1,721,004 research outputs found
[Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia] "Introduction: 'Un paese tutto poetico' - Byron in Italy, Italy in Byron"
No full textByron’s ethnographic eye: the poet among the Italians
No full textIn a letter to Annabella Millbanke dated 6 September 1813, Byron wrote that “The great object of life is Sensation - to feel that we exist – [...] - it is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to gaming - to battle - to travel - to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.” Three years later, when he embarked on his second European tour – in fact a voluntary exile –, Byron felt that urge to “sense” and experience life to the full during his 8-year Italian sojourn. From 1816 to 1823, especially in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, the poet realised first-hand what in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto I) he defined as “Toil and travel”, suggesting how his idea of travelling differed from the purposes of the 18th-century Grand Tour: as proved by the letters and works that he wrote in Italy, Byron appropriated and transformed the English aristocratic habit of visiting classical and Renaissance Italy from a general formative period into a total, empirical experience based on carpe-diem philosophy and on a full sensorial immersion in the host country’s cultural customs, traditions and usages. Already in 1808 Byron wrote to his mother that “it is from experience, not from books, we ought to judge of [mankind]. There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own senses”. And this is what he achieved in Italy, where, in order to satisfy his thirst of knowledge (experiential not theoretical), he assumed an attitude towards Italian people and cultural objects which may be defined as “ethnographic”: instead of travelling and living in Italy as a flâneur observing people and places from a foreigner’s perspective, Byron, at least for most of his Italian years, wears the mask of – as well as identifies himself with – the anthropologist who can understand the Other only by plunging entirely and intensely into it, or by observing it from an insider’s perspective.
Starting from these premises, the aim of my essay is to show the idiosyncratic experiential quality of Byron’s life in Italy by looking at the ways in which his ethnographic and anthropological interests for Italian places, people and traditions emerge in his letters and works written between 1816 and 1823. In particular, the essay will focus on the following aspects: the poet’s personal relationship with and representation of Italian women and men; his absorption and usage of Italian language and the Venetian dialect; and his involvement and personal interpretation of Italian customs, traditions and behaviours (including sexuality) as opposed to English culture. The ultimate aim will be to identify and analyse textual evidence proving the author’s cosmopolitan conception of journeying abroad, which combines the capability of discarding original national habits with the tendency to embrace the new culture, merging and integrating in it instead of observing it from a distance. The essay will also show that it was thanks to his insider’s perspective that Byron could avoid idealising Italy and simplistically identifying it as the Bel Paese – an anti-Romantic stance which explains his final disenchantment with Italy and the Italians, yet at the same time allowing him to become “a portion of their hopes, and fears, and passions” (Letter to Thomas Moore, 1820) and to experience while there, as he writes in Beppo, “Love in full life, and length, not love ideal, / No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name, / But something better still, so very real”
“Don Juan in the Ottoman East: Dis/continuities in Cantos V-VIII”
No full textAs with the English cantos, those set in Constantinople and Ismail constitute a discrete narrative sequence within Don Juan, one whose apparently seamless plot progression is criss-crossed by continuities and discontinuities in relation to the poem’s previous instalments. Discontinuities particularly concern the position of these cantos in the poem’s compositional history during the fraught period of 1821-22, as well as a representation of the Ottoman East which knowingly reprises and relentlessly subverts familiar orientalist topoi. In keeping with Don Juan’s pervasive medley mode, cantos V-VIII are built on an interplay of dis/continuities forcing readers uninterruptedly to identify and decode multiple, ever-varying lines of argument about excess, consumption, eroticism and war, and held together by a central thread of reflections on power. Investigating the thematic and structural peculiarities of this section of Don Juan, this chapter suggests that we read it as a unit within the poem, which consistently engages questions of authority and control through a distinctive interweaving of figurative protocols, historical-ideological materials, and metaliterary references
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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