the concerns of middle-class society, wherein marriage is considered as a trade and bears an economic mission rather than connecting two lovers. Hence the marriage plot functions as a happy ending that settles the two confronting ideologies.

This text describes the synthesis of surface-oriented multilayers based on novel monomeric species. The impetus of this study is to incorporate atypical species and techniques in order to prepare well-ordered assemblies on gold surfaces. These thin films were characterized by one or more of following techniques: grazing angle FT-IR; optical ellipsometry and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. First, chemical vapor deposition polymerization was used to prepare surface-oriented monolayers on amine functionalized gold from 4-aminobenzaldehyde and 5-phenyl-1, 3-dioxolane-2, 4-dione. The 4-aminobenzaldehyde showed regular increases in the intensity of characteristic IR absorptions with number of deposition cycles while the dioxolane showed no regularity in this respect. We infer from our data that this technique is a practical way to synthesize highly conjugated polymers. Secondly, we investigated the preparation of surface oriented materials based on host-guest assemblies. Cyclodextrin functionalized gold surfaces could serve as orientational templates for multilayered well-ordered host-guest materials. However, in our study, thiol modified cyclodextrin showed no ability to organize surface multilayers via surface crystallization in the presence of the appropriate host; nor did it show an ability to pre-organize in solution via polyethylene glycol rotaxane formation followed by surface attachment. Finally, surface-oriented organometallic monolayers and multilayers were prepared from alkyne functionalized gold surfaces. Using bis-orthodimethylaminomethyl (NCN) ligands we synthesized two unique surface-oriented organometallic assemblies. Palladium NCN hydrosulfides formed monolayers on gold. Characterization by FT-IR, XPS and ellipsometry show that these species similar to their thiol counterparts. In addition, organometallic polymers were grown from alkyne functionalized surfaces. The thickness of these films, which reached 40 Å by ellipsometry was dependent upon the nature of the alkyne initiator. / text

In this thesis we discuss quantum Hall effects in bilayer graphene and other novel two-dimensional electron systems, focusing on the interplay between nontrivial Fermi surface topology and electron-electron interactions. In the first chapter I will give a brief introduction to some aspects of the quantum Hall effects. The second chapter discusses the physics in bilayer graphene in the absence of external magnetic fields. The first half discusses the band gap opening and trigonal warping effects in its bandstructure, and the second half focuses on the insulating ground state that results from electron-electron interactions. The third chapter discusses the single-particle Landau level structure in bilayer graphene. We will see that when both the band gap and trigonal warping effects are present, the highest Landau level in the valence band is three-fold degenerate at small magnetic fields. As the field increases, the three fold degeneracy is lifted and the Landau level structure gradually reduces to that in the absence of trigonal warping effects. At the end of the chapter we will demonstrate a formalism to map the momentum distribution of the single-particle Landau level structure. Such a mapping will give valuable information about the single-particle bandstructure. The fourth chapter deals with electron-electron interactions in the integer quantum Hall regime, where there is no fractional filling of the orbital degrees of freedom. In such a regime, the effect of electron-electron interactions often leads to spontaneous ordering of the internal degrees of freedom, such as spin, layer and valley. The first part of the chapter will establish the general formalism of Hartree-Fock theory in the quantum Hall regime, and then a specific theory for gapped bilayer graphene with trigonal warping effects is constructed. The resulting ground states are analyzed in the last part of the chapter. / text

"Uncanny Affects" argues, broadly, that the gothic novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries models a critical ethics of reading. By examining recurrent scenes of reading and interpretation in key gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816), and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), I surmise that this critical ethics posits affect, or the experience of generalized emotion, as central to the act of interpretation. I contend that this gothic critical ethics influences the concurrent development of the discipline of literary criticism. By reading these key gothic novels and then tracking their broader influence on Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, I make a case for the significance of a gothic epistemology to the development of literary criticism in British and American universities from the nineteenth century onward. A focus on the gothic novel's critically inclined characters, including antiquarians and detectives, enables me to read gothic novels and other gothically-inflected writing for what they can tell us about the practice of interpretation, particularly as that practice becomes institutionalized and professionalized. Thus I track the gothic mode's tendency toward affective reading in relation to ideas of professionalization, which values critical detachment or disinterestedness in interpretation. As a result, interpretation in the gothic mode can seem too emotional or "creative" for a typically professional practice. Reading the gothic as such links it to modern discussions about interpretive practices such as close reading, paranoid and reparative reading, and surface reading. Perhaps more importantly, reading the gothic alongside these new discussions on critical ethics allows us to think through the place of affect and pleasure in an ethical critical practice. Ultimately, examining how gothic texts formulate a gothic mode or philosophy of reading demonstrates the real ubiquity this mode has achieved in the critical setting, a ubiquity that continues to shape and influence our conceptions of scholarly and critical reading even today. / text

Le Goût piquant de l'Univers is written by the Francophone Belgian writer Elisa Brune. Brune holds a Ph.D. in environmental sciences, and this novel does not stray far from her training in science. The setting of this oeuvre is that of a Provençal village of Peyresq, the premiere annual rendezvous for the world's foremost cosmologists. The vocabulary employed in this book is that of highly scientific coteries. The work's sentence structure is a mix of dialogue, and unruly compound phrases. These two aforementioned stylistic choices made the translation of this work especially difficult. In translating, I worked with Dr. Gaëtan Brulotte, a French-language writer and professor; Dr. Roberta Tucker, a French literature professor; and Dr. David Rabson, a theoretical physicist. All of their unique knowledge, in tandem with my familiarity with French and English, allowed for engaging exchanges on subtleties, nuances, and technicalities in the translation.

My thesis is a contemporary realistic novel using alternating perspectives. Footwork explores the modern day-to-day struggles and temptations that face monogamous relationships. How do we negotiate truth within society and expectations that others have of us? What are the deals we make with ourselves and each other in order to live within society? Footwork examines how truth and pain interact. Does truth always have to come forward at the cost of pain? There are three books that represent the contemporary cannon where Footwork could be situated. Infidelity by Stacey May Fowles encompasses alternate perspectives and deals with an affair as the central theme. Love and the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche focuses on two perspectives of an affair and much of the book uses dialogue with the characters’ inner thoughts also written. Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper concentrates on a dysfunctional family, infidelity and is primarily dialogue. All three novels explore realistic portrayals of truth and infidelity. Footwork goes further by examining the intricacies of how people deal with deception and also forces the reader to have an emotional reaction. One of the ways this emotional reaction is achieved is by Footwork primarily being written in dialogue form. The dialogue encourages the reader to become emotionally invested in the characters’ struggles. The novel does not employ flashbacks, but instead focuses on the immediacy of the characters’ lives to create a story authentic to contemporary relationships. Footwork also uses alternating perspectives as a device to make the reader question which character he/she should be fighting for or against. All the characters have motives for why and how they deceive. The reader understands one character’s perspective only to be challenged by another character’s perspective. All three main characters at the end of Footwork find and/or speak their truth despite the pain that is inflicted.