1,721,047 research outputs found
Novel Dialogue 1.0: Introducing a New Podcast: Novel Dialogue with Aarthi Vadde and John Plotz
No full textNovel Dialogue: where unlikely conversation partners come together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. Join Aarthi Vadde, a scholar of contemporary literature and Victorianist John Plotz as they take a four-continent journey (ok, fine a virtual four-continent, Zoomish journey) to talk turkey with novelists and critics the world over. In fact, episode two takes place in Turkey, where Orhan Pamuk , in conversation with Bruce Robbins, reveals a hankering for french fries
Recall this Book 8: On Distraction: A Conversation with Marina Van Zuylen and John Plotz
No full textWe frequently worry that we live in a "distracted age." But perhaps the human condition is always to live "almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite another" (Ford Madox Ford, On Impressionism). Join John's conversation with Marina Van Zuylen of Bard College. Van Zuylen, the author of The Plenitude of Distraction, makes the case that some aspects of distraction that are far more positive than they initially appear. Kierkegaard's image of saving yourself from a boring philosophy lecture by watching sweat trickle down the speaker's face is one highlight; her story about her real-life brain scan is another. John, drawing on his recent book Semi-Detached, approaches the topic via George Eliot's ideas about what it means to get lost in a novel-and by discussing the deadpan comedy of Buster Keaton. The conversation begins with the sublime, as Marina and John discuss acedia, the "noonday demon" that attacked medieval monks when they had spent too many hours in the study. But it ends up much closer to the present, as they debate the merits of iPhone usage and the distracting powers of the telephone. The event was hosted by Dean (and noted Art Historian) Robin Kelsey at Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center in November 2018. Our podcast presentation of it has been edited and condensed for clarity; a video of the full event is available on their channe
Recall this Book 7: A Conversation with Samuel Delany
No full textFresh on the heels of our conversation with Madeline Miller, author of Circe, John Plotz has a talk with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond "New Wave" SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution. RTB loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America? He came to Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation
刘慈欣访谈中文版 Recall this Book 14c: Cixin Liu with Pu Wang (in Chinese)
No full text今年5月18日，前来Brandeis大学接受荣誉博士学位的科幻小说家刘慈欣接受了John Plotz和王璞两位教授的专访。这次独具深度、异常精彩的访谈，已经整理为中英双语两个版本，想听刘慈欣中文原声的科幻迷们，请点这里！也请有兴趣的朋友们多多关注Recall This Book。 收听音频，请戳—
Recall this Book 26: A Conversation with John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry
No full textFor the third installment of Books in Dark Times, inspired by our global moment, Elizabeth and John turned inward. We started with a book that you might not think would be so comforting, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) about the plague in London "during the last Great Visitation in 1665." Probably based on the journals of Defoe's uncle Henry Foe, the Journal comforts Elizabeth in a few ways. First, by its similarities to our current situation, providing a sense of continuity to our forebears, even if it is through our epidemiological vulnerabilities and our incapacity for coordinated action. Second, because some aspects of what happened in 1665 seem so familiar, from detailed discussions of the "weekly bills" of dead in each parish and how to interpret them, to arguments over social isolation, contact tracing, the ethics of leaving London for second homes in the country, and the devastating secondary effects of lost commercial activity: "As navigation was at a stop, our ships neither coming in or going out as before, so the seamen were all out of employment...and with the seamen were all the several tradesmen and workmen belonging to and depending upon the building and fitting out of ships, such as ship-carpenters, caulkers, ropemakers, dry coopers, sailmakers, anchorsmiths, and other smiths; blockmakers, carvers, gunsmiths, ship-chandlers, ship-carvers, and the like. The masters of those perhaps might live upon their substance, but the traders were universally at a stop, and consequently all their workmen discharged." and so on. Thirdly: seriously, at least it's not the bubonic plague
Novel Dialogue 5.2 Writing the Counter-book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)
No full textEugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them?
Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel.
With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion…
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
- …
