Disorders of Desire or Moral Striving?

This chapter takes one case of the dangers posed by desire across religious divides—in this instance the small event of a Muslim girl and a Hindu boy in one of the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi having fallen in love with each other. The scene of desire that transcends religious differences and transgresses a given moral code is a significant motif in the poetic imaginary in South Asia, but it rarely asks how such desire is sustained within the social? Usually such love affairs are presented either in the form of cautionary tales or as allegories of the closeness of love and death. In the case examined, the motif shifts to that of inhabiting a life in this difference. The chapter shows that it is not only the couple but everyone in the family who is given an opportunity to make shifts, to learn how to inhabit a newness. The notion of an adjacent self, parallel to the idea of the neighborhood of the actual everyday and the eventual everyday, is taken up to show a moral sensibility that is not about escape from the everyday but an inhabitation of the everyday through a realization of new possibilities within it.

DBU Catalysis: An Efficient Synthetic Strategy for 5,7-disubstituted-1,2,4- triazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidines

Aim and Objective: An efficient and facile DBU catalysed synthesis of highly significant motif 5,7-disubstituted-1,2,4-triazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidines under solvent-free condition has been reported. Materials and Methods: To a round bottom flask, 1.0 mmol of chalcone (1), 1.5 mmol of 3-amino-1,2,4- triazole (2) and 30 mol% of DBU were added at 70 °C and stirred in solvent-free condition. After the completion of the reaction (monitored by TLC), water (10 ml) was added. The aqueous layer was extracted with ethyl acetate (3 ×10 ml). The combined organic layers were dried over anhydrous Na2SO4. The combined organic layers were evaporated under reduced pressure and the resulting crude product was purified by column chromatography by using ethyl acetate and hexane as eluent. Results: Reaction using chalcone and 3-amino-1,2,4-triazole as model substrates were carried out under different reaction conditions and it was observed that 30 mol% of DBU under the solvent-free condition at 70 °C was the optimum temperature for the proposed synthesis. Conclusion: Use of DBU (an organocatalyst) as a base, operational simplicity, high yield of products and short reaction time are some of the significant advantages associated with the proposed strategy.

Conscience as an Experiment: The Russian Subtext of John Galsworthy’s Short Story “Conscience”

John Galsworthy, as it is quite widely known, was strongly influenced by Russian literature. What is much less known, or even realized, is that this influence had at least two major lines: (1) a literary line, connected with a vivid perception of style, plot, other aesthetic and ideological discoveries of Russian novelists, and (2) a cultural line that carried Galsworthy to philosophizing on such problems as national character, national culture, and the historical development of the European civilization. In this second respect, Chekhov can be considered the central figure for the English writer. This supposition is based on some Galsworthy’s essays in which Chekhov’s name is directly connected with the idea of “Russianness”, with such typical, according to the English writer’s point of view, Russian traits as “a passionate search for truth”, emotionality, self-knowledge, and self-declaration. Thus, these were, primarily, Chekhov’s works that served for Galsworthy as the basis for his very special—both aesthetic and ideological—experiment. Galsworthy conducted this experiment in his short story under a “Russian”, if not “Chekhovian”, title “Conscience” (cf., Chekhov’s short story “Bezzakonie” [Iniquity, Lawlessness]). Conscience is a very significant motif in Chekhov’s works, and it obviously plays an important role in works by many other Russian authors, including Dostoevsky, which is not something inexplicable. Unlike English culture, which, during the 17th–19th centuries, shifted from reliance on the inner moral voice in a human being to faith in outer moral rules, Russian culture, on the eve of the 20th century, still preserved the authentic Christian belief that conscience is the voice of truth in man. Since, in his essays, Galsworthy declared Chekhov the most authentic Russian writer of all he had known, it is natural to assume that whenever we speak about the English writer’s experiment dealing with the Russian concept, we should bear in mind Chekhov (as the key point to understand the experiment). The essence of the experiment can be described in terms of transplanting the Russian model of “life according to the voice of conscience” to the everyday English reality contemporary with the author within the aesthetic texture of his short story. As a result, the hero, who starts—rather unexpectedly both for himself and everybody around him— living according to his conscience, loses his social status, money, job, home, as well as trust of all those who know him. He excludes himself (and is excluded) from social life and from all possible connections with the human world: the only “world”, the only environment open for him is nature. The experiment Galsworthy made in his short story “Conscience” proves that the Russian model of “life according to the voice of conscience” is not viable in the circumstances of English reality (contemporary with the author).

