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The article provides a close reading of the video "Sometimes you fight for the world, sometimes you fight for yourself", dir. by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (2004, 5'). It reads the video as promoting what it calls a 'queer politics of paradox', that is, a politics that acknowledges desire as a constitutive moment of the political and at the same time challenges the political via a queer understanding of desire in order to make room for the political articulation of the Other. The article argues that a reworking of the political - one that aims at de-centring its hegemonic dynamic and creating space for Otherness - becomes possible if one invites paradox as a specific, anti-identitarian, and agonistic mode of tension to function as a constitutive moment of desire and of the political.
Writing a positive account of utopias has always been a difficult and risky task. Utopias have always already been out of fashion and outside of time. Since 1989 at the latest, visions of utopia appear to have come to an end. Twenty years after Fukayama's 'end of history', this article re-assesses the potentially fruitful roles for utopia’s out-of-timeness. Focusing on the critical potential of utopias through the concept of tension, it argues that utopian thought must be conceptualized through its tensile connections both to the status quo of a given society and to its possible futures.
The article compares the aesthetic notions of the "je ne sais quoi" (as it emerges in the Renaissance and is widely debated in the eighteenth century) and of the 'uncanny' as theorized by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. Its hypothesis is that both notions, in situating aesthetic experience in a liminal space between pleasure and trouble, can be considered after-images of non-aesthetical notions - notions that belong to the domain of the sacred and have metamorphosed as forms of aesthetic undecidability through the paradigmatic fracture of early modernity. The article focuses on depictions of female figures directing their gaze upward - in the iconography of Sade's Justine, in popular imagery connected with Lourdes apparitions (1858), in medium photography, and in the images taken by Charcot of his hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière - and argues that they become a Warburgian Pathosformel indicating a space of undecidability and 'nonsense' between the subject and otherness.
This article shows that 'tension' cannot be conceived as a specific object of an analysis for which one could determine a precise field of enquiry. Instead, it establishes tension as a specific mode or angle of approach with which any given contingent object or set of objects can be explored. The wideness of its applicability and the specificity of its angle suggest that research on tension can help to unfold a better understanding of a classical ontological question concerning the essential value of actions and relations in the definition of what a thing is. The text follows this line of argumentation by pairing contemporary philosophical sources and specific aesthetic and political examples. Suggesting the possibility of an open classification of different modes of tension, it clarifies the extent to which the essential definition of a thing is bound to the contingent analysis of its transformations.
This article discusses the function of tension in autobiographies written by eighteenth-century doctors George Cheyne, Francis Fuller, Claude Revillon, and the Viscount de Puysegur. It studies how their rhetorical strategies stir tensions in readers through the narration of their own periods of infirmity and search for a remedy. The descriptions of their recoveries offer resolution, legitimate their medical practices, and help diffuse their works. Through the staging of these reversals, the authors suggest a shift in the way the role of medical doctors was perceived as well as a fundamental change in their relationship to illness.
This edited transcript of a presentation by filmmaker/choreographer Laura Taler responds to Heinrich von Kleist's text by taking him on as a dancing partner. It follows a simple structure of proposal and response similar to that found in the movements between leader and follower in Argentine tango. Engaging Kleist's text in the double form of a speech and a tango performance, this critical contribution follows a twofold direction: it questions Kleist's representation of dance as a mechanical activity deprived of any form of intelligence and it refuses his attempt to force the aesthetic experience of dance into a framework that privileges theory over bodily experience. These two classical philosophical positions are questioned and provocatively opposed to the dynamic, situated, and dialogic thought performed within a witty tango interaction.
This article conceptualizes tension as a relation between elements in which at least two forces with different directions are involved. How can this concept of tension be applied to the analysis of the peculiar logic of life in common? The article offers a reading, inspired by the method of conceptual history, of the use of the concept of 'force' in three models of society: Hobbes's political model, the economic model proposed by the thinkers of commercial society, and Durkheim's social theory. The analysis sheds some light on the ways in which the presence of contradictory forces can be taken to be constitutive of the social itself. This observation is then used to suggest that the puzzling fascination exerted by the notion of tension can be better understood if we see it pointing to some fundamental features of our way of collectively inhabiting the world.
Insects, the new food?
(2017)
In many parts of the world it is common to eat insects while in the western world it is regarded as a bizarre habit, even evoking disgust. Is this justified? What if insects were nutritionally similar to our common meat products and have proven to be delicious in blind tests? Insects have an environmental impact which is much less than our common production animals, so why not eat it? If these questions can be answered affirmatively, then the question is: Can we persuade the western consumers to take this psychological barrier? There has been a tremendous interest during the last five years to promote insects as food. There are now close to 200 start-up companies listed. Also, in the scientific world the interest is growing exponentially, testified by the number of articles on edible insects that have appeared during the last 15 years (83 from 2011 to 2015 against 9 from 2001 to 20051). These articles deal with harvesting from nature, environmental benefits, nutritional value, food safety, processing, and consumer attitudes. I will give a short overview of the developments in these different areas.
