The Epic is situated between history and the myth. It is a tribute to the entire cultural experience of a society to one character who has made a mark on their time, and derives all past, present, and future values of that society from this character thus rendering the epic a source of identity serving to distinguish itself from others. And of all the places in the world there is no place I would rather be. From the mind of the critically acclaimed visionary who brought you illuminazioni, Non Worldwide and Paradiso, Comes part one of An earth shattering Epic Globalist Thriller, Introducing : ONTICIDE 1 A new novel by Chino Amobi

Tundra is a murder mystery/coming-of-age novel about a fifteen-year-old boy named Ethan and his high school biology teacher, Pam, who come together over a mysterious text-based video game and unwittingly use it to resolve an unsolved murder from 1994. The novel is largely interested in bodies—their perplexities, pleasures, and limitations—as well as what it means to “come of age” as a queer person in a time and place where queer folks are denied so many markers of adulthood—marriage, families, oftentimes job and housing security. This is also a book about the myriad of ways in which technology enables us to pursue modes of connection and intimacy outside of the limitations of both our bodies and repressive social strictures. This thesis contains the first seven chapters of the novel, constituting Part One.

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS MANDALA SPRINGS by Juleen Collins Florida International University, 2018 Miami, Florida Professor Debra Dean, Major Professor MANDALA SPRINGS is the small town setting for a story that explores the nature of secrets, lies, revelations, and the damage each can cause. The narrative follows Bodhi MacLachlan, a young woman who struggles with Borderline Personality Disorder, back to the psychiatric hospital where she has resided in-patient multiple times. The long-term association with her psychiatrist becomes complicated when she reveals details of her affair with a secretive man. Meanwhile, she becomes obsessed with uncovering the mysteries of the relationship between a new patient, Scott, and his much younger sister, Ollie, to whom he is guardian. As Bodhi proceeds, she unintentionally but irreparably damages her relationships with each of these characters. Ultimately, she must come to terms with the consequences of her actions. To reflect the complicated, upside down world of psychiatric illness, the story is written in the hybrid form of a playscript-novel.

L’intertextualité devrait permettre d’appréhender l’œuvre sarrautienne dans ses contradictions structurelles, réflexivement représentées, dans son évolution problématique, dans sa spécificité littéraire. Une première partie, analytique, met en évidence le régime moderne de l’emprunt, à travers l’étude de deux Nouveaux Romans emblématiques (Portrait d’un inconnu, Le planétarium), tandis que s’amorcent, avec « disent les imbéciles » et Ich sterbe, un tournant autobiographique et une restauration de la directivité auctoriale, caractéristiques des derniers opus. Une seconde partie, synthétique, retrace le contexte culturel de l’emploi figuré du mot tropismes ; s’efforce de répondre à l’objection qui oppose la composition d’Enfance à la discontinuité fragmentaire des autres livres ; propose d’identifier, dans la « sous-conversation », la réécriture d’une forme de dialogue commenté que Proust, héritier de Balzac, a perfectionnée, mais qui devient, chez Sarraute, le lieu d’une déconstruction littéraire du soupçon moderne, où son œuvre peut trouver sa cohérence thématique et stylistique comme sa pertinence historique en se mesurant à un paradigme majeur du XXème siècle. Enfin, un Répertoire des allusions est joint en Appendice pour illustrer la densité de l’intertexte sarrautien, de Tropismes à Ouvrez. – Manifestant la radicalité d’une recherche expérimentale, d’un « tâtonnement aveugle dans le langage », l’intertextualité offre un point de vue critique sur l’œuvre sarrautienne, permettant de saisir comment le projet littéraire, à la fois psychologique et poétique, d’un auteur se réfléchit et s’épuise dans les tensions souvent extrêmes de ses textes indécidables, à l’inapparente opacité, attendant de l’avenir d’imprévisibles métamorphoses. / Is Intertextuality a permanent (even a structural) component of the Nathalie Sarraute’s writing? To maintain this critical position, we should first scrutinize how the intertextuality system, especially in Portrait of a Man Unknown and in The planetarium, is strongly perturbing the narrative conventions and promoting a reflexive approach of the text; while Fools say and Ich sterbe show an autobiographical evolution and a restoration of the author’s directivity; then some examples from a missing Index of References based upon the whole of the Sarrautean oeuvre should confirm the extent of intertextuality; in a second section, we should relativize the originality of the sarrautean tropisms by studying how the traditional forms of dialog or fragment are renewed by such a rhetorical “estrangement”. So, with the question of intertextuality, we could realize how a literary project become distorted by the practice of writing, since the Sarraute’s post-romantic conceptions heavily contrast with the modernist features of her works, which is a deciding factor of their aporetic ambiguity.

