• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1087-1101
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• 2009

The ongoing attempt to classify and categorize Jonathan Swift's literary work, A Tale of a Tub, as either satire or parody has not only opened issues concerning authorial intent and a present voice but also surfaced questions as to whether Swift identifies with what he is criticizing, thereby becoming the subject he schemes to destroy in his own literary work. In addressing these critical problems, my paper questions the boundaries of genre and analyzes the Tale, not within the conventional terms of literary genre, but by applying Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalistic impulse to Swift's Tale. Rather than focus on finding the author or identifying a voice within the text, Bakhtin's literary vision of carnivalization allows a means of subverting all rules yet holding the work together to present a shocking experience for the reader. Within the Tale, carnivalistic participation includes the reader who at one point is given the detached position of subjective spectator yet eventually decrowns the reader as both a carnivalistic participant and object of the same ridicule and derision once used to judge others. In conclusion, the Tale is revealed as a mocking commentary on the efforts of human beings/participants/writers to ignore the carnival aspects of existence and attempt to elevate themselves to the privileged role of spectator/reader.

• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.665-669
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• 2015

The Kepler mission has shown that small planets are extremely common. It is likely that nearly every star in the sky hosts at least one rocky planet. We just need to look hard enough-but this requires vast amounts of telescope time. MINERVA (MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array) is a dedicated exoplanet observatory with the primary goal of discovering rocky, Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone of bright, nearby stars. The MINERVA team is a collaboration among UNSW Australia, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Penn State University, University of Montana, and the California Institute of Technology. The four-telescope MINERVA array will be sited at the F.L. Whipple Observatory on Mt Hopkins in Arizona, USA. Full science operations will begin in mid-2015 with all four telescopes and a stabilised spectrograph capable of high-precision Doppler velocity measurements. We will observe ~100 of the nearest, brightest, Sun-like stars every night for at least five years. Detailed simulations of the target list and survey strategy lead us to expect $15{\pm}4$ new low-mass planets.