1,721,018 research outputs found
Can Celts teach us how to live with Kanaks? The Case of Robert Louis Stevenson.
No full textInternational audienceIf Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson is famous for being the writer of boys’ adventure stories featuring tales of piracy, hidden treasures and islands (if not known as the author of key Victorian texts like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (to quote only one)), one too many readers seem to have forgotten that R.L. Stevenson is also the author of South Pacific Tales, which he started to write during the final years of his life that he spent in the Pacific (1888-1894). When setting out for the Pacific in 1888, Stevenson’s objective was to search for a healthier climate, not to become a chronicler of the South Seas. And yet, his travelogue of what he encountered on the various islands in the South Pacific, published posthumously as In The South Seas in 1896, became recognized as one of Stevenson’s finest books and invaluable source for historians studying the archipelagos of Oceania - the Marquesas, Tuamotus and Gilberts Islands. Writing to one of his friends Sidney Colvin, Stevenson himself considered that, with his South Pacific novella “The Beach of Falesa” (1892), readers “will know more about the South Seas after [they] have read my little tale that if [they] had read a library” (Selected Letters 467-468). In his own words, Stevenson believed that he had acquired “the smell and the look of the thing” and could write with conviction about the people, places and cultures of the South Seas (Selected Letters 467-468). After a life of traveling, Stevenson eventually settled in Samoa and ended his life there, becoming a ardent defender of the Samoan desire for home rule and a defender of their rights and condemning European colonial exploitation. To do so, Stevenson often draws a parallel between the South Sea Islanders and the “barbaric” Highlanders, noticing “points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of my own folk at home” (In The South Seas 23). If Michael Shaw reads this as a proto-Celticist tendency in Stevenson’s works (typical of some Scottish romance revivalists) –making the Samoan situation a new efficient paradigm for Stevenson to look back upon and reassess the situation of imperial domination imposed upon Highlanders—(what Stevenson himself acknowledged in The South Seas), studying some of Stevenson’s South Pacific Tales, and in particular “The Beach of Falesa,” also proves a formidable lesson into intercultural encounter, one that may well be needed in times like the ones we are currently facing in New Caledonia as we speak. Not only does Stevenson avoid some of transcultural pitfalls that often threaten the writing of milieux that are considered too exotic by the average European or American reader, but he also resists the colonial narrative polarized into domestic versus exotic. By portraying white missionaries as ‘partly Kanakaized’ (34) and by organizing the plot around the marriage between the English trader Wiltshire and the Polynesian Uma, this novella, as I shall argue, reads as an exercise into cultural crossing and maybe more than anything else, an exercise into domesticating the unknown and creating contact zones. To get to the sense of the other, as this communication will show, Stevenson encourages the reader to discard generalities, revise traditional oppositions, and embrace ways of seeing and knowing the “stranger” that refuse normative, absolutist and universal (European) truths
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
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
The Southern Gentleman and the Idea of Masculinity: Figures and Aspects of the Southern Beau in the Literary Tradition of the American South
No full textThe American planter has mostly been presented as the epitome of the romantic cavalier legend that could be found in the fiction of John Pendleton Kennedy to Thomas Nelson Page: a man of chivalric manners and good breeding; a man of good social position; a man of wealth and leisure (Concise Oxford Dictionary). A closer scrutiny of the cavalier and genteel ethos of the time, however, reveals the inherent ideological inconsistencies with the idea of the gentleman itself, as the ideal came to be more and more perceived as an illusion and as challenges to traditional gender stereotypes came to redefine the nature and role of the Southern Gentleman. This study hopes to complicate the traditional delineation of hegemonic manhood with the aim to better understand how precisely the Old South’s masculine ideals were constructed and maintained over time, especially in times of crisis, and how southern elite males (re)defined, enacted, and/or maintained a distinctive Southern model of masculinity while others resisted, modified, or flouted those ideals. The work undertaken by this dissertation can thus be situated within the broad rubric of masculinity studies and its central axiom—the interrogation of the structures of power, domination, and hierarchy. Enriching masculinity studies of the Old South, this critical study of Southern American fiction attempts to respond to the invitation of historians like Stephen Berry or Craig Thompson Friend in striking a commendable balance between conceptualizing larger historical questions and narrating the intimacies and complexities of Southern men’s individual lives. Taken collectively, these novels continue to explore this fertile field by moving outside the “confines and confidences of elites” (Peel 1). Because it complicates any simple equation between honor, mastery, and manliness, and because it seeks to revisit traditional conceptualisations of gender, I hope that this study will open new ways of thinking about the privileges and wounds of a masculinity that has been considered by most as the normative, invisible, and unquestioned referent from which to measure marginalized others—foreigners, women, or non-whites.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
“Defamiliarization and Fragmentation of the Self in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles: When the Baby Becomes Instrument of Cognition.”
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Moliere Et La Peinture Du Bourgeois Dans Un Siecle De Transition
Full text linkDepuis le Moyen Age, le personnage du bourgeois est souvent objet de comédies. Victime de farces qui se plaisent à souligner la balourdise de l’individu placé de par sa situation sociale dans l’inconfort de l’entre-deux, il est puissant par le jeu commercial et financier qu’il régit mais écarté du pouvoir, apanage de la noblesse (Rolland 79). Bien sûr, dans sa peinture du bourgeois, Molière cherche plus à distraire qu’à informer son public comme le ferait un véritable historien. Il ne faudrait donc pas considérer ce personnage de farce comme révélateur approprié des idéaux ou des vices d’une classe sociale définie. Il n’en demeure pas moins, comme le reconnaît Molière lui-même, que le but de la comédie est de présenter les défauts et les ridicules des hommes et en particulier ceux de son temps. Les œuvres de Molière, et en particulier Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, apparaissent donc comme un outil non négligeable pour l’historien
“Defamiliarization and Fragmentation of the Self in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles: When the Baby Becomes Instrument of Cognition.”
No full textInternational audienc
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