1,720,969 research outputs found
In Camera/On Camera: The Re-Presentation of Janet Frame as a Kiwi Icon
No full textFrequently referred to as New Zealand’s most famous and least public author, Janet Frame occupies a curious place in the nation’s literary and cultural history. With her feted literary production largely overshadowed by her dramatic personal history, Frame is, to paraphrase one critic, an author obscured by her image. The present study takes the form of an analysis of this characterisation of Frame in all its attendant implications: biomythical, socio-cultural, multimedia, and extraliterary. Inverting the traditional mode of analysis, we will frame our subject, as it were, by focusing not on the author’s own literary production, but on the promotion and reception of her work in an increasingly heterogeneous range of media/contexts, examining Frame’s transformation from obscure author to New Zealand icon in relation to an ever expanding range of appropriations. Far from superfluous artefacts subordinate to traditional modes of literary analyses, the ephemeral and ancillary evocations of authorial identity that form the basis of our study have an animating and vitalising influence on Frame’s career and celebrity status, testifying to the integral role of mass media in the perpetuation of her biographical legend and construction of her iconic status. By concealing their inherently discontinuous nature through their re-presentation of the subject as an historically determined presence, these manifold appropriations simultaneously purport to present us with an authentic and incontrovertible image of the author, a guarantee that gains added significance in the case of famously hermetic celebrities such as Frame. The increasingly visual nature of Frame’s authorial construction creates the illusion of the foreclosure of the gap between the visible and the invisible, the knowable and unknowable. Through this process, Frame’s likeness becomes increasingly ubiquitous while retaining the mysterious qualities essential to her appeal as both an experimental author and enigmatic celebrity. But rather than re-present her rise to prominence as ameliorative in its manifestation, our analysis reveals Frame’s authorial imago to be a contended site of cultural production, mediating the impact and influence of artists commercial and political commodities in late twentieth and early twenty-first century New Zealand. Refashioned as a secularised, multimedia re-presentation of irrepressible artistic individuality in the face of social and global impediment, Frame’s remarkable life/story is indelibly etched into New Zealand’s cultural imaginary; the famously reclusive author granted the status of Kiwi Icon
In Camera/On Camera: The Re-Presentation of Janet Frame as a Kiwi Icon
No full textFrequently referred to as New Zealand’s most famous and least public author, Janet Frame occupies a curious place in the nation’s literary and cultural history. With her feted literary production largely overshadowed by her dramatic personal history, Frame is, to paraphrase one critic, an author obscured by her image. The present study takes the form of an analysis of this characterisation of Frame in all its attendant implications: biomythical, socio-cultural, multimedia, and extraliterary. Inverting the traditional mode of analysis, we will frame our subject, as it were, by focusing not on the author’s own literary production, but on the promotion and reception of her work in an increasingly heterogeneous range of media/contexts, examining Frame’s transformation from obscure author to New Zealand icon in relation to an ever expanding range of appropriations. Far from superfluous artefacts subordinate to traditional modes of literary analyses, the ephemeral and ancillary evocations of authorial identity that form the basis of our study have an animating and vitalising influence on Frame’s career and celebrity status, testifying to the integral role of mass media in the perpetuation of her biographical legend and construction of her iconic status. By concealing their inherently discontinuous nature through their re-presentation of the subject as an historically determined presence, these manifold appropriations simultaneously purport to present us with an authentic and incontrovertible image of the author, a guarantee that gains added significance in the case of famously hermetic celebrities such as Frame. The increasingly visual nature of Frame’s authorial construction creates the illusion of the foreclosure of the gap between the visible and the invisible, the knowable and unknowable. Through this process, Frame’s likeness becomes increasingly ubiquitous while retaining the mysterious qualities essential to her appeal as both an experimental author and enigmatic celebrity. But rather than re-present her rise to prominence as ameliorative in its manifestation, our analysis reveals Frame’s authorial imago to be a contended site of cultural production, mediating the impact and influence of artists commercial and political commodities in late twentieth and early twenty-first century New Zealand. Refashioned as a secularised, multimedia re-presentation of irrepressible artistic individuality in the face of social and global impediment, Frame’s remarkable life/story is indelibly etched into New Zealand’s cultural imaginary; the famously reclusive author granted the status of Kiwi Icon
Of Beauty and Its Other: Janet Frame's Ethical Aesthetics
No full textIn this thesis, I argue that Janet Frame's experimental aesthetics are the manifestation of an ethical impulse that runs throughout her oeuvre. In making such an argument, I contribute to the recent scholarship that places her work in relation to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Read within this theoretical context, Frame's aversion to traditional modes of representation reveals an ethical engagement with the elusiveness of the human subject. However, after examining Levinas's writings on art, I suggest that the invocation of his philosophy vis-à-vis literature is not without problems of its own. For Levinas, all art is an instance of the beautiful, with the beautiful fostering a ludic form of social disengagement. It is therefore necessary to move both with and beyond Levinas's thought for an account of how Frame's fiction might operate ethically. To this end, I turn to Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic theory. Adorno questions the ethical capacity of traditionally beautiful and realist art because he considers it to preclude the singularity of its subject matter; conventionally ugly aesthetics, by contrast, offer an ethical alternative to the extent that they stem from an engagement with alterity. I propose that Frame intimates this ethical alternative in A State of Siege (1966). Although Frame's realism in this novel seems to belie an aesthetics of ugliness, her performative critique of the beautiful—the way that the text calls its own aesthetics into question—points to the limits of the beautiful and thereby allows an ethical impulse to appear through the fabric of a realist aesthetics. Extending my reading of this earlier novel to the last of Frame's novels to be published in her lifetime, I claim that Frame's commitment to the ethical capacity of the ugly finds its most mature expression in The Carpathians (1988). Through the employment of formal fragmentation, this novel is able to evoke the uniqueness of its characters. By consistently manifesting an ethical concern, albeit in markedly different aesthetic registers, Frame models a sociality that embraces alterity, gesturing toward a more peaceful mode of being with others