How is it possible to write about "American" habitus in general, when the United States is socially, geographically, ethically and politically so diverse? "The USA", it has been observed, "is not a country, it is a continent". The social forces and social processes shaping the habitus of Americans are multifarious. There has not, for example, ever been a single elite in the USA as a whole that has succeeded in monopolising the social "model-setting" function to the extent that was common in the history of many Western European countries. For the development of American habitus, Stephen Mennell advances a central proposition: His thesis is that the central historic experience shaping the social habitus of Americans is that of their country constantly becoming more powerful relative to its neighbours. This has had long-term and all-pervasive effects on the way Americans see themselves, on how they perceive the rest of the world, and how others see them.
Nations are signified by their constructed or mythicized cultural memory, since "identity is part of memory discourse". There are shared historical legacies in Southeast European countries, among which the most significant are Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire: "It has been chiefly the Ottoman elements or the ones perceived as such which have mostly given rise to the current stereotype of the Balkans, so that it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Balkans are, in fact, the Ottoman legacy." Contrary to it, the Habsburg legacy and the belonging to the Habsburg Monarchy have mainly not been seen in the same, negative way. Consequently, there are two different understandings of national identity and different strategies in defining self-representation in the (previous) provinces of the two empires, which is also explicated in Southeast European operas. The construction of Croatian national identity is considered through the stage representations of the historical Siege of Szigetvár (1566).
On July 10, 1798, the German ensemble at the Vienna court theater presented the premiere performance of 'Die Hochzeit des Figaro', the first production of Mozart and Da Ponte's 'Le nozze di Figaro' – and indeed of any Mozart-Da Ponte work – at the court theater since Mozart's death and Da Ponte's departure from the imperial capital. A few months later, on December 11, 1798, a new production of Don Giovanni, titled Don Juan, arrived at the court theater stage. On September 19, 1804, a production of Così fan tutte followed, under the title 'Mädchentreue'. Although the productions were not extraordinarily successful in terms of performance numbers, they represented important trends in the Viennese reception of Mozart's operas that were to continue throughout the early nineteenth century. In particular, these productions left behind numerous records about the convoluted processes through which theatrical works were approved, re-approved, and revised before reaching the stage in Vienna around 1800. Particularly prominent among these processes was censorship. Yet, as this article shows, Viennese censors worked in tandem with numerous private and public agents who likewise contributed to the final shape of pre-existing works' adaptations. An examination of the censorial approaches to Mozart's Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte in Vienna around 1800 shows that late Enlightenment censorship was contradictory and multidirectional and should be considered not as a force of restriction but as an element that affected artworks in ways similar to other social, political, and cultural factors, such as patronage, audience structure, and various social and political ideologies.
On the one side there is book culture, centered on the printed book as a material object; on the other digital culture, centered on what is displayed on a screen, by now more often than not that of a mobile phone. In the cultural imaginary, the two practices are separated by far more than just media technology. The girl in Delevingne's picture, in choosing to read a book rather than participate in the social media arena, opts (as the black-and-white blocking of the caption neatly reflects) for a commendable type of media use: She sharpens her intellect and exercises her imagination, she digs deep rather than staying on the surface, and she engages – in a seemingly disinterested manner – with valuable content rather than obsessing over how to present herself in the best light. Her absorption is a badge of honor, much different from the 'bad' absorption of digital media users, a recurring trope that is artistically represented, for example, in the much-acclaimed surrealist photo series "SURFAKE" by the French photographer Antoine Geiger, which represents mobile phone users whose faces are sucked into their devices.
The adaptation of disaster: representations of environmental crises in climate change fiction
(2019)
In light of climate change, the attempt to overcome the gap between the 'Two Cultures' appears more urgent than ever. With climate change being only one of the environmental crises marking the so-called Anthropocene, knowledge production and representations are constantly challenged. The very reason that led to the idea of proclaiming a new geological epoch can be taken as evidence for the collapse of the Cartesian dichotomy between nature and culture. The Anthropocene marks an epoch in Earth's history in which the human species has become a geological force. That is, the effects of industrialized civilization are now forming geological strata that irreversibly change the face of the planet and its future. However, if nature and culture cannot be meaningfully distinguished anymore, how, one might ask, is a divide within academia still of concern? Would it not naturally perish with the insight that what has been regarded as nature has now been thoroughly pervaded by remnants of human actions? To the contrary, the persistence of the gap between the sciences and the humanities is one of the main reasons that complicates the representation and, ultimately, hinders the understanding of the problems which characterize the new epoch. Inability or unwillingness to change behavior on a collective level will most probably lead to environmental, political and social disaster on an unprecedented scale.
