Browsing by Subject "Novel"
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Item Cordial treatments : the medical plot in novels by Jane Austen and the Brontës(2016-05) Turner, Joanna Leigh; Bertelsen, Lance; Baker, Samuel, 1968-; MacDuffie, Allen; Minich, Julie A; MacKay, CarolThe word “cordial” in this dissertation’s title represents its concerns with both emotional and biomedical matters in nineteenth-century England. The dissertation focuses on what it calls the “medical plot”: whereas critics such as Tony Tanner and Nancy Armstrong have argued that marriage and its literary representation structure the English novel of manners, this dissertation argues that medicine and medical discourse likewise shaped the ways authors represented social, personal, and literary “conditions.” It thus evaluates the complementary influence of marriage and medical plots in novels by Jane Austen and by Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë, historicizing medical treatment to show that concerns about health and illness permeated social, legal, and literary discourse and that these concerns were manifested by Austen and the Brontës when they fashioned novels as a figurative mode of “treatment.” Chapter One surveys the apothecary figures in Austen’s works, showing that her novels are as much novels of medicine as they are novels of manners. Chapter Two examines Austen’s “cordial” treatment of disability in her fiction in relation to an account of her family’s disabled members and a historical survey of disabled veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. Chapter Three shows how marriage and medicine work in tandem to influence narrative at mid-century, by tracing socio-medical attitudes toward cordials as they inform the prescient treatment of alcohol addiction in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). An Epilogue then gestures toward future critical work on the Brontës and cordial treatments by considering “influence” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and sickness more broadly in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Illuminated by the study of the medical plot, these novels of cordiality and courtship prove to also be novels of cordials and cures. Early nineteenth-century experimental cordials reflect scientific and personal uncertainty about medical treatment, and the medical plot’s emotional and medical cordials offer alternatives to critical demands that novels prescribe “cures” for the social ills they portray. Austen and the Brontës’ show that while novelistic “cures” are elusive, literary cordials offer palliative comfort to treat medical and social illness.Item Efficient Detection on Stochastic Faults in PLC Based Automated Assembly Systems With Novel Sensor Deployment and Diagnoser Design(2012-07-16) Wu, ZhenhuaIn this dissertation, we proposed solutions on novel sensor deployment and diagnoser design to efficiently detect stochastic faults in PLC based automated systems First, a fuzzy quantitative graph based sensor deployment was called upon to model cause-effect relationship between faults and sensors. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used to aggregate the heterogeneous properties between sensors and faults into single edge values in fuzzy graph, thus quantitatively determining the fault detectability. An appropriate multiple objective model was set up to minimize fault unobservability and cost while achieving required detectability performance. Lexicographical mixed integer linear programming and greedy search were respectively used to optimize the model, thus assigning the sensors to faults. Second, a diagnoser based on real time fuzzy Petri net (RTFPN) was proposed to detect faults in discrete manufacturing systems. It used the real time PN to model the manufacturing plant while using fuzzy PN to isolate the faults. It has the capability of handling uncertainties and including industry knowledge to diagnose faults. The proposed approach was implemented using Visual Basic, and tested as well as validated on a dual robot arm. Finally, the proposed sensor deployment approach and diagnoser were comprehensively evaluated based on design of experiment techniques. Two-stage statistical analysis including analysis of variance (ANOVA) and least significance difference (LSD) were conducted to evaluate the diagnosis performance including positive detection rate, false alarm, accuracy and detect delay. It illustrated the proposed approaches have better performance on those evaluation metrics. The major contributions of this research include the following aspects: (1) a novel fuzzy quantitative graph based sensor deployment approach handling sensor heterogeneity, and optimizing multiple objectives based on lexicographical integer linear programming and greedy algorithm, respectively. A case study on a five tank system showed that system detectability was improved from the approach of signed directed graph's 0.62 to the proposed approach's 0.70. The other case study on a dual robot arm also show improvement