"she who connects": Unity of Self & World in the Novels of Robin Hyde
No full textThis thesis identifies connection and unity as the core tenets of Robin Hyde’s work. Focusing primarily on three novels that came out of Hyde’s voluntary convalescence at Avondale Mental Hospital (Wednesday’s Children, Nor the Years Condemn and The Godwits Fly), I propose that these novels encapsulate the vision of peace and harmony which pervades Hyde’s body of work as a whole. These three novels, resulting from her own transformative sojourn at the Lodge, reflect with particular clarity Hyde’s central preoccupation: regaining, via a transformation of the psyche, a sense of unity and equipoise which she believed to be absent from the fragmentary modern life she saw around her. As Hyde scholars have recognised, precisely such an internal transformation was central to the works of Carl Gustav Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom Hyde had encountered during her time at the Lodge. Building on this scholarship, I propose that these novels bear rich testimony to Hyde’s engagement with and unique variations on just such contemporary ideas of psychic unity as are found in Jung and Nietzsche: the conception of a collective unconscious, the value of art in allowing access to that realm of primordial connection, and the notion of transformation as a “union of the opposites” which balances and integrates Apollonian ego-consciousness with an awareness of deeper, Dionysian unity. I link the transformations sought or attained by Hyde’s central characters to their inherent affinity with the Dionysian: the untamed, generative forces of nature and art, which offer both diversity and unity through their source: the collective unconscious. Moving from Hyde’s depiction of the self fragmented by a divisive society in Wednesday’s Children, via her evocation of a coming societal transformation in Nor the Years Condemn to, finally, her depiction of a successfully transformed individual at the end of The Godwits Fly, I draw lines of connection to illustrate the coherence of Hyde’s vision for the integration of individual and society. Ultimately, I seek to demonstrate that Hyde’s impulse to connect what modernity had fragmented (in society and in self) was a direct response to urgent issues of conflict and disconnection
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
"she who connects": Unity of Self & World in the Novels of Robin Hyde
Full text linkThis thesis identifies connection and unity as the core tenets of Robin Hyde’s work. Focusing primarily on three novels that came out of Hyde’s voluntary convalescence at Avondale Mental Hospital (Wednesday’s Children, Nor the Years Condemn and The Godwits Fly), I propose that these novels encapsulate the vision of peace and harmony which pervades Hyde’s body of work as a whole. These three novels, resulting from her own transformative sojourn at the Lodge, reflect with particular clarity Hyde’s central preoccupation: regaining, via a transformation of the psyche, a sense of unity and equipoise which she believed to be absent from the fragmentary modern life she saw around her. As Hyde scholars have recognised, precisely such an internal transformation was central to the works of Carl Gustav Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom Hyde had encountered during her time at the Lodge. Building on this scholarship, I propose that these novels bear rich testimony to Hyde’s engagement with and unique variations on just such contemporary ideas of psychic unity as are found in Jung and Nietzsche: the conception of a collective unconscious, the value of art in allowing access to that realm of primordial connection, and the notion of transformation as a “union of the opposites” which balances and integrates Apollonian ego-consciousness with an awareness of deeper, Dionysian unity. I link the transformations sought or attained by Hyde’s central characters to their inherent affinity with the Dionysian: the untamed, generative forces of nature and art, which offer both diversity and unity through their source: the collective unconscious. Moving from Hyde’s depiction of the self fragmented by a divisive society in Wednesday’s Children, via her evocation of a coming societal transformation in Nor the Years Condemn to, finally, her depiction of a successfully transformed individual at the end of The Godwits Fly, I draw lines of connection to illustrate the coherence of Hyde’s vision for the integration of individual and society. Ultimately, I seek to demonstrate that Hyde’s impulse to connect what modernity had fragmented (in society and in self) was a direct response to urgent issues of conflict and disconnection
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
A Time for Ethics: Janet Frame and W. G. Sebald
No full text'A Time for Ethics: Janet Frame and W. G. Sebald' identifies how literary texts which both respond to a traumatic past and adopt an openness towards the future enact an ethical stance. The recent "ethical turn" in a range of disciplines, among them literary studies, has led to a renewed interest in the ethical dimension of literature. The recent readings suggest, however, that a traditional humanist ethics continues to rely on a metaphysics of presence that forecloses an encounter of the human subject with alterity: the Other's time as well as the very otherness of time itself. Responding to the time-bound limitations of a humanist model of ethics, where ethical regard is only extended to those whom the subject encounters in its own time, Emmanuel Levinas proposes a form of ethics which originates in a model of subjectivity where the ego cannot claim exclusive control over time but, instead, is subject to a time that is beyond its self: the time of the Other. Using Levinas's philosophy as a theoretical framework, I examine how literary texts which foreground a time that both thematically and structurally undermines presence—the presence of characters and of language—can demonstrate an ethical response to the Other's plight. More specifically, I focus on the ways in which Janet Frame's and W. G. Sebald's works produce an ethical response to key traumatic events of the twentieth-century: colonialism and the Holocaust. Both writers demonstrate that a deconstruction of presence, the time of the self, not only enacts an ethical response to the Other of the past but also ensures a more just future. As such, their work undermines the primary premise of a metaphysics of presence—the sovereign subject—and produces a form of ethical responsibility which can encompass past and future generations. Foregrounding in language the violence that attends the self's subjection to the Other's time, Frame and Sebald gesture to the way in which a time that is unforeseeable and even traumatising produces a more just self. Such a self is mandatory if literature's ethical turn is to speak to a time beyond its own
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