In this article, I will argue for a different notion of adaptation as a form of appropriation that allows a more productive analysis of the literary works of German author Rainald Goetz. Therefore I will draw on a specific understanding of pop music, which derives from Diedrich Diederichsen 'Über Pop-Musik' (On pop music). According to Diederichsen, pop-music is not limited to certain kinds of music, but moreover to the practices pop-music entails.
In the early 21st century, scientists once more declared God a delusion and announced the end of faith, boosting the current critique of religious belief known as 'New Atheism'. Yet the contemporary British and Irish novel engage with religion in various forms, and religion has indeed "returned", Andrew Tate argues, "to the study of literature". The Bible in particular proves a rich source for novelists as different as Colm Tóibín, Zadie Smith, and Philip Pullman among others. Where Colm Tóibín's 'The Testament of Mary' (2012) offers a fictional memoir by the mother of God, depicting the Virgin Mary as "a powerful, unsparing figure" ('Guardian'), Zadie Smith's 'NW' (2012) describes the lives of its two female protagonists against the backdrop of the stories of Mary and Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke. And Philip Pullman's bestselling trilogy 'His Dark Materials' (1995- 2000) is a re-writing of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1667) that "only really makes sense" according to Tate "if the reader has a detailed knowledge of the biblical scriptures against which it writes". Despite being written from a very critical, ironic or atheist stance, all these novels rely on the Bible as an intertext in crucial ways. The Bible, in other words, is once more living up to its ancient reputation as "the Book of Books", "the Urtext of Western literature".
The discipline of adaptation studies has come a long way from its academic inception in novel-to-film studies. Since George Bluestone's seminal 1957 study Novels into Film, often regarded as the starting point of modern day Anglo-American adaptation studies, the discipline has seen a continual widening of its methodology as well as of the material scholars are willing to regard as adaptations. Particularly since the turn of the 21st century and the increasing institutionalization of the discipline as distinct from literary or film studies, adaptation scholars have widened the scope to include a broad range of media, encompassing not only the traditional adaptations from novels and drama into film, but also novelizations of various other media, video game and comic adaptations, TV series, opera, theme parks and tie in vacations, and many more. Others have included the study of media franchises as dependent on adaptation. As part of this redefinition of the discipline, scholars have also widened their discussion to bring to the centre aspects that were not originally the main focus of adaptation researchers' comparative textual analyses, including industrial structures, legal frameworks, and, most frequently and emphatically, questions of intertextuality and the cultural and ideological embeddedness of adapted texts.
The discipline of adaptation studies has come a long way from its academic inception in novel-to-film studies. Since George Bluestone's seminal 1957 study Novels into Film, often regarded as the starting point of modern day Anglo-American adaptation studies, the discipline has seen a continual widening of its methodology as well as of the material scholars are willing to regard as adaptations. Particularly since the turn of the 21st century and the increasing institutionalization of the discipline as distinct from literary or film studies, adaptation scholars have widened the scope to include a broad range of media, encompassing not only the traditional adaptations from novels and drama into film, but also novelizations of various other media, video game and comic adaptations, TV series, opera, theme parks and tie in vacations, and many more. Others have included the study of media franchises as dependent on adaptation. As part of this redefinition of the discipline, scholars have also widened their discussion to bring to the centre aspects that were not originally the main focus of adaptation researchers' comparative textual analyses, including industrial structures, legal frameworks, and, most frequently and emphatically, questions of intertextuality and the cultural and ideological embeddedness of adapted texts.
In 1983, Brian Henderson published an article that examined various types of narrative structure in film, including flashbacks and flashforwards. After analyzing a whole spectrum of techniques capable of effecting a transition between past and present – blurs, fades, dissolves, and so on – he concluded: "Our discussions indicate that cinema has not (yet) developed the complexity of tense structures found in literary works". His "yet" (in parentheses) was an instance of laudable caution, as very soon – in some ten–fifteen years – the situation would change drastically, and temporal twists would become a trademark of a new genre that has not (yet) acquired a standardized name: "modular narratives", "puzzle films", and "complex films" are among the labels used.
Popularity/Prestige
(2018)
What is the canon? Usually this question is just a proxy for something like, "Which works are in the canon?" But the first question is not just a concise version of the second, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Instead, it can ask what the structure of the canon is - in other words, when things are in the canon, what are they in? This question came to the fore during the project that resulted in Pamphlet 11. The members of that group were looking for morphological differences between the canon and the archive. The latter they define, straightforwardly and capaciously, as "that portion of published literature that has been preserved—in libraries and elsewhere" The canon is a slipperier concept; the authors speak instead of multiple canons, like the books preserved in the Chadwyck-Healey Nineteenth-Century Fiction Collection, the constituents of the six different "best-twentieth century novels" lists analyzed by Mark Algee-Hewitt and Mark McGurl in Pamphlet 8, authors included in the British Dictionary of National Biography, and so forth. [...] This last conundrum points the way out of these difficulties and into a workable model of the structure of the canon. It suggests two different ways of entering the canon: being read by many and being prized by an elite few—or, to use the terms arrived at in Pamphlet 11, popularity and prestige. With these two dimensions, we arrive at a canonical space [...].
