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Notes on Ecosystems of Theatre and Performance
No full textAs the Associate Scholar of the EASTAP Annual Conference 2024 hosted by the Institute of the Arts Barcelona, Professor Emerita Maria Shevtsova delivered a keynote address on 29 October 2024. Her presentation focused on the conference’s central theme, ‘Ecosystems of Theatre and Performance’. Presented in this section are her notes from that address, offering a unique insight into her preparation for what became a vibrant talk, which played a formative role in shaping the ensuing discussions throughout the conference
Tidens tecken, fältets tillstånd: tre fall och den finlandssvenska minoritetslitteraturens fält på 2020-talet
No full textIn this article, I ask how the effects of macro-level developments – digitalization, globalization and the new market economy – can be studied within a local literary field, given that such macro-level processes are not directly observable but become evident through their effects. Following a description of the symbolic economy of the Finland-Swedish minority literary field, I analyze three cases: the self-representation of two established female authors as they promote their writing school; how a popular author’s disappointment over being denied membership in a writers’ association becomes news on the culture pages; and how readers have taken on the role of literary judges by selecting the winner of the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s Finland-Swedish literary prize. Together, these cases reveal key effects of ongoing macro-processes within this small minority literature: popular genres and intermediality play a central role in writing and authorial self-representation; the attention economy and social media logics influence which topics are featured on the culture pages; and literary experts have become marginal in a context where their expertise was previously essential. All examples point in the same direction: a profound restructuring is taking place within the Finland-Swedish literary field, with changes that mirror developments in larger literary fields. These effects suggest that the field is no longer immune to market forces, and literary value is no longer its guiding principle. A literature long defined by its aesthetic and political mission to preserve the language and identity of the Finland-Swedish minority population is now rapidly losing its (relative) literary autonomy to emerging technological and economic pressures
Istället för spänning: prestige? Den internationella lanseringen av Johanna Hedmans debutroman Trion och förnyelsen av den svenska litteraturexporten
No full textThis article deals with Swedish author Johanna Hedman’s debut novel Trion, published in 2021. The novel quickly gained attention from international publishers and agents. This surprised the Swedish critics, since Trion represents a genre of literary fiction that is not normally translated from Swedish, literary export from Sweden being highly dependent on crime fiction and children’s books. In this article, it is suggested that publishers and agents took the publication of Hedman’s novel as an opportunity to renew export of literature from Sweden when international interest for Scandinavian crime fiction seemed to be waning
Natuurlijke omgang? Een exegetisch-theologische verkenning van gelijkgeslachtelijke activiteit in vroegjoodse literatuur
No full textThis article examines early Jewish literature for its discussion on same-sex activities in the Bible. It will show that early Jewish authors do not restrict the prohibition of samesex activity to pederasty, but often reject same-sex activity because such behavior is unnatural. Other arguments derive from this principle. Early Jewish authors’ arguments against same-sex activity is more similar to Hellenistic views than that of Old Testament texts. Although Paul deviates from the apologetical goals of early Jewish authors, their form of argumentation is also found in his writings. The overall conclusion is that Reformed theology should take note of the early Jewish positions and arguments in its discussion of the historical context of the Biblical speech on same-sex activities
About Disputed Existences: Dys4ia’s Conflicted Status between Game and Autobiography
No full textIn 2012, Anna Anthropy released her computer game Dys4ia about her experiences with hormone replacement therapy. Described explicitly by her as an autobiographical game, Dys4ia inevitably invites comparison with the genres of autobiography, computer game, and digital life narrative. However, it appears to be at odds with all these categories. Within the framework of automediality, introduced by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser in 2008, this paper seeks to explore these discrepancies. First, it will analyse how Dys4ia relates to notions of autobiography and common types of game. Second, Dys4ia will be compared with weblogs, a prevalent form of digital life narratives. Third, by looking into the discourses surrounding the game, the paper aims to explain why Dys4ia was designed in this manner and to identify the discursive limits of this design. Thus, the article makes an important contribution to current research on computer games as media of life narration and self-expression
Samira Saramo, Building That Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans
No full textIn Building That Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans, Samira Saramo has written an interesting and clear study of a significant but little-known series of events in world history. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, over 300,000 Finns immigrated to the United States and Canada, often settling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. During the early 1930s, many of these immigrants were actively recruited to return, not to Finland proper but to Karelia, a frequently-disputed region on the border of Finland and what was then the Soviet Union. Many of these Finns tended politically toward socialism and perceived the Soviet Union as a favorable sign of the kind of future they believed in. Simultaneously, they were attractive to members of the Karelian leadership because they were more educated than most residents of the region and were assumed to have greater access to tools, machinery, and other financial resources. Eventually, about 6500 North American Finns moved to Karelia, where they were met with significant social and physical challenges. Many of them eventually died during the Stalinist Great Terror
Anna Poletti, Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book
No full textWhat happens to our understanding of human life when we attribute agency to the artifacts that represent it? Anna Poletti places this intellectually sophisticated yet provocative question at the center of her book Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book (New York University Press, 2020). With this question in mind, she invites readers to reconsider the materiality of life narration in the modern world
Jürgen Habermas: "Es musste etwas besser werden …". Gespräche mit Stefan Müller-Doohm und Roman Yos
No full textRezension zu: Jürgen Habermas: "Es musst etwas besser werden...". Gespräche mit Stefan Müller-Doohm und Roman Yos. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2024
"Ziet u ze trappen?" De mobiele wijkzuster als ingeburgerde conventie van verbeelding
No full textDe verbeelding van wijkzusters op hun fietsen, trappend ‘door weer en wind’ door een leeg Nederlands landschap, is een beeld uit de Nederlandse wederopbouwperiode. De focus op de mobiliteit van de wijkzusters plaatste het kruiswerk in een nadrukkelijk nationalistisch wederopbouwvertoog. Daarin verschenen de wijkzusters als een categorie vrouwen die vormgaven aan een Nederlandse versie van vrouwelijk sociaal burgerschap. Door hun zichtbare fysieke inspanningen op het Nederlandse nationale vervoermiddel tegen de achtergrond van een nadrukkelijk Nederlands landschap in stormachtige omstandigheden belichaamden wijkzusters een vrouwelijk roepingsideaal dat paste in het traditionele vrouwbeeld van de tijd
A multimodal critical perspective on the challenges of automatic detection of hate speech in internet memes: The case of Simianization
No full textIn the digital ecosystem, memes are one of the most popular means of communication for Internet users worldwide. While some memes are harmless, others have become powerful means to disseminate hate messages against vulnerable categories and individuals. The ubiquity of the Internet and the potential for virality of malicious contents call for the improvement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to support humans in the prevention of online discrimination and cyberbullying. Research on AI-driven hate speech detection is currently making great strides. Still, it proves problematic in several areas, including the automatic interpretation of text-image clusters (TICs), such as memes. Based on the qualitative analysis of two different datasets (the Hateful Memes Challenge dataset, created by the Facebook AI Research group to train machines, and the TIC dataset, including user-generated memes manually collected by the researcher), this paper investigates memes’ multifarious meaning-making processes, whose interpretation requires pragmatic and intercultural skills, as well as the ability to understand visual/verbal interplays in English multimodal texts. The tools of sociosemiotic and multimodal critical discourse studies are adopted to analyze a set of hateful memes and, in particular, racist forms of dehumanization via simianization (i.e., the portrayal of individuals as primates). In conclusion, this study provides empirical indications about how multimodal-informed research can assist computer science in the development of AI systems for the creation of inclusive digital spaces