1,720,958 research outputs found
Crisi americane: Paine, Hawthorne, Thoreau
Get PDFAmerican crises: Paine, Hawthorne, ThoreauTaking as my point of departure Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 monumental canvas Washington Crossing the Delaware, in this article I discuss the ways in which the event depicted in Leutze’s iconic painting relates to the publication of Thomas Paine’s influential pamphlet The American Crisis, No. 1 (1776). Then, I examine how from the 1770s on the concept of “crisis” becomes what the German historian Reinhart Koselleck has called “a structural signature of modernity”. Finally, I turn my attention to two scenes – the first from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the second from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) – in which both of these American Renaissance writers describe some moments of crisis and reflect on the transformative potential of critical situations for human beings
A Note from the New Book Review Editor
Get PDFStarting with this issue, our journal will include a completely redesigned Book Review Section, featuring three to five high-quality reviews by leading and emerging scholars from around the world. As for the selection of the books to be reviewed, even though I am a literary scholar, it is my intention as Review Editor to consider books that engage with the U.S. and the Americas as a hemispheric and global phenomenon from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, and media studies
Gli zoomanti: insegnare la letteratura americana ai tempi del Covid-19
No full textIn May 2020, Giorgio Agamben, one the most influential Italian philosophers of his generation, wrote in a post published on the website of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies that all those professors who would agree “to submit to the new telematic dictatorship and to teach their courses only online are the perfect equivalent of those university professors who in 1931 swore allegiance to the Fascist regime.” Philosophers, as is well known, have cultivated the art of paradox since the time of Zeno. In a less apocalyptic vein than Agamben’s post, in this essay I suggest that teachers and students involved in digital teaching and learning don’t run the risk of turning into dangerous Blackshirts, but at worst they might turn into zoomanti (a neologism that could be roughly translated into English as “Zoomers,” but also a word that for many Italian readers is evocative of the phrase “anime purganti,” “the souls of Purgatory”). More specifically, drawing on my experience of teaching online classes in American literature at the University of Munich for three semesters in a row, I reflect on both the risks and opportunities arising from the radical reconfiguration of the relationship between knowledge production and technology triggered by the Covid pandemic.Nel maggio 2020, Giorgio Agamben, uno dei filosofi italiani più influenti della sua generazione, scriveva in un post pubblicato sul sito dell’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici che i professori che avessero accettato di “sottoporsi alla nuova dittatura telematica e di tenere i loro corsi solamente online” erano “il perfetto equivalente dei docenti universitari che nel 1931 avevano giurato fedeltà al regime fascista”. I filosofi, si sa, sin dai tempi di Zenone, amano coltivare l’arte del paradosso. Con tonalità meno apocalittiche rispetto ad Agamben, in questo contributo, suggerisco, con un pizzico di ironia, che docenti e studenti che accettano l’uso massiccio della didattica online non rischiano di trasformarsi in pericolose camicie nere digitali, ma, tutt’al più in zoomanti: anime sospese nei nuovi purgatori digitali del terzo millennio. Ripercorrendo tre semestri di didattica online della Letteratura americana presso l’Università di Monaco, questo saggio riflette sulle opportunità e i pericoli creati dalla radicale riconfigurazione del rapporto fra produzione del sapere e tecnologia causata dalla pandemia
A Note from the New Book Review Editor
No full textStarting with this issue, our journal will include a completely redesigned Book Review Section, featuring three to five high-quality reviews by leading and emerging scholars from around the world. As for the selection of the books to be reviewed, even though I am a literary scholar, it is my intention as Review Editor to consider books that engage with the U.S. and the Americas as a hemispheric and global phenomenon from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, and media studies
“Down Beside where the Waters Flow": Reclaiming Rivers for American Studies (Introduction)
Get PDFOver the past three decades, rivers have become a fascinating and popular subject of scholarly interest, not only in the field of environmental history, where river histories have developed into a distinct subgenre, but also in the emerging field of environmental humanities. In this scholarship, rivers have often been reconceptualized as socio-natural sites where human and non-human actors interact with the natural world, generating complex legacies, path dependencies, and feedback loops. Furthermore, rivers have been described as hybrid “organic machines,” whose energy has been utilized by humans in many different ways, including the harvesting of both hydropower and salmon. Indeed, as several environmental historians have noted, in many regions of the world, watercourses have been transformed by technology to such an extent that they increasingly resemble enviro-technical assemblages rather than natural waterways. Rivers have also been discussed through the lens of “eco-biography,” a term coined by Mark Cioc in his influential monograph on the Rhine River, a book informed by “the notion that a river is a biological entity—that it has a ‘life’ and ‘a personality’ and therefore a ‘biography’.” Quite surprisingly, despite this “river turn” (to use Evenden's phrase), rivers have played a marginal role in recent American Studies scholarship. To address this gap, this issue of RIAS brings together scholars from different disciplines, countries, and continents to analyze a wide variety of river experiences, histories, and representations across the American hemisphere and beyond. Hence the title of this volume, Rivers of the Americas, should be seen as both an allusion to the Rivers of America book series (a popular series of sixty-five volumes, each on a particular US river, published between 1937 and 1974) and as a reminder of the still untapped potential of hemispheric, transnational, and comparative modes of critical engagement with rivers in American Studies
“Down Beside where the Waters Flow": Reclaiming Rivers for American Studies (Introduction)
Get PDFOver the past three decades, rivers have become a fascinating and popular subject of scholarly interest, not only in the field of environmental history, where river histories have developed into a distinct subgenre, but also in the emerging field of environmental humanities. In this scholarship, rivers have often been reconceptualized as socio-natural sites where human and non-human actors interact with the natural world, generating complex legacies, path dependencies, and feedback loops. Furthermore, rivers have been described as hybrid “organic machines,” whose energy has been utilized by humans in many different ways, including the harvesting of both hydropower and salmon. Indeed, as several environmental historians have noted, in many regions of the world, watercourses have been transformed by technology to such an extent that they increasingly resemble enviro-technical assemblages rather than natural waterways. Rivers have also been discussed through the lens of “eco-biography,” a term coined by Mark Cioc in his influential monograph on the Rhine River, a book informed by “the notion that a river is a biological entity—that it has a ‘life’ and ‘a personality’ and therefore a ‘biography’.” Quite surprisingly, despite this “river turn” (to use Evenden\u27s phrase), rivers have played a marginal role in recent American Studies scholarship. To address this gap, this issue of RIAS brings together scholars from different disciplines, countries, and continents to analyze a wide variety of river experiences, histories, and representations across the American hemisphere and beyond. Hence the title of this volume, Rivers of the Americas, should be seen as both an allusion to the Rivers of America book series (a popular series of sixty-five volumes, each on a particular US river, published between 1937 and 1974) and as a reminder of the still untapped potential of hemispheric, transnational, and comparative modes of critical engagement with rivers in American Studies
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
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