VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Tropologies of Indianness in Anglophone Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Fiction

While previous studies have explored the literary representation of "India" as a place, a colony, or a modern nation-state, this dissertation focuses on the idea of Indianess as a civilizational essence within the field of Anglophone colonial and postcolonial South Asian fiction. The central finding of this project is that Indianness is often imagined in fiction through a system of recurrent tropes. These tropes include the Neo-Vedantic concept of metaphysical oneness (brahman); the centripetal dynamics of Sanskritization; the ontological modes of "impersonal" being; the Hegelian allegory of "History"; and most importantly, the rhetoric of caste subjectivity (varna). The use of these tropes in fiction reveals a critical disassociation with contemporary grand narratives of "India" as a postcolonial nation-state as well as the fascist Hindutva ideology of purified Hindu-ness. For these reasons, this project uses the term "Indutva" to classify the unique tropologies of Indianness within colonial and postcolonial South Asian literature. The primary texts of this study are E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope (1960), and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). In Passage, Forster illustrates his idea of Indianness through the rituals of the Gokul Ashtami festival, its Brahminical agents of varnic order and its heterotopic confrontations with History. In Serpent, Indianness is explored through the marital crises of Rao's Brahminical protagonist and the symbolic rebirth of varnic Indianness in post-imperial Europe. Finally, in Small Things, Roy engages an allegorical, counter-Indutva critique of civilizational Indianness, as represented by the "History" of violence against lower-caste "Untouchables." This study of Indianness in fiction is grounded in a historical and theoretical framework that takes late eighteenth-century British Orientalism as a starting point for the modernity of Indianness, and it also draws on Sanskrit and vernacular Indian discourses of religion, caste, and metaphysics. The methodology of this project thus draws equally from postcolonial and pre-colonial sources.

Keywords: Arundhati Roy
Caste
E. M. Forster
Indianness
Postcolonial
Raja Rao
Advisor: Kanaganayakam, Chelva
Forms of Sentience in Early Modernity

My dissertation examines the relationship between affect and biological life by exploring how Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton articulated the feeling of being alive. This phenomenon, which I call sentience, is at the heart of recent debates in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, but I argue that early modern literature plays a central role in developing a language adequate to its expression. I focus on written depictions of threshold experiences when this feeling slips into the historical record: altered states of consciousness, episodes of suspended animation, and moments of radical awakening. Although I adumbrate the theoretical history of sentience--a scattered lineage stretching from Aristotle to Antonio Damasio and other current thinkers--my focus is on first-person accounts of this phenomenon. I draw a methodological distinction between attempts to explain sentience and attempts to express it. There were many early modern categories that expounded how sentience might work: the common sense, humors, animal spirits, vital heat, and so on. These are akin to the current invocation of hormones, homeostasis, and other principles that may have explanatory purchase but never address how it feels to be alive. Since my dissertation seeks to shed light on how early moderns experienced sentience, I anchor my analysis in passages where writers express the felt qualities of vitality in language that is not inscribed in explanatory categories. I focus on two strategies that Montaigne, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton used to express the feeling of being alive. First, since sentience has no inherited system of images and phrases (as do such senses or passions as vision and melancholy), grammar became a primary tool for verbalizing the feeling of being alive. Second, because sentience is all but inexpressible, those who put it into words appropriated other discourses--including theology and philosophy--and repurposed them to register subtle distinctions in affect and sensation. Organized around an analogy to the life cycle--beginning with birth and then moving through death to re-birth--each of the five chapters focuses on a different aspect of sentience: its relationship with death, personhood, temporality, effort, and other living beings.

Advisor: Harvey, Elizabeth D
Thinking in Pieces: Victorian Notebooks and Notation

This dissertation argues for the coherence of the Victorian notebook as a genre, challenging the critical convention that treats writers' notes as rudimentary preparations for published works. Instead of reading authors' papers as meaningful only when they are located in a developmental timeline leading to a novel, poem, or essay--that is, instead of reading notebooks teleologically--"Thinking in Pieces" approaches them as an archive with collective resemblances. If we suspend our commitment to the "ends" to which authors may or may not have put their notes, what kinds of fantasies and concerns emerge from these scrappy documents, and how might attending to them in this way expand our definition of literary form? What would happen, in other words, if we took notes as notes? What emerges, I argue, is a genre in which writers inhabit states of open-endedness, making minimalist descriptive documents that do not have to lead anywhere or cohere systematically: thinking in pieces. I present the notebook as a shelter for inconsequence. By "inconsequence" I mean that which is apparently useless, and (in the older sense of the word) that which foregoes order, arrangement, or sequence. I show how Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, and Gerard Manley Hopkins take note of seemingly insignificant, fleeting, and useless subjects and phenomena, without having designs upon these documents' future redemption in other literary forms. As such, note-taking represents an ethical position that values containment and preservation over total synthesis and systematic explanation. I will also propose that in their refusal of telos and their resistance to holistic synthesis, notebooks present a style of queer thought.