Am 6. Juli 1916 notierte Ludwig Wittgenstein in seinem Tagebuch: "Und insofern hat wohl auch Dostojewskij recht, wenn er sagt, dass der, welcher glücklich ist, den Zweck des Daseins erfüllt." Diese Aussage ist eingebettet in Überlegungen zur Beziehung von Ethik und Ästhetik in seinem Tagebuch, die später in den 'Tractatus logicophilosophicus' einfliessen (ab Satz 6.42). Die Figur Dostojewskijs, die am explizitesten solche Sätze aussprach, wie den oben zitierten, ist der Starez Sosima aus den 'Brüdern Karamasow'. Wittgenstein hat diesen Roman so oft gelesen, dass er ihn nahezu auswendig konnte, insbesondere die Reden des Starez Sosima. Obwohl Wittgenstein darauf bestand, dass Ethik "unaussprechbar" ist, deutet er an, dass Literatur das gute Leben "zeigen" kann. Somit überschreitet er die Grenzen der frühen analytischen Philosophie, die sich an mathematischen Wissenschaften orientierte und sich möglichst von der Kunst abzugrenzen suchte.
Des critiques et écrivains de nouvelles ont défendu l'idée que la brieveté et un unique moment de clarté sont les éléments essentiels du format court typique de la nouvelle. Cependant, la nouvelle postcoloniale est plurielle, polyphonique et versatile, et elle a tendance à s'appuyer sur le désaccord culturel, social, et linguistique. Ce chapitre examine la traduction et l'échec de celle-ci dans l'oeuvre de deux nouvellistes prolifiques qui viennent des deux différentes traditions postcoloniales : Nadine Gordimer et Anita Desai. La prémisse de mon argument est que les nouvelles de ces écrivains ont pour la plupart lieu dans des espaces périphériques, par exemple des villages et des avant-postes. Elles dramatisent une forme de processus postcolonial de désengagement des centres de pouvoir en explorant et en remettant en question des hiérarchies discursives. Cette renégociation implique la présence de perspectives multiples et de subjectivités plurielles, de même qu'elle insiste sur des traductions problématiques et des malentendus surgissant en leur sein. Par l'étude de textes de Gordimer et Desai, ce chapitre considère plusieurs formes de malentendus – fausses représentations, mécompréhension, traductions erronées et obstructions linguistiques – qui ses présentent dans deux nouvelles. Il ressort de cette analyse que les malentendus sont susceptibles de devenir les instruments de l'expression d'une résistance dans les sites hégémoniques de la langue et du pouvoir.
Cet article examine le rôle souvent occulté et pourtant essentiel de la traduction comme source d'innovation et de créativité dans l'histoire littéraire et la théorie. Il s'appuie sur plusieurs exemples allant du fameux épisode de la création d'Ève à partir de la "côte d'Adam" dans la Bible de Jérôme, basée sur la traduction fautive du mot hébreu "qaran" en latin et reflétant le biais patriarcal de Jérôme, à la traduction, tronquée du Deuxième Sexe de Simone de Beauvoir (1946) par le zoologiste retraité Howard M. Parshley qui allait néanmoins inspirer des études marquantes de la seconde vague féministe américaine telles que "The Feminine Mystique" (1963) de Betty Friedan et "Sexual Politics" (1970) de Kate Millett. L'exemple le plus développé retrace l'interaction productive de la traduction et de la réécriture dans la fiction d'Angela Carter, de "The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault" (1977) jusqu'à ses célèbres "stories about fairy stories" recueillies dans "The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories" (1979) et "American Ghosts and Old World Wonders" (1992). Je propose de lire les variations de Carter sur "Aschenputtel" dans "Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost" comme un correctif à sa traduction de la morale de "Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre" de Perrault. La poétique traductive (translational poetics) de Carter démontre ainsi l'impact crucial de la traduction – y compris des erreurs – sur la démarche de l'écrivain, qui associe la (re)lecture créative inhérente à l'activité de traduction au travail de (ré)écriture jusqu'à en faire la matrice à partir de laquelle elle a élaboré son oeuvre singulière.
In her article, Karin Littau proposes a material or medial turn in the humanities and social sciences to end the neglect of the material basis to every act of communication, including translation. This proposal is warmly welcomed. As a comparatist who has for some time been trying to build bridges between literary studies and book history, I strongly support Littau's point of view – all the more since I am less optimistic regarding the general acceptance of such ideas in the humanities, and especially in literary and translation studies. I am not so sure that McLuhan and the other authorities for the importance of mediality and technicity whom Littau quotes (e.g. Kittler, Ong, and Gumbrecht) have really provoked a "crisis in the self-understanding of the human sciences". For brevity's sake, in my response below, I leave aside literary studies to focus on translation studies.
