The authorial delusion: counting lady Macbeth’s children

In 1933, literary critic L. C. Knights published a caustic essay against the notion cultivated by certain of his colleagues, predominantly A. C. Bradley, that Shakespeare is a ‘great creator of characters’. Knights (1973) regarded the examination of isolated particles such as ‘character’ as disorientating, alleging that an analysis of this sort obscures the greater merit of language. Knight’s polemic essentially stands in the threshold of the dissention between formalists and realists: the former consider the examination of the fictional narrative as anything but a textual construct a scholarly faux pas; the latter regard the referential relationship between text and the world as a foundation for the creation of fiction. This is a pseudo-dilemma. The notion that literature is denuded of its artistic merit once it is defined by its constituent artefacts is disorienting, for it completely bypasses the dynamics of its creation. Put differently, a post-event analysis can exist as a standalone act, albeit it cannot challenge or dismiss the foundational principles of the event’s creation process

Tuning Heme Functionality: The Cases of Cytochrome c Oxidase and Myoglobin Oxidation

The (Fe-O) moiety of Cytochrome c oxidase ferryl intermediate of the dioxygen activation reaction and the oxy-myoglobin (Mb-O2) structure have been probed by QM/MM (hybrid quantum mechanical/ molecular mechanical) calculations using Density Functional Theory (DFT)/MM to elucidate the effect of the heme propionates and the protein matrix on the chemistry of heme Fe-O moieties. On this line, we have probed the role of His97 in various protonation states of the heme propionate-6 in Mb and compared the results to that of the Cytochrome c oxidase chemistry