• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.143-161
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• 2002

This essay explores the theories of Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini on the language of cinema. In essays such as "The Cinema of Poetry" and "The Written Language of Reality" composed during the 1960s, Pasolini argues for the special status of film language as "pre-grammatical" and links it to visual signifying processes such as dreams and memories. He also views cinema as the inroads towards a general semiotics of reality since, for him, the basic unit of film language is not the shot but those objects of reality that constitute the mise-en-scene of the shot, hence cinema is posited as the written language of reality whose minimal units of articulation are the very objects of reality itself. Accused by semioticians such as Umberto Eco of semiotic ingenuousness in trying to reduce the facts of culture to nature, Pasolini responded by arguing that he was trying to do the opposite, that is to say, to culturalize nature by examining it as a language. Against the constructed naturalism of both commercial and neorealist films, Pasolini argued for the creation of a poetic cinema able to exploit its constitutional pre grammatical, oneiric and sacred relationship with the world. The essay concludes with an analysis of the film Medea in which Pasolini′s attempt to restore a sacred vision of reality merges with his concerns over the cultural genocide of traditional and emarginated peoples at the hands of neocapitalist homologation.

• Advances in aircraft and spacecraft science
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.449-465
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• 2017

The aim of the present work is to present a computational study of the non-linear aero-elastic behavior of a multi-layered Thermal Protection System (TPS). The severity of atmospheric re-entry conditions is due to the combination of high temperatures, high pressures and high velocities, and thus the aero-elastic behavior of flexible structures can be difficult to assess. In order to validate the specific computational model and the overall strategy for structural and aerodynamics analyses of flexible structures, the simplified TPS sample tested in the 8' High Temperature Tunnel (HTT) at NASA LaRC has been selected as a baseline for the validation of the present work. The von $K{\acute{a}}rm{\acute{a}}n^{\prime}s$ three dimensional large deflection theory for the structure and a hybrid Raleigh-Ritz-Galerkin approach, combined with the first order Piston Theory to describe the aerodynamic flow, have been used to derive the equations of motion. The paper shows that a good description of the physical behavior of the fabric is possible with the proposed approach. The model is further applied to investigate structural and aero-elastic influence of the number of the layers and the stitching pattern.