Modern Languages

Hawley-Colón argues that misarchaia gets between the post-modern scholar and distant texts, just as debris accumulates upon ancient frescoes, and suggests an approach that studies texts from multiple generations with a reversed chronology.

In Federica Accorsi's 2012 article "El Pamphilus de Juan Ruiz," 1 the author follows Luis Jenaro-MacLennan's lead and seeks to discern which manuscript of Ovid's famous play might have most directly informed Juan Ruiz in his composition of the Don Melón, Doña Endrina, Trotaconventos episode of the Libro de buen amor. Accorsi sets up her thesis as follows: To begin, it must be said that the probability that the very manuscript used by Juan Ruiz may have been preserved is very remote, among other things because only four of the known codices indisputably derive from dates prior to the composition of the Libro. Moreover, we cannot dismiss the possibility that the poet had the opportunity to see more than one enactment of the work, perhaps at different points of his life. I do not think that the adaptation could have been made exclusively from memory, but it would not be strange that ensuing reminiscences of readings from youth should have left their footprints, constituting one more source. My objective has been to locate rather the branch to which to assign the particular manuscript of the Pamphilus known to Juan Ruiz, or at least to establish some fixed and characteristic textual locations of this manuscript source, as a starting point for future research.

When the forces of nature furnish us with exercises in humility, they very often do so in such a way that some offspring of those exercises remain with us far longer than does our humility. In 1966 such an assault by nature was unleashed upon Italy-more specifically, upon Florence-in the form of a flood. As a result of this single act of nature the Florentine fine arts community found itself obliged to take notice of the dire conditions of many of the city's treasures-among them, the frescoes of Guido di Piero di Gino, better known as Fra Angelico. Though it was the flooding that had sounded an alarm, it soon became apparent that the existent sorry state of affairs owed more to the accumulation of some 400 years of dampness, pollution, neglect, and makeshift reparation than to the flood of 1966. In the eqd, however, this story proves to be one of achievement with a happy ending, one that resulted in the union of chemists and restoration scholars such as professors Dino Dini, Enzo Ferroni and Umberto Baldini, among others, and in the rejuvenated state of the Fra Angelico frescoes as well as significant advancements in the science of art restoration. What are the discursive or textual pollutants equivalent to those haptic contaminants which accumulated over the centuries upon the Fra Angelico frescoes, and what procedures are available to the postmodern scholar interested in accessing the representations beneath the layers? These are the questions that the following pages explore. The scrutiny of any cultural informative, be it a representation such as a Fra Angelico fresco, a manuscript such as the Cantar de mio Cid or a historical event such as the battle of the Navas de Tolosa, or the unification of Castile and Leon, fmds its essence here in a practice common to cultural poetics: that of examining such informatives in textual terms.

Using molecular dynamics simulations, we study the crystallization process in Ag 6 Cu 4 and CuAu alloys. By changing the amount of supercooling, we are able to identify the role played by icosahedral order in the crystal growth kinetics. Specifically, the Ag 6 Cu 4 alloy exhibits a slowing down of the growth rate when temperature decreases, as a result of the greater amount of icosahedral order in the liquid. On the other hand, there is much less icosahedral order in the CuAu alloy and, as a result, this system displays the expected behavior of increased growth rates for greater supercooling. Furthermore, by varying the metal used as a substrate for the crystal growth process, we are able to show the major role played by the size mismatch between the atoms of the substrate and the alloy during the polymorph selection process.

Using molecular simulation, we shed light on the crystal nucleation process in systems of Cu, Ni and their nanoalloy. For each system, we simulate the formation of the crystal nucleus along the entire nucleation pathway and determine the free energy barrier overcome by the system to form a critical nucleus. Comparing the results obtained for the pure metals to those for the nanoalloy, we analyze the impact of alloying on the free energy of nucleation, as well as on the size and structure of the crystal nucleus. Specifically, we relate the greater free energy of nucleation, and bigger critical nuclei, obtained for the nanoalloy, to the difference in size and cohesive energy between the two metals. Furthermore, we characterize the dependence of the local composition of the incipient crystal cluster on its size, which is of key significance for the applications of bimetallic nanoparticles in catalysis.