Keywords: aestheticism
aesthetics
notebooks
queer theory
sociality
victorian literature
Advisor: Jaffe, Audrey
The Role of Iroquois 3 and 5 in Limb Bud Pattern Formation and Morphogenesis

Limb skeletal pattern heavily relies on graded Sonic hedgehog (Shh) signaling. As a morphogen and growth cue, Shh regulates identities of posterior limb elements including the ulna/fibula and digits 2 through 5. In contrast, proximal and anterior structures including the humerus/femur, radius/tibia and digit 1 are regarded as Shh-independent and the mechanisms governing their pattern formation are unclear. Here I show that patterning of the proximal and anterior limb skeleton involves an early specification phase dependent on two transcription factors, Irx3 and Irx5 (Irx3/5). They are expressed in the anterior margin of the limb field to regulate expression of the key anterior prepattern gene Gli3 and specify the anterior population during limb initiation. The early specification phase is followed by a late modulation phase during which Shh signaling negatively regulates these anterior elements. In addition, Irx3/5 also play a role in limb bud morphogenesis. Irx3/5-DKO hindlimb buds are small with abnormal shape due to prolonged cell cycle time and division defects including anaphase bridge and altered cell division orientation in the anterior hindlimb field. Therefore, pattern formation of anterior limb skeletal elements requires functions of Irx3/5 during limb bud initiation for the specification and expansion of anterior population followed by negative modulation by Shh signaling.

Keywords: Irx3
Irx5
Limb morphogenesis
Limb patterning
Mouse
Sonic hedgehog
Advisor: Hui, Chi-chung
Hopyan, Sevan
Visible Histories: Print Culture and the Reproducible Past in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Ghosts, resemblances, ruins, paintings, and other visual phenomena in nineteenth-century British novels often illustrate the otherwise invisible past. As new media technologies expanded the mass production of images during the nineteenth century, representing earlier time as visible helped novelists to affirm its reality, power, and difference from the present. Distinguishing between the past (prior time) and history (the representation of the past), this project relates historical apparitions in novels by Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde to contemporaneous print media, including illustration, print series, and photography. Against the backdrop of modernizing shifts in popular visual culture, these novelists depict the past as a realm of precarious reality that fiction can uphold, query, or verify by portraying it as a visible reproduction. Their novels disclose bygone events by making them available to sight in images, appearances, and serial variations between bodies that often combine biological and mechanical reproduction, thereby enlarging print-culture notions of reproducibility. These texts make readers, usually already viewers of printed pages, into spectators of fictional worlds by obliging them to agree that narrated histories can be seen. Moments when prior epochs appear before the eyes of fictional characters offer insight into values placed on memory, visual representation, and reproduction. Intimations of former eras in these novels frequently transpire as sights of landscape and so position anterior time as another distant territory that nineteenth-century British expansionism yearned to access. The mnemonic displays in these novels inherit traditions of supernatural fiction and often stand in for fictional ghosts, even as they link print media to spectrality. The physical book itself manifests the haunting presence of earlier worlds and so represents an important symbol of visible history throughout this study. Chapters of the dissertation explore how fictional sights of reproduced time illuminate notions of illustration, Darwin's evolutionary theory, British interests in Palestine, and concepts of mimesis in graphic representation. This interdisciplinary work of literary criticism thus situates the nineteenth-century novel in modern visual culture by examining fictional spectacles in relation to historical spectatorships, tourism, the prehistory of cinema, and the displays of print culture.