In 2017, a novel miRNA was found at the MLTU-region of adenoviral genome, termed as MLP-TSS-sRNA. This current study started with performing a series of mutations in the MLP-TSS-sRNA in order to investigate how the MLP-TSS-sRNA as a single stranded small RNA was protected from rapid RNA degradation in transfected cells (in vivo). Since the hairpin structure of this small RNA was considered to be the reason to its high stability, the deletions of nucleotides were occurred inside the complementary region and the loop of the hairpin structure. Three variants of MLP-TSS-sRNAs were therefore transfected into the A549-lung epithelial cancer cell line and measured during times series studies. The results showed that the wild type form of this small RNA has the highest stability. Subsequently, a panel of different synthetic single-stranded RNAs, in which the MLP-TSS-sRNA sequence was modified to target different genes of interest, was used to compare its suppressive efficiency to the more traditional double stranded small interfering RNA “siRNA” or miRNA mimics. To this, the MLP-TSS-sRNA sequence was modified in such a way that it targeted the Dicer mRNA, thus termed as 3s-dicer-miRNA. Successful suppression of the Dicer mRNA as a consequence of using this modified 3s-dicer-miRNA sequence could emphasize that, theoretically, any possible mRNA of interest could be targeted. To express this miRNA inside a host cell, its sequence was incorporated in a CMV-driven plasmid vector system, upstream of the gene encoding for the HDV-ribozyme, which showed to be functional in vitro, but not in vivo. On the other hand, the vector system showed a clear tendency of being functional even in vivo, once it was put into the test by co-transfecting it with a Dicer plasmid inside 293-cells.

This study examines three 18th-century novels and their connection to the romances of the 17th century, the middle ages, as well as the Greek romances that flourished during the Roman Empire. I argue that the novel and the romance differ, not because the novel possesses some intrinsic formal, structural, or thematic essence wholly and disjunctively different from the romance, but rather because the two forms have been arbitrarily differentiated over a long contentious history for ideological and not categorical reasons. Thus, I define the novel not as a form or a genre, but as a mode and medium—a way and means of expressing story rather than as a structural, shaping category of story. Romance, on the other hand, is a type of story particularly interested in how to deal with difference. It asks: How do I deal with difference without annihilating or exiling it or myself in the process? When the romance gets subsumed into the novel as the dominant mode of prose fiction, it re-inscribes this ethical aspect of the romance’s structure through the use of resembling conventions and tropes. In analyzing how resemblances are treated in three 18th-century novels—Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Sophia Lee’s The Recess, and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess—my dissertation focuses on the novel’s re-use of the romance to explore anxieties about difference and sameness, about moral issues related to personhood, and about the tension between the individual and the collective. These texts ask: How do we cope with and incorporate the difference of the other when privilege in rank and perception is assumed by the subjective self? This question informs familiar and social relations of all kinds. It illuminates the 18th century’s scientific assumption that reality can be dissected via objective observation. It influences views of aesthetics, of gender and sexual politics, of creativity and the conflation of originality with novelty and of repetition with derivativeness.

