1,720,959 research outputs found
Le magiche tessitrici di Gorenka. Intervista ad Alena Grom
No full textAlena Grom è una fotografa ucraina, nata e residente in Ucraina. Il suo progetto Mavky. Camouflage presentato a Palermo per il terzo anniversario dell’invasione russa, raffigura le volontarie del villaggio di Gorenka che da più di due anni intrecciano le reti mimetiche per i soldati. Nell’intervista Grom parla della genesi del suo progetto e racconta le storie delle donne raffigurate nei suoi scatti, le quali, avvolte nelle reti, si trasformano nelle creature mitologiche ucraine, chiamate mavky, che attingono a forze antiche per proteggere la loro terra
The Subtle Residual: Baroque Echoes in The Scarlet Letter
Full text linkThe following essay analyzes a significant Baroque substrata underlying The Scarlet Letter, taken up, among other things, in relation to the momentous Puritan legacy that is an essential element of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary work. In particular, the paper focuses on analyzing crucial and minor Baroque topoi represented in the novel, such as metamorphosis, relativism and ambivalence of reality, anxiety and the obsession with death. Furthermore, the article investigates the role of sharp chromatism within The Scarlet Letter, the use of typical Baroque
symbols, such as the ellipse and the maze, and the fundamental role of distinctive Baroque tropes, that is, metaphor and antithesis.
In order to examine the aforementioned Baroque elements, the present essay refers to the theoretical framework drawn up by Raymond Williams in his classic work Marxism and Literature (1977). That theoretical model, elaborated by Williams on the basis of Gramsci’s
concept of hegemony, aims at describing social and cultural practices and phenomena as dynamical interaction between “residual,” “dominant” and “emergent” components. While the “dominant” represent the core of the cultural triad, the “residual” and the “emergent” situated on its periphery are likewise essential for a persuasive dynamic description of literary phenomena at any given moment. The following article interprets the echoes of the Baroque literary tradition in the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne as belonging to the domain of “residual” and hence effectively formed in the past, but still active in the cultural process as an effective element of the present
“Hyperethnicity” and Ethnic Scenarios in White Noise by Don DeLillo
No full textThe present article aims at analyzing the reshaping of the Italian American cultural heritage in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Drawing on the concept of hyperreality as construed by Jean Baudrillard, the notion of hyperethnicity proves to be an efficient tool for a thorough exam of the transformation of the crucial Italian American topoi — i.e, ethnic signifiers such as the conception of the family, the theme of the household, and the concept of serietà — in the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo. Analyzing the signs of italianità in novels by Don DeLillo, Fred Gardaphé hypothesizes that the writer enacts a “masquerade” of his cultural identity, encoding in this manner ethnic “traces” into his oeuvre (1996, 174); on the other hand, analyzing White Noise through the lens of hyperethnicity, we might see DeLillo as constantly re-negotiating his cultural legacy. Broadening, therefore, the perspectives traced by Gardaphé, we deduce that the “masques” depicted by DeLillo represent an artistic re-interpretation of the originals, the outcome of the post-modern transformation of classic ethnic topoi rather than the “disappearance of a distinctive Italian American subject in light of the advance of postmodernism” (23). As white light represents a combination of all colors in the color spectrum, and noise being the irregular, unfamiliar, unintelligible sounds of the other, White Noise by Don DeLillo reveals the author’s refracted perception of ethnic identity in the post-modern age
“Hyperethnicity”: Mystery and Italian American Catholic Imagery in "White Noise" by Don DeLillo
No full textThe present article analyzes the reinvention of Italian American Catholic Imagery in “White Noise” by Don DeLillo using the heuristic tool of “hyperethnicity.” The notion of “hyperethnicity” addresses ethnicity as a protean category subject to what Michael Fischer calls the process of “(re-)invention” (1986 195-6), as a fluid “network of signs which — as they interact with their socio-historical contexts — constantly recreates itself and re-establishes the relation between the signified, the signifier, and the referent” (Moskalenko 2021, 35). Given the writer’s artful re-elaboration of the signifiers and the signified of the emblems of Catholic imagery — that is, the topos of the Holy Family, the representation of Madonna with Child, and the ritual of baptism — and the revision of elements typical of the cultural phenomenon identified as Southern Italian Catholic mysticism which emerge in “White Noise,” “hyperethnicity” proves to be an essential tool in the analysis of DeLillo’s imagined landscapes with their underlying cultural touchstones. As Sandra M. Gilbert once put it: “to be an Italian-American is to live in a world of perpetual mystery” (Gilbert 1991, 116), and indeed the examination of the relationship between that sense of mystery and Italian American ethnic identities allows one to investigate the roots of the former and the trajectory of the latter. “Hyperethnicity” — by taking into account the reshaping of the vivid and rich Italian American heritage by the complex socio-cultural context of the United States in the postmodern age — represents a theoretical framework that allows for the comprehension of the mechanisms at the core of the “mystery” which informs DeLillo’s work, and, paraphrasing the writer, provides a basis to analyze it as “natural product of Catholic upbringing” (DeCurtis 1991, 55) translated onto the composite landscape of twentieth-century America
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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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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