Missionary positions: reading the Bible in Forster's "The life to come".
E. M. Forster's short story "The Life to Come" intersects the concerns of both his colonial fiction (A Passage to India) and his homosexual fiction (Maurice). The confrontation in the story between a native chief and a missionary serves initially to explore the differences between permissive and prohibitional readings of the Bible, which reflects Forster's dislike of restrictive English morals. However, contextualizing the story within the project of translating Vedic scripture that attended British imperialism near the turn of the century demonstrates that Forster, like his contemporary and mentor Edward Carpenter, found within colonialism access to a mode of thinking that ultimately questioned the validity of either permission or prohibition as foundations for political argumentation.
B/O—Barthes's Text/O'Hara's Trick
Barthes's principle of jouissance provides an erotics of reading that counters essentialist textuality. Yet much feminist inquiry has also found implicit phallocen-trism in the concept. I use the poetry and poetics of Frank O'Hara to reread Barthes's Pleasure of the Text. Gay male sexuality, I claim, offers a model that refuses to privilege the phallus. Moreover, O'Hara's poetics symbolically embraces the gay male body and demonstrates an absolute jouissance. I juxtapose O'Hara's poetry with an ironic myth of gay male sexuality, the “signifying clone.” The comparison shows that both this sexuality and O'Hara's poetry reconstruct “meaning” as an ex post facto decision—in contrast to traditional androcentric notions of meaning as an a priori truth. I suggest that the material experience of sexualities can provide a basis for a theorization that unwrites the homogenizing transcendence of the androcentric phallus. (GWB)
Design of a Ceiling Glass Installation Robot
Building materials and components are much larger and heavier than many industrial materials. Ceiling glass is a type of building material for interior finishing. The demand for larger ceiling glass has increased along with the number of high-rise buildings and an increased interest in interior design. The objective of the study is to introduce robotic technology for installing ceiling glass on construction site. Robotically installed ceiling glass is receiving special attention because of the difficulties in moving to high installation positions and handling fragile building materials. Below, we describe the design of a ceiling glass installation robot. After analyzing a target project, we establish a design concept for a proposed robot. Finally, we describe the detailed design of the robot.