Poetic image of Kuzbass in the verses of regional authors

This research features the phenomenon of the so-called literature of space, namely amateur and professional poetic texts that together constitute a cultural supertext devoted to the Siberian coal mining region of Kuzbass. The article employed a multifaceted approach (statistical, pragmatic, textual and temporal/spatial vision analysis) to reconstruct the image of the region in the naïve worldview. Statistical analysis identified the key words and semantic models. The cognitive analysis reveals the basic cognitive structures, while the textual analysis makes it possible to reconstruct narrative and perception. The pragmatic analysis determines the communication role model and the predominant speech acts. The study exposes extended thematic nets of geographical, natural and meteorological terms, time description, and coal mining realia. The predominating cognitive models represent Kuzbass as a territory / a living being / treasure trove / home / family, while the most significant motif for professional oeuvre is legitimizing the peripheral area as an inseparable part of the Russian domain and history. Introspection, simultaneity, and strong modality appears to be the most significant text characteristics. Thus, the image of Kuzbass proves to be a complex comprehensive multitiered phenomenon based on different linguistic units and reflecting the results of the evaluative perception and processing.

Triumph der Phantasie und der Magnifizenz Überlegungen zur Rezeption Veroneses im venezianischen Settecento

Although the Veronese revival is the formative phenomenon of Venetian painting in the eighteenth century, the causes for this circumstance are not entirely clear. The love of splendor is considered to be a significant motif that can be easily misinterpreted as shallow. The fundamental element of the Veronese revival is magnificenza, which also recognizes splendor, luxury, and imagination as aesthetic qualities in the art and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while presenting them in a complex reciprocal relationship whose aim is meraviglia, the amazement of the viewer. Fantasia plays the central role in Algarotti’s, Muratori’s, Vico’s, Maffei’s, and Conti’s theories as well as in Sebastiano Ricci’s and Giambattista Tiepolo’s artistic practices. This quality is as important for the patron as it is for the artist whose work is supposed to stimulate the fantasia of the audience.

From Pompeii to Marienbad: Classical Sculptures in Postwar European Modernist Cinema

The statue is a significant motif in many key films of the European modernist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Famous examples are Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, 1953), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), Méditerranée ( Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963), Le Mépris ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Une Femme mariée ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1964), Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964), and Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Luchino Visconti, 1965). Focusing on Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953) and Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) as cases in point, this chapter not only traces the fascination for sculpture in modernist cinema but also explains it by examining the ways in which statues are presented as tokens of death, time, history, myth, memory, the human body, and strategies of doubling – important topics for many of the leading modernist directors working in the 1950s and 1960s.

Statistical methods for identifying sequence motifs affecting point mutations

Mutation processes differ between types of point mutation, genomic locations, cells, and biological species. For some point mutations, specific neighbouring bases are known to be mechanistically influential. Beyond these cases, numerous questions remain unresolved including: what are the sequence motifs that affect point mutations? how large are the motifs? and, do they vary between samples? We present new log-linear models that allow explicit examination of these questions along with sequence logo style visualisation to enable identifying specific motifs. We demonstrate the utility of these methods by analysing human germline and malignant melanoma mutations. We recapitulate the known CpG effect and identify numerous novel motifs, including a highly significant motif associated with A→G mutations. We show that major effects of neighbourhood on germline mutation lie within ±2 of the mutating base. Models are also presented for contrasting the entire mutation spectra (the distribution of the different point mutations) and applied to the data. We show the spectra vary significantly between autosomes and X-chromosome, with a difference in T→C transition dominating. Analyses of malignant melanoma confirmed reported characteristic features of this cancer including strand asymmetry and markedly different neighbouring influences. The methods reported are made freely available as a Python libraryhttps://bitbucket.org/pycogent3/mutationmotif.