on system's detectability improved from the approach of signed directed graph's 0.61 to the proposed approach's 0.65. (2) A novel real time fuzzy Petri net diagnoser was used to remedy nonsynchronization and integrate useful but incomplete knowledge for diagnosis purpose. The third case study on a dual robot arm shows that the diagnoser can achieve a high detection accuracy of 93% and maximum detection delay of eight steps. (3) The comprehensive evaluation approach can be referenced by other diagnosis systems' design, optimization and evaluation.Item Factography(Texas Tech University, 2008-05) Bailey, Sara Sloan; Jones, Stephen G.; Covington, Dennis; Purinton, Marjean D.Factography is a hypertext novel that weaves together a series of stories, which can be read either in a linear fashion or through a series of links. The links work in the same way as the mind, giving the novel a life all its own by creating a network of threads that connect together ideas, characters, place, and plot. In many ways, it give readers control of the text, allowing their minds to wander along the work in a way it might only after reading a linear novel for the second time. In other words, while the structure provides the reader the freedom to navigate freely through the text, it also helps as a textual guide, making suggestions of what one might take away from what might otherwise seem an unrelated collection.Item God says no : a novel ; &, You must remember this : a screenplay(2006-05) Hannaham, James; Magnuson, JamesGod Says No is a novel purporting to be the testimonial of Gary Gray, a young black man coming of age in Charleston, South Carolina. Gary cannot reconcile his Christian faith with his homosexual desires. Eventually, before a suicide attempt, he asks God for a sign. The following day, his Amtrak train derails outside Atlanta and a vision of Christ inspires him to run away from his old life. While hiding out, he joins a dance/theater company and continues to explore and battle his sexuality. Eventually, his wife tracks him down and he agrees to attend a reparative therapy center in Memphis. While there, he rooms with Nicky, a former hustler, with whom he falls in love. Nicky dies tragically. Though the therapy center gives Gary a job setting up a new branch in Atlanta, his faith in the possibility of changing his sexual orientation is severely shaken. He tries to reconcile with his wife and family and is forced to make painful compromises and accept himself. You Must Remember This is a prequel to Casablanca (1942) that focuses on the love story between Ilsa Lund and her husband, Victor Laszlo. When the Nazis capture Victor, Ilsa must find and save him by posing as a reporter for a Nazi newspaper. Victor, in the meantime, devises a way to escape from a concentration camp. The couple cross paths at just the wrong moment, and Ilsa believes that her husband is dead. She returns to Paris and has an affair with Rick Blaine. Victor makes his way through the Sudetenland and has an affair of his own. Eventually the two find each other and make their way to Morocco, and they must untangle their pasts and find their way to America.Item Social violence, social healing : the merging of the political and the spiritual in Chicano/a literary production(2012-05) Lopez, Christina Garcia; Cordova, Cary, 1970-; Limón, José Eduardo; Lieu, Nhi; Perez, Domino; Cox, JamesThis dissertation argues that spiritual and religious worldviews (i.e. Mexican Catholicism, indigenous spiritualities, and popular religion) have historically intersected with social and political realities in the development of Mexican origin communities of the United States. More specifically, as creative writers from these communities have endeavored to express and represent Mexican American experience, they have consistently engaged these intersections of the spiritual and the material. While Chicano/a criticism has often overlooked, and in some ways dismissed, the significant role which spiritual and religious discourses have played in the political development of Mexican American communities, I examine how the works of creative writers pose important questions about the role of religious faith and spirituality in healing the wounds of social violence. By placing literary texts in conversation with scholarship from multiple disciplines, this project links literary narratives to their historical, social, and political frameworks, and ultimately endeavors to situate literary production as an expressive cultural product. Historical and regional in approach, the dissertation examines diverse literary narratives penned by writers of Mexican descent between the 1930s and the current decade. Selected textual pairings recall pivotal moments and relations in the history of Mexico, America, and their shared geographical borderlands. Through the lens of religion and spirituality, a broad array of social discourses emerges, including: gender and sexuality, landscape and memory, nation-formation, race and ethnicity, popular traditions, and material culture.