Keywords: print culture
reading
spectatorship
the novel
the past
visual culture
Advisor: Jaffe, Audrey
Fully Integrated Wireless Power Transfer System For Biomedical Applications

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is commonly realized by means of near-field inductive coupling and is critical to many applications. It is highly desirable to fully integrate the receiver coil (Rx) and power shaping circuits on a single chip in a standard CMOS process with no additional post-processing steps or external components. This thesis investigates the feasibility of a fully integrated WPT system that is capable of wirelessly providing milliwatts of power at centimeter distances. We present a closed form analytical solution for the optimum load that achieves the maximum possible power efficiency under arbitrary input impedance conditions based on the general two-port parameters of the network. Our results generalize several well-known special cases. The formulation allows the design of an optimized WPT link through biological media using readily available electromagnetic (EM) simulation software and effectively decouples the design of the inductive coupling two-port from the problem of loading and power amplifier design. As a proof of concept, we present a 2x2.18mm2 on-chip coil with proper power shaping blocks such as a rectifier, and a regulator in addition to an adaptive matching network, which are co-integrated on a single die in a 0.13um CMOS process. The receiver is separated from the transmitter (Tx) by 10mm of biological media. The on-chip coil demonstrates a peak WPT efficiency of 1.42% in air, 0.97% efficiency while receiving power through a combined 7mm of 0.2 molar NaCl (with similar conductivity and permittivity as blood) and 3mm of air, and 0.8% of efficiency through a combined 7.5mm of bovine muscle and 2.5mm of air. Fully integrating the receiver coil introduces new challenges and opportunities that led to new circuit innovations in each power shaping block. The adaptation block employs a synchronous sampling scheme and provides the optimum susceptance on the basis of the mathematical derivations for the optimum load. The rectifier demonstrates an efficiency of 80% and uses a positive feedback structure to avoid plasma-induced gate-oxide damage caused by the on-chip coil. Finally the integrated regulator employs an auxiliary rectifier to provide better than 24dB of power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) over all frequencies with a low quiescent current of 6uA and no off-chip components.

Keywords: energy harvesting
Inductive coupling
integrated CMOS coil
near-field
Regulator
Wireless power transfer
Advisor: Gulak, Patrik Glenn
Imagining Bombay: the Literary Representations of a Postcolonial City

This dissertation analyses Bombay novels written in English that construct the city through the narrative manipulation of time, space, and memory. I argue that these imaginative (re)constructions of the city emphasize the limitations of narrative agency as well as the multiplicity and competition between narratives that comprise Bombay's identity. In the first chapter, I contend that the hegemonic narratives of postcolonial nationalism, British colonialism, and Hindu fundamentalism are reductive rhetorical strategies that limit interpretations of Bombay novels to singular conceptions of the city. I argue that the novels by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, and Vikram Chandra reveal characters who actively struggle in different ways with the multiple and coexisting identity-narratives of Bombay that they encounter in their everyday lives. In Chapter Two, I argue that in Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet first-person narrators manipulate time, space, and memory from protected, private spaces in order to reclaim the endangered Bombay that is central to their individual identities. Chapter Three examines Mistry's Parsi characters in Such a Long Journey and Family Matters, who have almost no power to exercise narrative agency and, consequently, must negotiate by other means the overwhelming crush of identity narratives that impinge upon their private spaces. They attempt to change these narratives through ordinary actions in their everyday lives. In Chapter Four, I argue that Chandra's Sacred Games reveals how typically elided characters reinscribe themselves into Bombay's spaces. The novel uses the threat of nuclear holocaust and the intricate political and economic relationships between mob bosses and police to sensationalize, and so represent very explicitly, characters' engagements with hegemonic narratives. The versions of Bombay these novelists produce are at once nostalgic, utopian, and pessimistic, and my analysis provides a model for reading this city and these narratives in which characters struggle to make their voices heard amidst both the city's dense population and its crowd of stories.

Keywords: Bombay
India
Postcolonial
Rohinton Mistry
Salman Rushdie
Vikram Chandra
Advisor: Kanaganayakam, Chelva
Against Ulro: On the Creation of Poetic Space in the Work of Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik and Marosa di Giorgio

Poetry is the language of subversion. It is a linguistic mode where rules are broken and foundations are shaken, where reality twists and changes its shape, where metaphors startle and confound us. Looking at the work of Southern Cone writers Delmira Agustini (1886-1914), Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) and Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004), this dissertation explores the ways in which poetry becomes a discourse of resistance. I argue that these writers, though traditionally considered apolitical, have created a discourse that is actually politically charged. Drawing extensively on literary theorist Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature, I argue that all three poets seek contact with a "space of knowledge" of an ultimate reality, refusing to abandon their quest even as it proves unrealizable. Through this search, all three poets subsequently create a "space of resistance" that subverts the epistemic structures of their social context. Whether or not these authors intended for their work to make a political statement lies beyond the scope of this investigation and, in my view, has little bearing on the outcome. Because the social structures in which they lived - technocracy and rational utilitarianism during Agustini's era and dictatorship in Pizarnik's and di Giorgio's - are inherently oppressive, the three poets' determination to go beyond them is indeed a political act.