The Puerto Rican coqui frog (Eleutherodactylus coqui) has been hypothesized to affect bird communities in Hawaii by 1) competing with insectivorous birds for prey, 2) providing prey for predatory birds, and 3) bolstering populations of non-native mammals by serving as prey. No previous studies have collected empirical data on these potential impacts. We investigated the impact of coquis on birds at two scales. For our first research question, we used stable isotope analyses to address whether three species of insectivorous bird, one native and two non-native, and coquis could compete for invertebrate prey. We found that the coquis overlapped in isotopic niche space with all three bird species, which suggests these species occupy a similar place in the food web. However, our Bayesian diet analysis suggests that coquis mostly feed on Acari, Amphipoda, and Blattodea (>90%), and only consume about 2% Araneae, the only diet source they share with birds. This result suggests that coquis do not heavily compete with these bird species for prey. For our second research question, we conducted avian point counts in coqui and non-coqui plots across 15 sites on the island of Hawaii. We modeled whether coqui presence or density explained patterns of insectivorous, vertebrate-preying, and native bird abundance. We estimated abundances of birds in coqui and non-coqui plots using hierarchical Bayesian N-mixture models with random effects. We tested whether habitat variables differed across coqui and non-coqui plots and whether coqui density was correlated with any habitat variable to more confidently attribute changes in bird abundance across coqui and non-coqui plots to the frogs. We found that coquis were associated with greater abundances of vertebrate-preying, generalist insectivorous, and non-native birds in Hawaii. Vertebrate-preying birds showed the strongest association, with a 0.97 probability of abundance being at least 50% higher in coqui plots. Native birds did not show differences in abundance across coqui and non-coqui plots. Because insectivorous bird and native bird abundance did not differ across coqui invasion fronts, our results suggest that coquis primarily affect Hawaiian birds by serving as a food resource for predatory birds, and not as competitors for invertebrate prey.

Le thème de l’immigration a inspiré une floraison d’œuvres littéraires francophones. Celles-ci prennent appui sur les grandes mobilités humaines et technologiques inhérentes au XXIesiècle et figurent les défis propres à la société de globalisation, principalement les problèmes de cohabitation interculturelle. La réception de ce corpus, dans le cas du roman africain subsaharien, parle de l’émergence d’une "nouvelle génération" de romanciers africains; thèse par ailleurs accréditée par la démarche institutionnelle des écrivains migrants eux-mêmes, comme en témoigne l’affiliation de certains au mouvement de la "littérature-monde" en français. La thèse se propose d’interroger cette problématique à travers une approche inspirée de l’analyse du discours littéraire. Elle se fonde sur le rappel de l’historiographie du roman africain de voyage. Il s’agit d’abord de questionner la périodisation des œuvres qui mettent en scène le parcours d’un personnage africain en Occident, dont certaines, bien que fondatrices, sont rarement prises en compte par le discours critique. Ensuite l’analyse porte sur la comparaison des œuvres de la "négritude" et celles de la "migritude",d’une part à l’aune des catégories comme le personnage, l’espace et l’imaginaire; d’autre part à travers les phénomènes d’intertextualité entre ces romans. Enfin, à la lumière des théories postcoloniales et de la sociologie du fait littéraire, la thèse présente cette littérature émergente comme la réécriture d’une archive; l’interrogation relative à l’accessibilité de l’Afrique et de sa diaspora à la culture du monde global. En cela la "migritude" se pose comme un mot-valise qui intègre aussi le discours de la "négritude". / The topic of immigration has inspired an explosion of novels in Francophone Literature. They usually lean on the twenty-first century’s mobility of people and technologies in order to fictionalize issues related to cosmopolitanism. In the specific context of sub-Saharan African Literature, literary criticism assimilates this corpus to the ‘’Migritude’’, a phenomenon presented as the raising of a new generation of African writers in contemporary France. The writer’s institutional approach also comes to strengthen this perception. Indeed, a mess of them have signed the manifesto of the World Literature in French. Our thesis needs to examine these problems through the Literature Discourse Analysis approach. The primary step is about the reminder of historiography related to postcolonial African travel fictions. Afterwards the reflection seeks to compare those African novels, between the founding and the recent, on the basis of categories such as characters, space and imaginary. With regard to postcolonial theories as well as the narrative phenomenon of intertextuality, this thesis finally consider the emerging of post-colonial African Travel Literature as the rewriting of an archive running across Francophone African travel-writings since the early twenty century. They all question the accessibility of Africa and its diaspora to the Global Culture.

