1,720,955 research outputs found
Invisible Cities as a Postmodern Text: A Multidimensional Approach
Full text linkFamous Italian author Italo Calvino’s popular novel <em>Invisible Cities</em>opens itself up for multidimensional theoretical and critical interventions due to its interesting and multifarious providence of scope for such interventions. Considering the diversity of interpretative scope the text offers, its reception in classroom both by students and teachers is equally critical and variegated. The text thus offers itself for multiple and divergent critical receptions and some of the critical receptions that can be made to the text include spatiality, temporality, magic realism, and a few other postmodernist approaches. My specific approach in this article shall be to explore and analyse the various possibilities of postmodernist critical receptions of the text through many interesting and revelatory postmodernist notions and concepts propounded by many famous postmodernist thinkers and philosophers like Michael Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and Jean Baudrillard. In this article, I will explore how certain philosophical and theoretical postulates propounded by these philosophers/theorists become potent and effective critical tools to study the mentioned novel of Calvino and how these concepts open up new vistas of critical, comprehension, reception and interpretation of the text
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
Dissolved Boundaries and Fluid Spaces: The Spatial Imagination of Amitav Ghosh in the Shadow Lines
Full text linkAmitav Ghosh s The Shadow Lines is a classic exposition of the defining postmodern notion of the fluidity of space The novel through its overt transnational character explores the idea of dissolution of space through its conceptual dismantlement of national boundaries across the globe Through various events and episodes that occur in the text its characters continually transit across national borders thereby breaching the spatial confinements created by them and unleash themselves into the limitless arena of transnational space that is fluid unstable and categorically transversal The text whose plot spans across the pre- and post-independent times in the subcontinent overtly exemplifies how the postmodern space defies all notions of structuration stability and territorial confinement for it is fluid indeterminate and fluctuating in nature Based on these precepts this article analyzes the fickle and indeterminate nature of the fluid space that permeates across conceptually dissolved national boundaries and frontiers in the subcontinent as effectively demonstrated in Amitav Ghosh s award-winning novel The Shadow Line
Man in the Cosmos: Italo Calvino’s Cosmic Ecology in The Cosmicomics
Full text linkItalo Calvino’s The Cosmicomics, despite its pluralistic openness to multiple critical interpretations by various theoretical and conceptual frameworks including post-humanism, science-fiction studies, postmodernism and many more, deals with the fundamental issue of the human’s physical and conceptual inseparability from Nature or the cosmos. The human’s inseparability from the non-humans (including animals, vegetation and inanimate matters) has profound ecological implications. What Calvino establishes in the mentioned text is the human’s inevitable and unconditional inclusion in Nature rather than his self-proclaimed, physical/conceptual exclusion from the same. This is vindicated by the fictional illustrations in the text in which the ‘human’ is posited as a mere member of the ecosystem, and not as its master. In this context, this article endeavours to explore and analyze the said ecological implications of the mentioned work in the light of some the established ecological theories and postulations.  
The Silence of Nature in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: An Ecocritical Study
No full textNature’s passivity in modern man’s discourse has been the area of focus in Ecocriticism. Ecocritics do believe that Nature has lost its vibrancy and vitality in the realm of modern man’s exclusively anthropocentric culture. Such ‘otherization’ of Nature has its roots in the Western philosophical and discursive practices. The Enlightenment philosophy has been instrumental in taking the dehumanization of Nature to a new low in the sense that it sees Nature as an inert, dull and dispirited entity that has its existence only for the material benefit of man. This kind of an attitude is clearly seen in the way the colonizing people in Conrad’s fiction dehumanize Nature and delineate it as a dull and lifeless entity. Based on these precepts this article intends to reread Conrad’s fiction from an ecocritical perspective and thus desires to expose the mechanism through which the human assumes for itself a central position in the universal scheme of things and relegates Nature to the realms o silence and instrumentality.</jats:p
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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