Keywords: Latin America
Literature
Poetry
Resistance
Southern Cone
Women Writers
Advisor: Rodriguez, Nestor
Evaluating the Clinical and Immunological Correlates of Semen HIV-1 RNA Shedding

Globally it is estimated that 35 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2012. Unprotected sexual transmission of HIV accounts for the majority of all new infections, with semen acting as a vector. HIV levels in blood of an HIV-infected individual is the best-defined predictor of transmission risk, however, as blood is not often a factor during sex, this association likely reflects the level of HIV RNA in semen. It has been shown that while blood viral load reaches a set point during chronic untreated infection, semen can remain highly variable. Factors responsible for this heterogeneity have not fully well characterized. Furthermore, while highly active antiretroviral therapy has been associated with suppression of blood and genital viral loads, some men continue to shed HIV in their semen, despite undetectable viremia, a phenomenon called isolated semen HIV RNA shedding (IHS). In my doctoral thesis I evaluated the impact of semen collection method on viral load measurements, correlations between antiretroviral therapy intensification and its effect on immune activation, viral load and IHS as well as factors contributing to semen viral load variability in drug naive men. Overall, I found that semen collected directly into transport medium had a large impact on the measurement of viral load, evidencing a 0.42log10 increase in viral load over neat collection. Initiation of intensified antiretroviral therapy was shown to decrease viral load in blood and semen faster than a standard regimen. Intensification, however, did not resolve the occurrence of ISH, nor did it reduce systemic immune activation faster then a conventional therapy. It was observed that men on longer durations of ART had no evidence of IHS, suggesting the phenomenon is transient and may resolve with longer duration of therapy. Finally I explored factors that may be linked to the variability seen in semen viral load in drug naive men. Of all parameters examined, the macrophage-associated cytokine IL-8 was the only factor independently predictive of semen viral load (aside from blood viral load) in longitudinal studies. This suggests IL-8 as a common pathway linking clinical causes of high semen HIV levels in therapy-naive men.

Keywords: antiretroviral
HIV
HIV RNA
human immunodeficiency virus
semen
semen shedding
Advisor: Kaul, Rupert
Covert Reminders: The Use of Distraction to Enhance Memory in Older Adults

Aging is associated with difficulty down-regulating attention to distraction and increased forgetting in explicit memory tests. This thesis explored whether older adults' distractibility can counterintuitively boost memory when presentations of distraction provide an opportunity for memory-strengthening rehearsal between learning and a delayed memory test. Four studies used the same general procedure: Younger and older participants studied and recalled a list of words on an initial test and again on a surprise test following a 15-min delay. During the delay, participants completed a 1-back task in which half of the studied words appeared as distractors. The first two studies examined whether repeating studied words as distraction midway through (Study 1a) or at the end of a delay interval (Study 2) would reduce forgetting for older, but not younger adults, who previous research has shown can effectively ignore distraction. Studies 3a and 3b explored whether younger and older adults can retroactively take advantage of rehearsal opportunities presented as distraction when directly instructed about their relevance at retrieval. Finally, Study 4 explored whether positive and neutral moods, which are known to affect attentional control abilities, influence the costs and benefits of distraction as a rehearsal device in younger adults. Results indicated that repeating to-be-remembered words as distraction minimized (Study 1a) or eliminated (Studies 2, 3b) older adults' forgetting, consistently resulting in final recall that was equivalent to younger adults' recall. Repeating words as distraction did modulate younger adults' recall by increasing forgetting of unrepeated words when they were directly cued about the repetitions (Study 3a), and by increasing forgetting of repeated words under induced neutral moods (Study 4). Nonetheless, younger adults showed clear forgetting of repeated words across all experiments. These results demonstrate that distraction can serve as covert reminders for older adults, a finding with implications for the reduction of prevalent age differences in explicit memory performance.

Keywords: aging
attention
distraction
forgetting
memory
Advisor: Hasher, Lynn