1,721,114 research outputs found
‘A lover's hand? A breath, An abyss’: Aloneness in Claire Denis
No full textIn readings of Beau Travail (1999), L’Intrus (2004), White Material (2009) and High Life (2018), films which feature aggressively solitary figures, I suggest that, for Denis, aloneness is often the result of, even a price paid willingly for, a passion or obsession which goes beyond that for companionship, love, family, or community. Her protagonists are usually already in enclaves (colonial, penal, military) which are themselves typified by facultative difference from their enclosing wider social settings. As Judith Mayne writes, all kinds of ‘Strangers populate the films of Claire Denis […] exiles who live sometimes on the margins, sometimes in the shifting spaces of the geographies of race and gender and colonization’ (2005: 80). These strangers with whom we become so fleetingly familiar in these brief but intense encounters are often intrusive foreign bodies, outcasts on distant outposts or islands, whether figurative or literal. It is not, however, the simple fact of their strangeness which marks them as remarkable, but the fact that they strive to perfect their sequestration within these stratified concentric spaces. In this sense, the films are not about the lonely, isolated, excluded or marginalised, but about the profoundly and voluntarily ontologically apart. Here, I focus on the forceful figures at the (faltering) heart of their often-solipsistic narratives; the landscapes which frame, enforce, symbolise their isolations; the fleeting moments of intimacy which temporarily irrupt within and offer ultimately illusory or unsatisfying alternatives to their aloneness; and finally, the ways in which each film witnesses its precarious subject in a moment of things – life, colony, humanity, comradery –collapsing. I want also to think through the significance of motion and stasis, velocity and inertia (‘are we rushing forward, are we standing still?’ as Robert Pattinson croons questioningly in Staples’ High Life soundtrack), the delicately balanced torsional forces between which play such a crucial role for Denis’s characters. Regardless of the shifting contexts and the ostensibly different lives portrayed, Denis’s films are united by an almost pathological idio-alienation which proves, ultimately, to be fatal
Empathy and the ethics of posthuman reading in Never Let Me Go
Get PDFThis chapter examines a range of novels that explore the scientific creation of posthumans, notably Frankenstein (1818), Brave New World (1932), and Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), to provide a continuum within which to situate a more focused discussion of Ishiguro’s novel, in turn interrogating whether the presence of affective response in the reader is either a sufficient or necessary condition to confer the nebulous status of human onto other entities. Indeed, N. Katherine Hayles has suggested that ‘the age of the human has given way to the posthuman’, that ‘the concept of the human has given way to its evolutionary heir’, while Armstrong, seeing a comparable paradigm shift in literature, proposes that the contemporary novel ‘confront[s] us with forms of human life so innovative as to make it next to impossible for us to recognize ourselves in them’ (2016: 247; 2014: 442). With the aid of Martha Nussbaum’s work in Frontiers of Justice (2006), this essay is also an attempt to think through the literary implications, the ethics of reading in a world in which the human subject is, demonstrably, becoming a more fluid species. Much influential criticism of Ishiguro’s novel assumes a human reader, and so, as I will argue below, participates in both the anthropocentricism and human exceptionalism which it attempts, at least in principle, to challenge. I argue here that the novel as a form has always posed questions about human nature and human identity; that empathising in and with novels does not extend to real world altruism; and, that Armstrong exemplifies a strand of criticism which assumes a human reader (ourselves) of the posthuman (other), placing an implicit bias on reading as a human. Armstrong powerfully demonstrates her thesis, that ‘novels featuring an apparently damaged, subhuman, or insufficiently individuated human being prepare us to attempt the kind of sympathetic identification that novels have traditionally offered readers. They do so in order to turn a critical eye on all such person-to-person relationships’ (2014: 442). However, the contemporary novel aspires to more than simply ‘person-to-person’ relationships: both text and reader are undergoing an epistemological and even ontological resituating in relation to the refiguration of the humanities to the posthumanities in what Francis Fukuyama somewhat anxiously refers to as the ‘“posthuman” stage of history’ (2003: 7). Indeed, one might consider Ishiguro to be advocating for a neo-humanism, a recognition of species fluidity alongside a commitment to extending both empathy and rights to the traditionally post or non-human
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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