Koselleck has repeatedly rejected the existence of a collective memory. All memory derives from individual experiences which are not interchangeable. Any person has the right to his own memories, without which he could not live and which cannot be collectivized. Only the conditions under which they are realized and recollected may be referred to as supra-individual. For this reason it is advisable to distinguish between the primary experiences of those who have lived them as a first person and who bind them to their own memories, and the secondary experiences after the fact of those who were not present in the situation which gave rise to the immediate experience. This distinction also applies to memorials. The messages of monuments are open to a double exegesis: they evoke the unmistakable occasions that have led to death. Like primary experiences they are not interchangeable. But, even so, artistic responses to incomparable occasions repeat themselves. There is only a limited repertoire of aesthetic solutions for fixating violent death – which individually is always unique – in the memory.
The object of this study is one of the most ambitious projects of twentieth-century art history: Aby Warburg's 'Atlas Mnemosyne', conceived in the summer of 1926 – when the first mention of a 'Bilderatlas', or "atlas of images", occurs in his journal – and truncated three years later, unfinished, by his sudden death in October 1929. Mnemosyne consisted in a series of large black panels, about 170x140 cm., on which were attached black-and-white photographs of paintings, sculptures, book pages, stamps, newspaper clippings, tarot cards, coins, and other types of images. Warburg kept changing the order of the panels and the position of the images until the very end, and three main versions of the Atlas have been recorded: one from 1928 (the "1-43 version", with 682 images); one from the early months of 1929, with 71 panels and 1050 images; and the one Warburg was working on at the time of his death, also known as the "1-79 version", with 63 panels and 971 images (which is the one we will examine). But Warburg was planning to have more panels – possibly many more – and there is no doubt that Mnemosyne is a dramatically unfinished and controversial object of study.
Patterns and interpretation
(2017)
One thing for sure: digitization has completely changed the literary archive. People like me used to work on a few hundred nineteenth-century novels; today, we work on thousands of them; tomorrow, hundreds of thousands. This has had a major effect on literary history, obviously enough, but also on critical methodology; because, when we work on 200,000 novels instead of 200, we are not doing the same thing, 1,000 times bigger; we are doing a different thing. The new scale changes our relationship to our object, and in fact 'it changes the object itself'.
The Emotions of London
(2016)
A few years ago, a group formed by Ben Allen, Cameron Blevins, Ryan Heuser, and Matt Jockers decided to use topic modeling to extract geographical information from nineteenth-century novels. Though the study was eventually abandoned, it had revealed that London-related topics had become significantly more frequent in the course of the century, and when some of us were later asked to design a crowd-sourcing experiment, we decided to add a further dimension to those early findings, and see whether London place-names could become the cornerstone for an emotional geography of the city.
Literature, measured
(2016)
There comes a moment, in digital humanities talks, when someone raises the hand and says: "Ok. Interesting. But is it really new?" Good question... And let's leave aside the obvious lines of defense, such as "but the field is still only at its beginning!", or "and traditional literary criticism, is that always new?" All true, and all irrelevant; because the digital humanities have presented themselves as a radical break with the past, and must therefore produce evidence of such a break. And the evidence, let's be frank, is not strong. What is there, moreover, comes in a variety of forms, beginning with the slightly paradoxical fact that, in a new approach, not everything has to be new. When "Network Theory, Plot Analysis” pointed out, in passing, that a network of Hamlet had Hamlet at its center, the New York Times gleefully mentioned the passage as an unmistakable sign of stupidity. Maybe; but the point, of course, was not to present Hamlet’s centrality as a surprise; it was exactly the opposite: had the new approach not found Hamlet at the center of the play, its plausibility would have disintegrated. Before using network theory for dramatic analysis, I had to test it, and prove that it corroborated the main results of previous research.
Of the novelties introduced by digitization in the study of literature, the size of the archive is probably the most dramatic: we used to work on a couple of hundred nineteenth-century novels, and now we can analyze thousands of them, tens of thousands, tomorrow hundreds of thousands. It's a moment of euphoria, for quantitative literary history: like having a telescope that makes you see entirely new galaxies. And it's a moment of truth: so, have the digital skies revealed anything that changes our knowledge of literature? This is not a rhetorical question. In the famous 1958 essay in which he hailed "the advent of a quantitative history" that would "break with the traditional form of nineteenth-century history", Fernand Braudel mentioned as its typical materials "demographic progressions, the movement of wages, the variations in interest rates [...] productivity [...] money supply and demand." These were all quantifiable entities, clearly enough; but they were also completely new objects compared to the study of legislation, military campaigns, political cabinets, diplomacy, and so on. It was this double shift that changed the practice of history; not quantification alone. In our case, though, there is no shift in materials: we may end up studying 200,000 novels instead of 200; but, they're all still novels. Where exactly is the novelty?
