This essay constitutes an unorthodox response to Ranjan Ghosh and J.Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature Across Continents:instead of attempting to conventionally engage with a text that challenges the idea of any ...This essay constitutes an unorthodox response to Ranjan Ghosh and J.Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature Across Continents:instead of attempting to conventionally engage with a text that challenges the idea of any unitary totality as a whole,I opt instead to dwell on the interplay between language and silence in three different sites of inquiry within the text:the first concerns the question of hunger,for which I take as my starting point Ghosh's own starting point in the first chapter of the book,namely Rabidranath Tagore's reflections on a brief episode on the river Ganges.I excavate the transcontinental provenance of these reflections for western,particularly Kantian,aesthetics before I focus on two aspects within the episode that such a framing misses or remains silent about:the paradoxical tendency of material satiation to demote the importance of hunger(as paradigmatically exposed in Brecht);and the indeterminacy of the kind of hunger that is involved in the boatman's response within Tagore's text(as evidenced by prehistoric cave paintings).Finally,I demonstrate the importance of taking these complications into account when reading Ghosh’s own extensive interest in foregrounding hunger within the literary phenomenon and its hermeneutic reception.In the second part of the essay,I dwell on Ghosh’s critique of prevailing notions of“world literature”in the fifth chapter of the book by demonstrating the ontological(Heideggerian)rather than empirical meaning of world in his writing,and,by extension,the subtractive and absence-centered meaning of what he calls the“more than global.”Finally,I turn to J.Hillis Miller’s reading of Wallace Stevens’s“The Motive for Metaphor”in the fourth chapter as an exemplary site for the exploration of the interface between poetics,hermeneutics and ontology that is central to Ghosh's theory of the literary,and thus serves to highlight,in Miller's very engagement with the failure of language as an issue of concern in the poem,the possibility of dialogue between the two critics:indeed,as I show,Stevens’s figure of the“X”serves both as a signifier of the ineffable and as one for criss-crossing,for the“across”involved in“thinking literature across”authors,continents and traditions.展开更多
As evidenced from recent literature,interest in employing information theory measures for understanding different properties of atomic and molecular systems is increasing tremendously.Following our earlier efforts in ...As evidenced from recent literature,interest in employing information theory measures for understanding different properties of atomic and molecular systems is increasing tremendously.Following our earlier efforts in this field,we here evaluate the feasibility of using information theory functionals such as Fisher information,Shannon entropy,Onicescu information energy,and Ghosh-Berkowitz-Parr entropy as measures of steric effects for the steric analysis of water nanoclusters.Taking the structural isomers of water hexamers as working models and using information theoretic quantities,we show that the relative energies of water nanoclusters and the computed steric energies are related.We also show the strong effects of steric repulsion on conformational stabilities.At the same time,we have also assessed the usefulness of simultaneously considering the different information theoretic quantities,and achieved more accurate descriptions of the stability of water nanoclusters.In order to consider the effects of cluster size on the obtained results and the extent of applicability of information theoretic quantities,we have also benchmarked larger water nanoclusters with 32 and 64 units.Scrutinizing the obtained data from information theory functionals,we found that Fisher information shows the best overall performance.Our findings underline that the information theoretic quantities,especially Fisher information,can be used as quantitative measures of relative energies and consequently the order of stability of nanoclusters,which affirmed the utility of information theory for investigating various physical and chemical problems.展开更多
文摘This essay constitutes an unorthodox response to Ranjan Ghosh and J.Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature Across Continents:instead of attempting to conventionally engage with a text that challenges the idea of any unitary totality as a whole,I opt instead to dwell on the interplay between language and silence in three different sites of inquiry within the text:the first concerns the question of hunger,for which I take as my starting point Ghosh's own starting point in the first chapter of the book,namely Rabidranath Tagore's reflections on a brief episode on the river Ganges.I excavate the transcontinental provenance of these reflections for western,particularly Kantian,aesthetics before I focus on two aspects within the episode that such a framing misses or remains silent about:the paradoxical tendency of material satiation to demote the importance of hunger(as paradigmatically exposed in Brecht);and the indeterminacy of the kind of hunger that is involved in the boatman's response within Tagore's text(as evidenced by prehistoric cave paintings).Finally,I demonstrate the importance of taking these complications into account when reading Ghosh’s own extensive interest in foregrounding hunger within the literary phenomenon and its hermeneutic reception.In the second part of the essay,I dwell on Ghosh’s critique of prevailing notions of“world literature”in the fifth chapter of the book by demonstrating the ontological(Heideggerian)rather than empirical meaning of world in his writing,and,by extension,the subtractive and absence-centered meaning of what he calls the“more than global.”Finally,I turn to J.Hillis Miller’s reading of Wallace Stevens’s“The Motive for Metaphor”in the fourth chapter as an exemplary site for the exploration of the interface between poetics,hermeneutics and ontology that is central to Ghosh's theory of the literary,and thus serves to highlight,in Miller's very engagement with the failure of language as an issue of concern in the poem,the possibility of dialogue between the two critics:indeed,as I show,Stevens’s figure of the“X”serves both as a signifier of the ineffable and as one for criss-crossing,for the“across”involved in“thinking literature across”authors,continents and traditions.
文摘As evidenced from recent literature,interest in employing information theory measures for understanding different properties of atomic and molecular systems is increasing tremendously.Following our earlier efforts in this field,we here evaluate the feasibility of using information theory functionals such as Fisher information,Shannon entropy,Onicescu information energy,and Ghosh-Berkowitz-Parr entropy as measures of steric effects for the steric analysis of water nanoclusters.Taking the structural isomers of water hexamers as working models and using information theoretic quantities,we show that the relative energies of water nanoclusters and the computed steric energies are related.We also show the strong effects of steric repulsion on conformational stabilities.At the same time,we have also assessed the usefulness of simultaneously considering the different information theoretic quantities,and achieved more accurate descriptions of the stability of water nanoclusters.In order to consider the effects of cluster size on the obtained results and the extent of applicability of information theoretic quantities,we have also benchmarked larger water nanoclusters with 32 and 64 units.Scrutinizing the obtained data from information theory functionals,we found that Fisher information shows the best overall performance.Our findings underline that the information theoretic quantities,especially Fisher information,can be used as quantitative measures of relative energies and consequently the order of stability of nanoclusters,which affirmed the utility of information theory for investigating various physical and chemical problems.
