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"Doubles (Literature)"
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A Suspended State
John Dos Passos uses the montage technique of the cinematic doppelgänger as the means to replot his experience of WWI outside the linear logic of wartime laws and propaganda. Alternatively, he plots wartime’s continuity by dissolving its presence—embodied by the Unknown Soldier—into the lives of survivors.
Journal Article
“The Whole Content of My Being Shrieks in Contradiction against Itself”: Uncanny Selves in Sayed Kashua and Philip Roth
The proliferation of doppelgängers and other doubles in Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular (2010) and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) suggests that the demands and expectations of national identity threaten the subjectivity of those who try to resist it. In both novels, paranoia and the abject unsettle the boundaries of subjectivity and contribute to the disequilibrium of the mind and the fragmentation of the body. Damaged bodies signify the disintegrating selves of characters who try in vain to overcome the limitations imposed on them by ideological paradigms of identity itself; paranoia is the psychological expression of the seemingly stable “I.” Paranoia and abjection—simultaneously the reason for and the consequence of the doublings and splits in these novels—indicate identity's encroachment on subjectivity. As such, these novels, though divergent in some aspects of their confrontation with identity, invoke similar phenomena to mount a scathing critique of nationalist logic.
Journal Article
DRAMATIZING DUALISM: The Use of the Literary Double in Boleslaw Prus's The Doll
Critics have devoted much attention to the complex ideological discourse of Bolesiaw Prus's The Doll, justly noting that throughout the novel its protagonist, Stanisiaw Wokulski, is torn between impulses to romance, political revolt, science, business, and social progress. These notions, traditionally associated respectively with the Polish Romantic and Positivist movements, are articulated and championed in the novel by various characters, and indeed compete with one another within the conflicted psyches of individual characters. While critics have increasingly characterized The Doll as a proto-modernist, dialogic novel, what has received relatively little attention among scholars of this novel is the pervasive use of the literary double as a device for exploring Wokulskis profound ambivalence--and by extension that of the transitional generation that he represents. Recurring appearances of Wokulskis doppelgangers, or mental projections in the form of voices and visions, manifest his repressed desires, while the novel's numerous quasi-doubles--characters bearing an uncanny resemblance--serve as a key organizing principle of the narrative, providing the protagonist with positive and negative insight into himself. But rather than attempting to reconcile these conflicting forces in monologic or dialectical fashion, Prus creates what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls a dialogic novelistic discourse, marked by multiple voices and viewpoints, unresolved ambiguities, and \"unfinalized\" characters, ever in the process of becoming. In such a reading, not only is Wokulski a transitional hero, negotiating social, ideological, and economic changes in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, but the novel itself becomes a transitional work during the period of mature realism, demonstrating many formal features of the dialogic novel, and serving as a \"bridge between the realist novel and modernist prose.\"
Journal Article
The order of complexity of visuomotor learning
Learning algorithms come in three orders of complexity: zeroth-order (perturbation), first-order (gradient descent), and second-order (e.g., quasi-Newton). But which of these are used in the brain? We trained 12 people to shoot targets, and compared them to simulated subjects that learned the same task using various algorithms.
Humans learned significantly faster than optimized zeroth-order algorithms, but slower than second-order ones.
Human visuomotor learning is too fast to be explained by zeroth-order processes alone, and must involve first or second-order mechanisms.
Journal Article