Different scales, different features. It’s the main difference between the thesis we have presented here, and the one that has so far dominated the study of the paragraph. By defining it as "a sentence writ large", or, symmetrically, as "a short discourse", previous research was implicitly asserting the irrelevance of scale: sentence, paragraph, and discourse were all equally involved in the "development of one topic". We have found the exact opposite: 'scale is directly correlated to the differentiation of textual functions'. By this, we don't simply mean that the scale of sentences or paragraphs allows us to "see" style or themes more clearly. This is true, but secondary. Paragraphs allows us to "see" themes, because themes fully "exist" only at the scale of the paragraph. Ours is not just an epistemological claim, but an ontological one: if style and themes and episodes exist in the form they do, it's because writers work at different scales – and do different things according to the level at which they are operating.
Loudness in the novel
(2014)
The novel is composed entirely of voices: the most prominent among them is typically that of the narrator, which is regularly intermixed with those of the various characters. In reading through a novel, the reader "hears" these heterogeneous voices as they occur in the text. When the novel is read out loud, the voices are audibly heard. They are also heard, however, when the novel is read silently: in this la!er case, the voices are not verbalized for others to hear, but acoustically created and perceived in the mind of the reader. Simply put: sound, in the context of the novel, is fundamentally a product of the novel’s voices. This conception of sound mechanics may at first seem unintuitive—sound seems to be the product of oral reading—but it is only by starting with the voice that one can fully appreciate sound’s function in the novel. Moreover, such a conception of sound mechanics finds affirmation in the works of both Mikhail Bakhtin and Elaine Scarry: "In the novel," writes Bakhtin, "we can always hear voices (even while reading silently to ourselves)."
The concept of length, the concept is synonymous, the concept is nothing more than, the proper definition of a concept ... Forget programs and visions; the operational approach refers specifically to concepts, and in a very specific way: it describes the process whereby concepts are transformed into a series of operations—which, in their turn, allow to measure all sorts of objects. Operationalizing means building a bridge from concepts to measurement, and then to the world. In our case: from the concepts of literary theory, through some form of quantification, to literary texts.
We would study not style as such, but style 'at the scale of the sentence': the lowest level, it seemed, at which style as a distinct phenomenon became visible. Implicitly, we were defining style as a combination of smaller linguistic units, which made it, in consequence, particularly sensitive to changes in scale—from words to clauses to whole sentences.
The nineteenth century in Britain saw tumultuous changes that reshaped the fabric of society and altered the course of modernization. It also saw the rise of the novel to the height of its cultural power as the most important literary form of the period. This paper reports on a long-term experiment in tracing such macroscopic changes in the novel during this crucial period. Specifically, we present findings on two interrelated transformations in novelistic language that reveal a systemic concretization in language and fundamental change in the social spaces of the novel. We show how these shifts have consequences for setting, characterization, and narration as well as implications for the responsiveness of the novel to the dramatic changes in British society.
This paper has a second strand as well. This project was simultaneously an experiment in developing quantitative and computational methods for tracing changes in literary language. We wanted to see how far quantifiable features such as word usage could be pushed toward the investigation of literary history. Could we leverage quantitative methods in ways that respect the nuance and complexity we value in the humanities? To this end, we present a second set of results, the techniques and methodological lessons gained in the course of designing and running this project.
If there is one thing to be learned from David Foster Wallace, it is that cultural transmission is a tricky game. This was a problem Wallace confronted as a literary professional, a university-based writer during what Mark McGurl has called the Program Era. But it was also a philosophical issue he grappled with on a deep level as he struggled to combat his own loneliness through writing. This fundamental concern with literature as a social, collaborative enterprise has also gained some popularity among scholars of contemporary American literature, particularly McGurl and James English: both critics explore the rules by which prestige or cultural distinction is awarded to authors (English; McGurl). Their approach requires a certain amount of empirical work, since these claims move beyond the individual experience of the text into forms of collective reading and cultural exchange influenced by social class, geographical location, education, ethnicity, and other factors. Yet McGurl and English's groundbreaking work is limited by the very forms of exclusivity they analyze: the protective bubble of creative writing programs in the academy and the elite economy of prestige surrounding literary prizes, respectively. To really study the problem of cultural transmission, we need to look beyond the symbolic markets of prestige to the real market, the site of mass literary consumption, where authors succeed or fail based on their ability to speak to that most diverse and complicated of readerships: the general public. Unless we study what I call the social lives of books, we make the mistake of keeping literature in the same ascetic laboratory that Wallace tried to break out of with his intense authorial focus on popular culture, mass media, and everyday life.