Le roman catholique tel que nous le connaissons est le fruit d’une illusion rétrospective. Nous avons voulu, dans cette thèse, montrer que l’on ne peut lire le roman du second XIXe siècle au prisme de sa popularité au XXe siècle. Le succès qu’il rencontre dans l’entre-deux-guerres est le fruit d’une évolution lente. Des auteurs comme Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans ou Léon Bloy, n’ont été acceptés de leur temps ni par le monde laïque, ni par le monde catholique. Ils occupent une place inconfortable entre le « prophète romantique » et l’« intellectuel catholique ». Si le monde intellectuel chrétien du XXe siècle s’est servi de ces auteurs pour accréditer l’existence du genre, le roman catholique est loin, au XIXe siècle, de constituer une évidence. Nos recherches explorent en conséquence sa visibilité à cette époque. Basées sur un travail d’archives qui se fonde sur le dépouillement des journaux et bibliographies catholiques, elles ont permis de reconstituer les difficiles rapports du monde chrétien avec le roman. Cette approche archéologique contribue à restituer l’ampleur de la tentative de réforme par l’art qu’ont essayé de mener à bien Barbey d’Aurevilly, Huysmans et Bloy. Elle sert de fondement à un travail de poétique qui interroge, dans le cadre de l’évolution de l’écriture romanesque, le sens qu’il faut accorder à cette tentative de révolution esthétique. / This dissertation explores the constitution of the Catholic novel as a genre in the second half of the 19th century. It aims to show how Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Léon Bloy were misread, partly because of the success of the genre during the 20th century. The popularity of the 20th-century Catholic novelists such as Claude Mauriac or Georges Bernanos has indeed swept away the difficulties encountered by Catholic writers over the course of this anti-clerical period. This work invetigates the reception of the Catholic novel at that time. It is based on historical researches, especially the study of Christian "bibliographies", Catholic press and edition. This provides a better understanding of Barbey d’Aurevilly, Huysmans and Bloy’s conception of Catholic novel as an original theory of art.

The nucleolus is the site for rRNA synthesis, a process requiring the recruitment of many proteins involved in ribosomal biogenesis. Nrap is a novel nucleolar protein found to be present in all eukaryotes. Preliminary characterisation of Nrap suggested it was likely to participate in ribosome biogenesis but as with many other nucleolar proteins, the functional role of Nrap is largely unknown. In this study, the role of mammalian Nrap in the nucleolus and in ribosome biogenesis was explored. Initially, a number of tools were generated to investigate Nrap function. This involved raising and purifying a polyclonal antibody against the N-terminal region of Nrap. The anti-Nrap antibody was found to detect two Nrap bands in mouse fibroblast cells, possibly corresponding to the two mouse Nrap isoforms, and . In addition, mammalian expression vectors containing the full Nrap sequence as well as deletion constructs were created. The subcellular localisation of each construct was observed by fluorescent microscopy. It was revealed that recombinant Nrap did not localise to the nucleolus, possibly because it was exported to undergo degradation by the 26S proteasome. Two putative NLSs were found to be responsible for directing Nrap to the nucleus but a region accountable for nucleolar localisation was not identified. The data indicated that multiple domains working together are likely to direct Nrap to the nucleolus. Nrap was also observed to co-localise with nucleolar proteins B23 and p19ARF. Moreover, it was shown by reciprocal immunoprecipitation that these three nucleolar proteins existed in a complex in unsynchronised mouse fibroblast cells. Recent reports demonstrated a complex relationship between B23 and p19ARF although the functional significance remained unclear. Nrap's in vivo association with B23 and p19ARF indicated a specific functional role in the nucleolus. Nrap knockdown using siRNA significantly increased B23 protein levels in a dose-dependent manner and down-regulated p19ARF protein levels at higher siRNA concentration. Preliminary studies also implicated Nrap in cell proliferation through these novel interactions. Both endogenous and recombinant Nrap were found to be highly unstable suggesting that Nrap might regulate B23 and p19ARF through its own tightly regulated stability. Finally, the role of Nrap in rRNA processing was investigated by northern blot analysis. Nrap knockdown was found to affect the levels of 45S, 32S and 28S rRNAs. The changes found may be a consequence of the concurrent perturbation in the levels of B23 and p19ARF caused by Nrap knockdown. As the results were not consistent with previous reports, it was likely that changes to rRNA processing could be contributed to Nrap loss of function. This study demonstrated for the first time a functional role of Nrap in rRNA processing possibly through its association with B23 and p19ARF.