• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.629-649
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• 2018

To date, one of the prevailing criticisms of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seen the adventure novel as a celebration of the rise of mercantile capitalism and the beginnings of colonialism. From this point of view, the Englishman has often been interpreted as an early embodiment of the concept of the sovereign economic subject. Prominent social critics who took up this interpretation have included Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Within literary studies proper, the work of Ian Watt offered perhaps the earliest version of this point of view of the novel. Influenced by both Weber and Rousseau, Ian Watt argued that Defoe's wandering protagonist embodies the rise of economic individualism. More recent criticism has tended to challenge this dominant interpretation by laying greater stress on such countervailing factors as Crusoe's mental uncertainty and inner conflict. Drawing inspiration from Fredric Jameson's diagnosis of the ills of late capitalism, this paper analyzes the ways in which Defoe's hero, rather than championing modern rationality, can in fact be seen as suffering from many forms of emotional psychosis. Robinson Crusoe can, after all, be better viewed as a contradictory multi-layered text that, despite its outward valorization of economic individualism, portrays its hero as a victim of negative capitalistic forces, a hero driven by his desire to possess but haunted by a fear of loss, a hero who flaunts inflated feelings of self-worth even as he reveals deflated notions of material insecurity and mental persecution.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.61-68
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• 2008

Of the seven base units of the international system of units, only the kilogram is still defined in terms of a material artifact. One of the experimental approaches opening the way to a new definition of the kilogram is the watt balance To improve the performance of the NPL watt balance, we need to quantify and reduce hysteresis effects in the balance knives. In this paper, we discuss the mechanical characteristics of the knife edges used in the NPL watt balance. The hysteresis mechanism is analyzed using the finite element method. It is found that the cause of hysteresis is not normal stress but shear, and the deformation of the flat, rather than the knife, is an important factor in the hysteresis mechanism. The study presented here, using finite element analysis, suggests that parameters such as material property, tip radius and knife straightness can be more important than others, such as friction coefficient, tip angle, etc.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.3-29
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• 2008

Ian Watt, author of The Rise of the Novel, maintained that the novel originated in modern England, came from prose discourses such as the news, political essays and journalistic writing which propagated the Enlightenment, and the novels represent formal realism. The main point of this paper is to examine Watt's theory of the rise of the novel on the basis of the criticism of antinomy of the Enlightenment and "the public sphere" in Habermas' terms. At first, I will criticize formal realism, which is not a new literary species, but a formally renovated realistic form that represented capitalism and protestantism. And, then, I will show that formal realism is a kind of antinomy because it turned away from the voices and reality of the low-class and women though the novel concentrated on common people, not the aristocrats. Secondly, I will inquire into the antinomy of the Enlightenment in the aspects of reason, freedom, individualism and women. In my view, as soon as the high-middle class acquired their political rights, these values were no more encouraged and the result revealed antinomy of the Enlightenment more explicitly. Thirdly, I'd argue that "the public sphere" had positive meanings to everyone when the bourgeosie were fighting against the Absolutism and the aristocracy. I'll also insist that the high-middle class and the intellectuals were in "the public sphere" in which Habermas argues that rationality and equality were thought to have been realized, while the low-middle class and most women were de-enlightened and disciplined by reading the novel privately. In conclusion, formal realism is not the rise of the novel, but the opening of the novel peculiar to bourgeosie parliamentarism from the middle-eighteenth century to the middle-twentieth century.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.3 no.2_3
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• pp.79-90
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• 2006

This paper describes the results of an investigation into high mass-low velocity impact behaviour of reinforced concrete beams. Tests have been conducted on fifteen 2.7 m or 1.5 m span beams under drop-weight loads. A high-speed video camera has been used at rates of up to 4,500 frames per second in order to record the crack formation, propagation, particle spallation and scabbing. In some tests the strain in the reinforcement has been recorded using "Durham" strain gauged bars, a technique developed by Scott and Marchand (2000) in which the strain gauges are embedded in the bars, so that the strains in the reinforcement can be recorded without affecting the bond between the concrete and the reinforcement. The impact force acting on the beams has been measured using a load cell placed within the impactor. A high-speed data logging system has been used to record the impact load, strains, accelerations, etc., so that time histories can be obtained. This research has led to the development of computational techniques based on combined continuum/discontinuum methods (finite/discrete element methods) to permit the simulation of impact loaded reinforced concrete beams. The implementation has been within the software package ELFEN (2004). Beams, similar to those tested, have been analysed using ELFEN a good agreement has been obtained for both the load-time histories and the crack patterns.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.793-820
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• 2009

The studies of correspondence between novel and nation-state, among which The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt is supposed to be the first book, have flourished for more than twenty years, encouraged by Benedict Anderson's and Cathy Davidson's works. According to them, the novel should come simultaneously with, or after the foundation of the nation-state, and testify to its production or the emergence of its subject/citizen. This paper questions about these prepositions, trying to introduce a new paradigmatical approach, "between global and transnational historical approach," to first novels in transatlantic areas including England and atlantic coastal areas. In its complex relation to a variety of colonial, post-colonial, and transnational geopolitics, various cultural practices such as history, traveler's tales and epistolary novels can be included in the genre of the novel. The idea of the sexual contract by Carole Pateman is very useful because it helps more clearly understand the nature of relation between men and women in the capitalist reproduction, while the social contract tells about the relation between men as citizens. Unlike Freud in Totem and Taboo, Zilboorg argues that there were primordial and violent scenes such as rape before the first sexual contract. This paper will illuminate that "the rise of the novel" corresponded with the emergence of the sexual contract. In the so-called first novel Pamela, the heroine Pamela was threatened to be violated by Mr. B., and was really even confined in his cottage. Mary Rowlandson's The Captive Narrative shows that her body was confined as an English female captive, and troubled with imaginary rape by Indians which resulted in the unequal sexual contract between her and her puritan community in America. However, Leonora Sansay's Secret History in an alternative communality, which was not a nation-state, was different from both novels mentioned above, in that it shows the possibility of emancipation from their unequal marriage, the sexual contract. Therefore, it can be argued that "between global and transnational historical approach" has a possibility to provide a new vision of global sisterhood and solidarity to recognize globalized women's violence, and free themselves from the unequal sexual contract.