In the last few years, literary studies have experienced what we could call the rise of quantitative evidence. This had happened before of course, without producing lasting effects, but this time it’s probably going to be different, because this time we have digital databases, and automated data retrieval. As Michel’s and Lieberman’s recent article on "Culturomics" made clear, the width of the corpus and the speed of the search have increased beyond all expectations: today, we can replicate in a few minutes investigations that took a giant like Leo Spitzer months and years of work. When it comes to phenomena of language and style, we can do things that previous generations could only dream of.
When it comes to language and style. But if you work on novels or plays, style is only part of the picture. What about plot – how can that be quantified? This paper is the beginning of an answer, and the beginning of the beginning is network theory. This is a theory that studies connections within large groups of objects: the objects can be just about anything – banks, neurons, film actors, research papers, friends... – and are usually called nodes or vertices; their connections are usually called edges; and the analysis of how vertices are linked by edges has revealed many unexpected features of large systems, the most famous one being the so-called "small-world" property, or "six degrees of separation": the uncanny rapidity with which one can reach any vertex in the network from any other vertex. The theory proper requires a level of mathematical intelligence which I unfortunately lack; and it typically uses vast quantities of data which will also be missing from my paper. But this is only the first in a series of studies we’re doing at the Stanford Literary Lab; and then, even at this early stage, a few things emerge.
This paper is the report of a study conducted by five people – four at Stanford, and one at the University of Wisconsin – which tried to establish whether computer-generated algorithms could "recognize" literary genres. You take 'David Copperfield', run it through a program without any human input – "unsupervised", as the expression goes – and ... can the program figure out whether it's a gothic novel or a 'Bildungsroman'? The answer is, fundamentally, Yes: but a Yes with so many complications that it is necessary to look at the entire process of our study. These are new methods we are using, and with new methods the process is almost as important as the results.
BLACK KIRBY is a collaborative "entity" that is the creative doppelganger of artists / designers John Jennings and Stacey "Blackstar" Robinson. The manifestation of this avatar is an exhibition and catalog1 of primarily visual artworks-on-paper that celebrate the groundbreaking work of legendary comics creator Jack Kirby regarding his contributions to the pop culture landscape and his development of some of the conventions of the comics medium.
BLACK KIRBY also functions as a highly syncretic mythopoetic framework by appropriating Jack Kirby’s bold forms and revolutionary ideas combined with themes centered around AfroFuturism social justice, Black history, media criticism, science fiction, magical realism, and the utilization of Hip Hop culture as a methodology for creating visual expression. This collection of work also focuses on the digital medium and how its inherent affordances offer much more flexibility in the expression of visual communication and what that means in its production and consumption in the public sphere. In a sense, BLACK KIRBY appropriates the gallery as a conceptual "crossroads" to examine identity as a socialized concept and to show the commonalities between Black comics creators and Jewish comics creators and how they both utilize the medium of comics as space of resistance. The duo attempts to re-mediate "Blackness" and other identity contexts as "sublime technologies" that produce experiences that sometime limit human progress and possibility. This paper / presentation will examine some of the themes of this inaugural exhibition of this new artistic team and share the processes involved with the ideation, execution, and installation of the exhibition.
The emotional state of being moved, though frequently referred to in both classical rhetoric and current language use, is far from established as a well-defined psychological construct. In a series of three studies, we investigated eliciting scenarios, emotional ingredients, appraisal patterns, feeling qualities, and the affective signature of being moved and related emotional states. The great majority of the eliciting scenarios can be assigned to significant relationship and critical life events (especially death, birth, marriage, separation, and reunion). Sadness and joy turned out to be the two preeminent emotions involved in episodes of being moved. Both the sad and the joyful variants of being moved showed a coactivation of positive and negative affect and can thus be ranked among the mixed emotions. Moreover, being moved, while featuring only low-to-mid arousal levels, was experienced as an emotional state of high intensity; this applied to responses to fictional artworks no less than to own-life and other real, but media-represented, events. The most distinctive findings regarding cognitive appraisal dimensions were very low ratings for causation of the event by oneself and for having the power to change its outcome, along with very high ratings for appraisals of compatibility with social norms and self-ideals. Putting together the characteristics identified and discussed throughout the three studies, the paper ends with a sketch of a psychological construct of being moved.
Stories can elicit powerful emotions. A key emotional response to narrative plots (e.g., novels, movies, etc.) is suspense. Suspense appears to build on basic aspects of human cognition such as processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction. However, the neural processes underlying emotional experiences of suspense have not been previously investigated. We acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants read a suspenseful literary text (E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman") subdivided into short text passages. Individual ratings of experienced suspense obtained after each text passage were found to be related to activation in the medial frontal cortex, bilateral frontal regions (along the inferior frontal sulcus), lateral premotor cortex, as well as posterior temporal and temporo-parietal areas. The results indicate that the emotional experience of suspense depends on brain areas associated with social cognition and predictive inference.
