1,720,967 research outputs found

    Honey from Maggots: Aura, Sacrifice, and the Human Universe in Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers”

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    In this thesis, I contend that some form of aura can be recovered from the ravages of technological reproduction described in Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version).” Recovering this aura, however, may require adopting an aesthetic of immediacy through destruction and even wanton disposability (what Georges Bataille in his general economic theory calls “nonproductive expenditure”) to ensure that, though routinely diluted and discarded, the split-second authenticity of a work remains, its radical ephemerality and formal irreproducibility opposing the enslaving, commodifying powers of the copy. The poetry and poetic theory of American poet Charles Olson, especially in his long poem “The Kingfishers” and his essays “Projective Verse” and “Human Universe,” serves as an example of how an author might inscribe auratic energy along nonproductive, general economic lines

    The Tension of the Real: Visuality in Nineteenth Century British Realism

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    This dissertation begins from the problem that is built into realism as a literary genre: its commitment to capturing the unfiltered circumstances of human life will always be at odds with the artifice of its representational constructs and its fiction. In this study, I consider visuality as a central, productive part of this problem and seek intensely visual moments within realist novels where realism wages its own struggle with itself as it attempts to navigate its limitations and push forward its possibilities. These moments pause the narrative as they prioritize picture over action. As descriptive moments work to render visual images through words on the printed page, they are fraught with realism’s struggle to use the artifice of fiction as a means for approximating an ostensible reality. Facing this difficulty, realist practitioners take up vastly different strategies. In this project, I investigate why and how visuality is deployed so differently by those who chose to write in this mode. I seek that which is piercing in the nineteenth-century realist novel by locating moments of crisis and tension, both within the plot and also within the strategies of the stories’ delivery. These are moments where the novel becomes troubled by the visual, revealing the potential and limit of the image. In realism, visuality encompasses a broad and varied array of strategies, including instances of enargeia and ekphrasis, passages that seek to evoke a sense of place or milieu through a rich catalog of visual detail, expressive self-renderings in the dialog and inner monologs of the characters, explorations of the embodied act of seeing, and moments where perception fails or visual description exposes itself as insufficient. I consider a small group of canonical authors: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, who are of critical importance to this genre and to nineteenth century realism, as it moves towards modernism. By examining moments in their novels where descriptive imagery is at its most acute, I seek to explain how moments of intense visuality are crucial nodes where each author, using unique and distinctive methods, negotiates the problem of realist representation

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

    Lifting the Veil and See(k)ing Hidden Beauty in Shelley’s “Lift Not the Painted Veil”

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    On first read, “Lift Not the Painted Veil” supposedly instruct the reader to not lift the painted veil called life as it only is a mirage/mirror of reality painted to convince people that it is truth; however, this reading is too literal and fails to reveal the power behind the ambiguities that exist between the lines. I utilize Shelley’s Defense of Poetry and his close analysis of the awe-full ability poetic language has on its subject and apply his theory to “Lift Not the Painted Veil” and, in doing so, I illustrate the way Shelley utilizes language to provoke philosophical, visual, and affective moments of expression in his early sonnet. “Lift Not the Painted Veil” emphasizes the importance of apprehending a hidden beauty when attempting to break free from the monotony of life. By apprehending this poem and allowing the poetic language to overwhelm us, we can begin to find truth.2022-02-2

    "I love you more than my eyes": Glimpsing the Oblique in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio

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    Reading Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s understanding of the visual challenge to logocentric epistemologies presented by Caravaggio’s paintings in Caravaggio’s Secrets against their reading of Caravaggio in film, the biopic Caravaggio by director Derek Jarman found in their monograph of the same name, produces fascinatingly contrary conclusions of aesthetic postulations of alternative relationalities and systems of knowing. Bridging this gap are the very bodies whose irreducibility drives the critique of narrativization read into Caravaggio by Bersani and Dutoit, but surprisingly not extended to Jarman, whose work and life as “Britain’s most up-front and articulate advocate for homosexuality” is profoundly offered in Caravaggio through a similar methodology of irreducible bodily presence. This paper seeks to explore these two different readings of Caravaggio as the consequence of a search for the noncoercive image, the mark of its critique of epistemology being its very ineffability.2025-07-2

    Some Other Being: The Autobiographical Phantom in Wordsworth and Byron

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    I explore Wordsworth and Byron's use of a mediating "other Being," or a third-person narrative voice, that functions as a "guide" through their autobiographical texts. After establishing this poetic voice, both poets employ their "other Being" to navigate spaces of ruin. Founded on fragments of memory and experience, as well as mediatory gaps, the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron illuminates the autobiographical poet's struggle with textual self-representation and the sustention of a poetic subjectivity that often substitutes for the poet's own. Through the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, Wordsworth and Byron find distinct ways to create a voice that will continue to "speak" for them in the lines of their text. While The Ruined Cottage represents a version of Wordsworth's understanding of breakdowns and poetic subjectivity, Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III and IV push Wordsworth's boundaries even to their limits and turn the autobiographical "other Being" into a "tyrant spirit.

    Musing Sadly on the Dead: Erotic Epistemology in the Nineteenth-Century English Elegy

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    This project is about what I am calling an “erotic epistemology” in nineteenth-century English elegiac poetry, a condition or event in a poetic text in which the discourses of love and knowledge are, to use a term Shelley liked to describe the experience of love, “intermixed.” The persistence of this inter-discourse suggests some fundamental connection between the desire for love and the desire for knowledge. Curiously, these performances of erotic longing insist urgently in the rhetorical, formal, and somatic registers of elegiac poetry in the nineteenth century. The confrontation with death that elegy stages is ideal for thinking about the relationship between erotic desire and poetic knowledge. As the limit case of a mind confronting an ultimately unknowable condition, the furthest expression of an impossible desire—the desire for the dead—elegies are love poems as well as death poems. This dissertation argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais for John Keats (1821), Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam for Arthur Hallam (1850), Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ave Atque Vale for Charles Baudelaire (1867), and Thomas Tod Stoddart’s The Death-Wake (1831), perform the poetics of mourning as an erotic discourse, and allow an intimate understanding of a dead other that is an experience of pleasure. Much scholarship on the concept of eros considers it nearly synonymous with sexual desire and bodily pleasure. This project establishes a mode of reading elegy through its figures and forms that conceptualizes eros in these poems beyond sexuality, and without the burdens of biography and history. By stepping outside the critical confines of generic convention, literary influence, and eros-as-sexual want, this dissertation reevaluates the interpretive possibilities of erotic desire and language in a genre that is not commonly read as an amorous mode of speech. For these elegists, knowledge itself is an object of amorous desire, and epistemological want is a motive force of poetic mourning. These poems arrive at the pleasure of this knowledge through verse forms and figures of speech that perform an intimate textual relationship between the living and the dead, and when these linguistic events occur, the elegies reveal themselves as love poems
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