his study explores Pynchon’s mammoth novel, Against the Day, in terms of the minor practice of language as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, which opens up new possibilities for literary criticism. With his idiosyncratic, intensive, and inventive practice of language, Pynchon shatters the already existing notions of appropriate and homogenizing forms of major language. The novel demystifies the language’s institutionalized system of signification and defies identifiable decipherable meaning in many ways, such as (...) covert and overt deterritorialization of language, escape from “territorial” and “representational” language, defiance of signification, neutralization of sense, asyntactical language, phantasmagorical and absurd tales, quizzical jokes, silly songs, and asubjective free indirect narration. Against the Day’s practice of language prefers the territory of asubjective insignification to subjective, symbolic, and signifying usage of language so as to dismantle the territory of representation; thus, it pushes the major language towards or even out of its limits. (shrink)

In Against the Day, Pynchon is obsessed with twoness, double worlds, as well as dual realities, and like Deleuze’s concept of repetition, these duplications and twinships are not merely repetition of the same, rather they allow for creativity, reinvention, and becoming. Pynchon’s duplication of fictional and spectral characters intends to critique the notion of identity as does Deleuzian concept of repetition. Not attached to the representational concept of identity as the recurrence of the same, Pynchon’s duplications decenter the transcendental concept (...) in favor of a perpetual becoming and reproduces difference and singularity. Like Deleuze, Pynchon eschews an identity that is always guaranteed, and shows that the repetition of an object or a subject is not the recurrence of the original self-identical object or person. Moreover, Iceland spar, the mystifying calcite, with its doubling effect provides the reader with a view of a world beyond the ordinary, actual world, which is quite similar to what Pynchon’s novel does per se. (shrink)

The evaluation of universities from different perspectives is important for their scientific development. Analyzing the scientific papers of a university under the bibliometric approach is one main evaluative approach. The aim of this study was to conduct a bibliometric analysis and visualization of papers published by Hamadan University of Medical Science (HUMS), Iran, during 1992-2018. This study used bibliometric and visualization techniques. Scopus database was used for data collection. 3753 papers were retrieved by applying Affiliation Search in Scopus advanced search (...) section. Excel and VOSviewer software packages were used for data analysis and bibliometric indicator extraction. An increasing trend was seen in the numbers of HUMS's published papers and received citations. The highest rate of collaboration in national level was with Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Internationally, HUMS's researchers had the highest collaboration with the authors from the United States, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, respectively. All highly-cited papers were published in high level Q1 journals. Term clustering demonstrated four main clusters: epidemiological studies, laboratory studies, pharmacological studies, and microbiological studies. The results of this study can be beneficial to the policy-makers of this university. In addition, researchers and bibliometricians can use this study as a pattern for studying and visualizing the bibliometric indicators of other universities and research institutions. (shrink)