Suchergebnisse

The influence of musical traditions on Ciaran Carson's work has long been noted. Carson's use of fugue forms, especially in For All We Know (2008), however, suggests a different, and perhaps more political, relation to form than can be found in his earlier collections. As can be seen with comparison to the work of Paul Celan, Carson uses fugue to navigate through what Pierre Nora calls the 'fundamental opposition' between memory and history. The doubling and repetition inherent to fugal forms provide a way to reconceptualise the past, highlighting the interrelation of multiple corresponding voices. Carson, like Celan, uses fugue to approach historical moments that resist language, and in so doing reconceptualises the demands the past makes on the present, and the ability of language to reflect those demands.

Abstract
Explicitly utopian novels are relatively uncommon in twentieth-century Scottish fiction, perhaps due to a prevailing conception of Scottish literature as inherently peripheral; for many critics and authors, Scotland is already a place outside the mainstream of political and historical narrative. Utopian themes and imagery, however, have frequently been used by Scottish writers to address the role of religious experience in contemporary life. In novels by Robin Jenkins, Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair Gray, and Iain M. Banks, the utopian form presents the possibility of abandoning traditional religious practices in favor of direct discourse with the divine. Even as they appear to repudiate organized religion, these novels also demonstrate the continued relevance of God and myth. Whether in outright science fiction such as Banks's Culture series and portions of Gray's "Lanark," classical utopias such as Gunn's "The Green Isle of the Great Deep," or ostensibly realist novels such as Jenkins's "The Missionaries," utopian imagery is used to examine what role the divine might have in a secular society. These Scottish utopias offer a place to discuss the relationships between individuals, communities, and nations and how these relationships are reconstituted in a modernity where God is known only as absence.

The development of the Cistercian Order in the twelfth century came as a product of a number of eleventh-century reforms. These reforms affected all strata of society, and they impacted the way in which medieval European Christians viewed themselves, their social, political, and theological structures, the world around them, and their relationship to the Christian narrative of salvation history and eschatology. The early Cistercians built their "new monastery" (novum monasterium) upon an apostolic foundation of austerity and poverty, informed by a "return" to the Rule of Benedict as the program for their daily ritual and liturgical lives. These Cistercians centered their monastic "way of life" (conversatio) around the pursuit of ascent into God, seeking to become "citizens among the saints and members of the household of God." The language of twelfth-century Cistercian ascension theology drew from a number of scriptural motifs for its expression. For example, Bernard of Clairvaux described his monastery as the "heavenly Jerusalem" and his monks as "Jerusalemites"; Aelred of Rievaulx spoke of "living stones," building up the Temple of Jerusalem and rising up as sacred incense; and Helinand of Froidmont exhorted his monks to climb the mountain with Christ and to raise up within themselves a Temple of "living stones," becoming bearers of Christ like Mary, his holy mother. In the case of these and other Cistercian exegetes, the goal remained the same: by interpreting Christian scripture and tradition, Cistercian theologians sought to transform the monastery into a sacred space, bridging the gap between the human world and the realm of God, so that they, and their brethren, might ascend "as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood."

ABSTRACTYield management is the dynamic pricing, overbooking, and allocation of perishable assets across market segments in an effort to maximize short‐term revenues for the firm. Numerous optimization heuristics for allocation and overbooking exist for the airline industry, whose perishable asset is the airplane seat. When an airplane departs, no revenue is gained from the empty seat(s). In the hotel industry, the perishable asset is the hotel room‐once a room is left empty for a night, that night's revenue cannot be recaptured. The literature on yield management heuristics for the hotel industry is sparse. For the hotel operating environment, no research has adequately (1) integrated overbooking with allocation, (2) modeled the phenomenon of hotel patrons extending or contracting their stay at a moment's notice, or (3) performed a realistic performance comparison of alternative heuristics.This research develops (1) two hotel‐specific algorithms that both integrate overbooking with the allocation decisions, (2) a simulation model to reproduce realistic hotel operating environments, and (3) compares the performance of five heuristics under 36 realistic hotel operating environments. Seven conclusions are reached with regard to which heuristic(s) perform best in specific operating environments. Generally, heuristic selection is very much dependent on the hotel operating environment. A counterintuitive result is that in many operating environments, the simpler heuristics work as well as the more complex ones.