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Back to the (Winter) Garden: On Still Video, Motion Pictures and the Time of Early Photography
No full textThis essay, which reframes elements of my 2015 book, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, returns to the lacuna at the heart of Roland Barthes’s reflections on photo-graphy: the so-called “Winter Garden” photograph of his mother as a little girl. An image that is lovingly conjured but forever withheld, this photograph is the fulcrum of a theory of photography that emerged from the conjunction of mourning and desire. For Barthes, and all those working in his wake, the absent photograph is something of photography’s primal scene. With attention to the work of Eve Sussman and Simon Lee, their 2011 three-channel HD video Wintergarden and her 2018 NFT 89 Seconds Atomized in particular, this essay takes readers “back to the garden” to think about the time of early photography. To do so, this essay considers a range of contemporary videos that mine and mime the conventions of photography to produce static, durational encounters with stillness in a medium that is anything but, ultimately, revealing the truths and fictions of photography’s founding moment and fundamental logic
Georg von Peschke, London
No full textPhotograph, 11.5 x 8.5 inches
This photo was taken at Vandyk Studio, London, in the 1920s, by Herbert Vandyk (British, 1879-1943), or by a studio photographer.https://repository.brynmawr.edu/peschke/1012/thumbnail.jp
Spatial and Temporal Distributions of Live Salt-Marsh Foraminifera in Southern New Jersey: Implications for Sea-Level Studies
No full textGeological reconstructions of relative sea-level change have been greatly enhanced by continuous high-resolution records with the use of salt-marsh foraminifera due to their relationship with tidal level in modern environments and subsequent preservation of tests in sediments. A detailed understanding of how live foraminifera assemblages compare to dead or total (live + dead) assemblages and the influence of environmental variables on foraminiferal distributions is essential for their use as a proxy to reconstruct sea level. Here, we evaluated small-scale spatial and temporal (seasonal and interannual) variability of live foraminifera assemblages from four high marsh monitoring stations along a salinity gradient in southern New Jersey over three years. In addition, we measured porewater and sedimentary variables and stable carbon isotopes during each sampling period every three months. In the 184 samples, we identified 11 live agglutinated foraminifera species and four distinct clusters of live foraminifera that correspond to the stations from which they were sampled and to the dead and total assemblages. We found no clear correlation over time between variability in live assemblages and measured environmental variables; however, elevation was the primary controlling factor influencing foraminiferal distributions, with secondary influences from salinity and substrate. The consistency of foraminiferal assemblages on spatial and temporal scales and among live, dead, and total assemblages further reinforces the value of salt-marsh foraminifera as reliable sea-level indicators
Practicing Bilingual Language Use in a Science Methods Class: Perspectives from a Student Teacher and a Teacher Educator
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The Platonic Sophists Against the Sophist: Complicating the Socratic Divide
No full textIf one were to look for a Platonic definition of a sophist, it would seem that there could be no better place than Plato’s Sophist, in which the Stranger and Theaetetus lay out a series of definitions in an attempt to articulate what makes a sophist. The Stranger’s definition of a sophist as a persuasive teacher of ἀρετή for pay, combined with the clear bias of Plato against these competitors of Socrates, has often led scholars to read these characteristics as the target of Plato’s critique and as markers of Socrates’ superiority.
However, by looking at Plato’s characterization of the sophists in ‘sophistic dialogues,’ such as the Gorgias, Protagoras, Euthydemus, Hippias Major and Hippias Minor, where they perform within a competitive context alongside Socrates, we see that the behavior of both is strikingly similar. Both Socrates and the sophists use the speech practices of dialectic and rhetoric, and both appear to attempt to lead others toward excellence. Even the characteristics which mark a clear difference between Socrates and the sophists, from the sophists’ receipt of payment to their foreign origin in contrast to the Athenian Socrates who refused a fee, are not emphasized by Plato as inherently blameworthy.
Instead, Socrates’ famous disavowal of wisdom, when placed in contrast with the sophists whose professional standing requires that they claim to possess knowledge, is at the root of Plato’s differentiation between Socrates and the sophists. Plato reveals the sophists’ ignorance of their own ignorance through their failed attempts to define and demonstrate their teaching, and this failing both attaches dangerous stakes to their use of rhetoric as well as precludes their capacity to understand and teach excellence. Unlike the Stranger’s sophists, who are characterized by action, Plato’s sophists are doomed more by their self-perception as experts than their methods
“The Weird and the Occult” in Carmilla and “The Portrait of Roísín Dhu”
No full textThis thesis brings together two Irish Gothic texts that contemplate queer intimacy and reveal similar logics of imagined Irish Catholicism. By reading Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla and Dorothy Macardle’s 1924 short story “The Portrait of Roísín Dhu” alongside Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), this thesis examines the literary treatment of Irish Catholicism and queerness as “backward.” In both texts, the embedded narrative undermines the frame, allowing more subversive and complex themes to haunt the hopeful, nationalist frame of “The Portrait of Roísín Dhu” and the patriarchal, imperial frame of Carmilla