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Apocalypse, Hope, and Dystopia between Fiction and Society
No full textThis special issue of FUTURI is the result of the international conference “Electricdreams – Between fiction and society. Imagination and world building in the aftermath of a global pandemic”, that supported a debate over speculative/science/fantasy fictions across different media, highlighting their relationships to history, society and to the contingent moment. Moreover, it encouraged us to pay close attention to the influence that both utopian and dystopian narratives exert on everyday life, as they provide possible frameworks to rethink the current conditions and imagine alternatives. How do novels, short stories, movies, TV series, comics, and video-games imagine the apocalypse and what kind of scenarios do they envision? How do utopia and dystopia shape our culture and collective imagination? How do speculative/science/fantasy narratives change in times of global crisis? These are just some of the questions that the international conference explored and that the articles of this special issue address
From ‘Satire’ to ‘Insult’: Tracing a Phenomenology of Hatchet Jobs in Film Criticism, from the Post-War Years to the Web
No full textThe Twilight of the Eiga Rondan: The Transformation of Post-war Japanese Criticism Observed in the Reviews of Italian Films
No full textThe 1950s and 1960s are decades of transition for the Japanese cultural world. Critics and writers
who established themselves in the pre-war period give way to new generations and, consequently,
also the style and methods of film criticism change. After the war, the establishment of classical
Japanese film criticism (eiga rondan) has its last phase of activity, comprising heated discussions and
moments of reflection on the role and methods of criticism in the changing socio-cultural landscape.
The critical production of the members of the rondan shows a conscious work of construction and
self-representation of the critic as an expert figure, capable of discussing cinematographic art and
establishing the ideal canon of Japanese and international cinema. The film review proves to be a
useful basis for theoretical elaboration and for carrying out a political-ideological agenda, while
strengthening the role of film critics as intellectuals on an equal footing with the colleagues of the
more prestigious bundan, the capital's literary scene.
After a presentation of the forms and methods of the film review in the post-war Japanese specialized
press, I will introduce as a case study the reviews of Italian films distributed in Japan in the 1950s
and the 1960s. In the first half of the 1950s, Italian neorealist cinema enjoyed great fortune among
the Japanese critical-theoretical world and was the subject of round tables and critical analyses
published in influential film magazines such as Kinema junpō and Eiga Hyōron. In the next fifteen
years, Japanese critics continue to look with interest at Italian cinema, extending their analysis to
different film genres. Since the mid-1950s, the gradual decline of the rondan is accompanied on the
one hand by unprecedented critical revaluations of popular cinema and of the role of the public, but,
on the other hand, by ever-present essentialist and self-orientalist statements on film and national
character centered on the conceptual pair western/"Italian" and eastern/ "Japanese" cinema. These
transformations in the post-war critical world emerge in the reviews of Italian films distributed in
Japan: controversies on cinematic realism or on the new post-war "art cinema", stimulated by
neorealist cinema in the early 1950s; contrasting reactions to the arrival of Italian comedies, musical
or historical films; contribution of intellectuals external to the rondan who occasionally write film
reviews or essays on cinema. Numerous post-war intellectuals operate on the increasingly blurred
border between bundan, rondan, and non-professional criticism. Renowned authors like Mishima
Yukio or Shibusawa Tatsuhiko consider cinema a further cultural phenomenon to engage with and
from which to draw useful elements in support of aesthetical or political ideas, while showing with
their reviews an open and attentive attitude towards the specificities of the medium cinema.
Starting from my case study, I will show how the review is an important part of the rich post-war
critical and theoretical debate on topics such as national identity, film genres, and the relationship
between the critics and their public. My studies on post-war Japanese film criticism can offer a new
contribution to the studies on the history of modern periodicals and on film criticism, and illuminate
more sides of the history of international film circulation in the post-war period
Book reviews in the Irish ‘revolutionary’ periodicals: Dialogic texts with a political agenda
No full textThis chapter aims to evaluate the importance of book reviews in the radical press, by discussing the productivity of an approach that combines historically-informed close reading with an interest in the specificities of the periodical as a cultural object. I thus examine four case studies from Irish print culture: Our Boys, Fianna, Young Ireland and Saint Enda’s – the most popular nationalist story papers for juveniles in early-twentieth-century Ireland (1900-1920s). With their country still under British rule, these papers were concerned about the role of the youths in the context of nation-building and, despite representing different nuances of the nationalist spectrum, they all shared an interest in forming a counter public sphere opposing the dominant Anglophile one.
Book reviews, a regular fixture of the periodicals, partook in this political and cultural project. The review was a space used by contributors to further their political agendas, support the formation of a trulyIrish literary canon, produce alternative historiographies, and instil patriotism in Ireland‟s youth. A great
variety of books were reviewed, which included fiction and non-fiction and ranged in topic from poetry to religious matters. Reviewers identified with the core (nationalist) ethos of the journal as is evident not only in the titles being reviewed – e.g. autobiographies of Fenians abounded –, but also in their language, which sometimes deployed the rhetorical devices commonly found in the political speeches of Sinn Féin members. We can assume that the reviewers' personal investment in their task was a central factor in the success achieved by the periodicals. But not only that. A close analysis of the reviews reveals the managerial competences of the reviewers (or the shrewdness of their editors), who were often careful to review and promote the books released by the publishing houses that financially supported the periodicals. As will be shown in the core section of the presentation, these peculiarities of the book review in the radical press can be best appreciated, first, if we consider the reviews against the background of the other „texts‟ featured in the periodicals. By „text‟ it is here intended also the visual text – such as those complementing advertisements – whose relationships with the blocks of written text in the reviews are here
taken into account. Indeed, an analysis of reviews in politically positioned periodicals should focus on the juxtapositions of the different „texts‟ that occur within and across the periodicals‟ pages. The juxtapositions were far from apolitical, being rather “dynamic conjunctions” meant to heighten the desired effect of prompting rebellion in the young readers. Basically, reviews interacted with the other components of the periodical to form a coherent cultural and political object. Finally, the appreciation of the reviews‟ importance demands a detailed investigation of the historical and cultural context in which these texts – and by extension, the periodicals – were produced. Here, the examined texts are thus seen as inseparable from the conditions of their production in history, and the historical, political and cultural particularities of the period around 1900 in Ireland
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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