Statistical methods for identifying sequence motifs affecting point mutations

Mutation processes differ between types of point mutation, genomic locations, cells, and biological species. For some point mutations, specific neighbouring bases are known to be mechanistically influential. Beyond these cases, numerous questions remain unresolved including: what are the sequence motifs that affect point mutations? how large are the motifs? and, do they vary between samples? We present new log-linear models that allow explicit examination of these questions along with sequence logo style visualisation to enable identifying specific motifs. We demonstrate the utility of these methods by analysing human germline and malignant melanoma mutations. We recapitulate the known CpG effect and identify numerous novel motifs, including a highly significant motif associated with A→G mutations. We show that major effects of neighbourhood on germline mutation lie within ±2 of the mutating base. Models are also presented for contrasting the entire mutation spectra (the distribution of the different point mutations) and applied to the data. We show the spectra vary significantly between autosomes and X-chromosome, with a difference in T→C transition dominating. Analyses of malignant melanoma confirmed reported characteristic features of this cancer including strand asymmetry and markedly different neighbouring influences. The methods reported are made freely available as a Python libraryhttps://bitbucket.org/pycogent3/mutationmotif.

Statistical methods for identifying sequence motifs affecting point mutations

Mutation processes differ between types of point mutation, genomic locations, cells, and biological species. For some point mutations, specific neighbouring bases are known to be mechanistically influential. Beyond these cases, numerous questions remain unresolved including: what are the sequence motifs that affect point mutations? how large are the motifs? and, do they vary between samples? We present new log-linear models that allow explicit examination of these questions along with sequence logo style visualisation to enable identifying specific motifs. We demonstrate the utility of these methods by analysing human germline and malignant melanoma mutations. We recapitulate the known CpG effect and identify numerous novel motifs, including a highly significant motif associated with A→G mutations. We show that major effects of neighbourhood on germline mutation lie within ±2 of the mutating base. Models are also presented for contrasting the entire mutation spectra (the distribution of the different point mutations) and applied to the data. We show the spectra vary significantly between autosomes and X-chromosome, with a difference in T→C transition dominating. Analyses of malignant melanoma confirmed reported characteristic features of this cancer including strand asymmetry and markedly different neighbouring influences. The methods reported are made freely available as a Python library https://bitbucket.org/gavin.huttley/mutationmotif.

Statistical methods for identifying sequence motifs affecting point mutations

Mutation processes differ between types of point mutation, genomic locations, cells, and biological species. For some point mutations, specific neighbouring bases are known to be mechanistically influential. Beyond these cases, numerous questions remain unresolved including: what are the sequence motifs that affect point mutations? how large are the motifs? and, do they vary between samples? We present new log-linear models that allow explicit examination of these questions along with sequence logo style visualisation to enable identifying specific motifs. We demonstrate the utility of these methods by analysing human germline and malignant melanoma mutations. We recapitulate the known CpG effect and identify numerous novel motifs, including a highly significant motif associated with A→G mutations. We show that major effects of neighbourhood on germline mutation lie within ±2 of the mutating base. Models are also presented for contrasting the entire mutation spectra (the distribution of the different point mutations) and applied to the data. We show the spectra vary significantly between autosomes and X-chromosome, with a difference in T→C transition dominating. Analyses of malignant melanoma confirmed reported characteristic features of this cancer including strand asymmetry and markedly different neighbouring influences. The methods reported are made freely available as a Python library https://bitbucket.org/gavin.huttley/mutationmotif.