Emotional competence has an important influence on development in school. We hypothesized that reading and discussing children’s books with emotional content increases children’s emotional competence. To examine this assumption, we developed a literature-based intervention, named READING and FEELING, and tested it on 104 second and third graders in their after-school care center. Children who attended the same care center but did not participate in the emotion-centered literary program formed the control group (n = 104). Our goal was to promote emotional competence and to evaluate the effectiveness of the READING and FEELING program. Emotional competence variables were measured prior to the intervention and 9 weeks later, at the end of the program. Results revealed significant improvements in the emotional vocabulary, explicit emotional knowledge, and recognition of masked feelings. Regarding the treatment effect for detecting masked feelings, we found that boys benefited significantly more than girls. These findings underscore the assumption that children’s literature is an appropriate vehicle to support the development of emotional competence in middle childhood.
This psychophysiological study is the first to examine the relationship between emotional tears and emotional piloerection (i.e., goosebumps). Although both phenomena have been related to peak states of being moved, details about their temporal occurrence and the associated levels of physiological arousal have remained unknown. In our study, we used emotionally powerful film scenes that were self-selected by participants. Our findings show that even within peak moments of emotional arousal, a gradation of intensity is possible. The overlap of tears and goosebumps signifies a maximal climax within peak moments. On the side of the stimulus, we found that displays of prosocial behavior play a crucial role in the elicitation of tears and goosebumps. Finally, based on the results of a formal film analysis of the tears-eliciting clips provided by our participants, as compared to randomly extracted, equally long control clips from the same films, we show how the technical and artistic making of the clips was optimized for the display of social interaction and emotional expressions.
The present paper aims to elucidate the conceptual structure of the aesthetics of literature.Following Fechner's "aesthetics from below" (1876) and adopting a method introduced by Jacobsen, Buchta, Kohler, and Schroeger (2004), we asked 1544 German-speaking research participants to list adjectives that they use to label aesthetic dimensions of literature in general and of individual literary forms and genres in particular (novels, short stories, poems, plays, comedies). According to our analyses of frequency, mean list rank, and the Cognitive Salience Index, beautiful and suspenseful rank highest across all target categories. For plays/comedies, funny and sad turned out to be the most relevant terms; for novels and short stories, suspenseful, interesting and romantic; and for poetry romantic, along with the music-related terms harmonious, rhythmic, and melodious. A comparison of our results with analogous studies for visual aesthetics and music yielded a comprehensive map of the distribution of aesthetic appeal dimensions across sensory modalities and aesthetic domains, with poetry and music showing the greatest overlap.
This study explored the organization of the semantic field and the conceptual structure of moving experiences by investigating German-language expressions referring to the emotional state of being moved. We used present and past participles of eight psychological verbs as primes in a free word-association task, as these grammatical forms place their conceptual focus on the eliciting situation and on the felt emotional state, respectively. By applying a taxonomy of basic knowledge types and computing the Cognitive Salience Index, we identified joy and sadness as key emotional ingredients of being moved, and significant life events and art experiences as main elicitors of this emotional state. Metric multidimensional scaling analyses of the semantic field revealed that the core terms designate a cluster of emotional states characterized by low degrees of arousal and slightly positive valence, the latter due to a nearly balanced representation of positive and negative elements in the conceptual structure of being moved.
The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles
(2017)
It is a common experience—and well established experimentally—that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry.
The present volume documents the twofold character of the conference 'Science meets Comics' with the first part focusing on comics as a format for communicating complex topics and the second part addressing food in the age of the Anthropocene as one such example for complex topics. The overall objective of the symposium was to deal with the results and suggestions of the presentations and discussions, to find possible pathways on how to feed the world in the future and to co-produce the final chapter of the scientific comic 'Eating Anthropocene' together with all artists participating in the project. In order to sum up the framing, contents and design process of the comic as well as to highlight its Anthropocene context we below provide a slightly abridged version of the preface of our comic book.
Interview mit Katerina Teaiwa über ihr Buch zu den Umweltschäden und schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen auf der Insel Ocean Island (Banaba) aufgrund des Phosphatabbaus durch Besatzungs- und Kolonialmächte.
Our daily food consumption is slowly but surely turning into the largest environmental threat. The agricultural sector consumes 70% of the water used by humankind. The production of meat consumes enormous amounts of water compared to plants. Innovations in the area of food production are lately summarized as AgTech, agricultural technology. This encompasses all sorts of areas, ranging from drone-controlled tractors to printed hamburgers. Specifically the challenge of making use of the limited areas available in cities and maximizing crop yields has seen a recent boom in novel approaches – and quite a bit of investor finance.