Comics comprise a hybrid art form descended from printmaking and mostly made using print technologies. But comics are an art form in their own right and do not belong to the art form of printmaking. We explore some features art comics and fine art prints do and do not have in common. Although most fine art prints and comics are multiple artworks, it is not obvious whether the multiple instances of comics and prints are artworks in their own right. (...) The comparison of comics and fine art prints provides a promising test for assessing how hybrid art forms develop more generally, and for assessing how they differ from closely related nonhybrid cousins. (shrink)

Not all comics are art. What about the comics that are art? What sort of art are they? In particular, are comics a form of literature? For a variety of reasons it is tempting to think that at least some comics are literature. Nevertheless, many theorists reject the ‘comics as literature’ view. And although some reasons for resisting that view are misguided, I shall argue that there are other good reasons for being hesitant about treating comics as a form of (...) literature. This leaves us at an impasse with respect to the classification of comics. I suggest that the way out of the impasse is to recognize that comics are a hybrid art form. (shrink)

Many comics are aesthetically trashy: They are immediately grasped and easily available. Historically, this trashiness is lobbed as an aesthetic defect of many comics, a defect for both their production and their appreciation. To defend these comics, some point to non-aesthetic values, like sociality. I argue that there is aesthetic value to these comics, and that it lies precisely in their trashy characteristics: their immediacy and availability. Many comics have these characteristics because many comics are cartooned. The immediacy of cartooning (...) is precisely what makes so many ordinary comics beautiful in an ordinary way. (shrink)

Comic is one of the paradigmatic forms of hybrid media, and coming up with a satisfactory definition for it has been difficult. Sam Cowling and Ley Cray (2022) take a functional approach and offer an Intentional Picture-Reading View which defines comics as something that is “aptly intended to be picture-read.” I show that the view is extensionally inadequate as is because formally ambitious prose and concrete poetry, too, are aptly intended to be picture-read. The way forward, I argue, is (...) to look at more medium-specific non-depictive images (such as speech balloons and panels) to set comics apart from other hybrid media. (shrink)

In Hybrid artwork, whereby the digital and the real are mixed, the artist/creator has to additionally manage interaction. Interaction is seen as an added dimension to narration: the art piece turns from being a means towards a narration (or an understanding) to a path towards an experience. It is argued that strong metaphysical concepts give place to new more fragmented ones. This nihilism and fragmentation can be seen as a cause of concern but also as an opportunity.

Today the movement of ideas, capital and people is faster and wilder than at any point in history. Globalization has made the world more interconnected. The flows of traffic in this new network have not only accelerated to new levels, but the directions of movement have multiplied and abandoned the well-worn paths. The cultural dynamics of globalization have presented new challenges to the existing models for explaining the forms of belonging and the patterns of exchange that are occurring in the (...) world. Culture is no longer understood as the discrete and unique expression of activities and ideas that occur in particular places. No culture can exist in isolation. The process of hybridization in the deterritorialization of cultures and peoples demands new theories of flow and resistance and is compelling artists and intellectuals to rethink their methods. Cultural critics and curators are also in need of new conceptual frameworks. There is an urgent need for a new vocabulary in art discourse that is able to make sense of the complex forms of representation that are incorporating images from different locations and that simultaneously activate signs that contain within them a multiplicity of other signs, each embodying a series of contrary or competing codes. To do justice to both the complexity of the artwork and the intellectual potential of these new conceptual headings we need to develop frameworks that can address both these signs of difference and the process by which signs are made out of the plays with difference. The concept of translation can serve as a tool that can both make sense of the broader dynamic of cultural exchange and explain specific forms of cultural representation. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which contemporary artists and art writing deal with issues of mobility and attachment. What sort of place does art connote if it is constantly evoking the shuttling between places? In what language can the artist articulate the recognition that translations fail as often as they succeed? How does a bi-lingual or a bi-cultural person speak their mother-tongue and see the world, which operates in a different or hybrid language? These questions push the available conceptual frameworks for cross-cultural exchanges to the limits. In this article I re-examine the conceptual viability of the term hybridity in light of the new debates on creolization and globalization. (shrink)

Comics are one of the paradigmatic forms of hybrid media, and coming up with a satisfactory definition for it has been difficult. Cowling, S. & Wesley D. C. (2022) take a functional approach and offer an Intentional Picture-Reading View which defines comics as something that is “aptly intended to be picture-read.” I show that the view is extensionally inadequate as is because formally ambitious prose and concrete poetry, too, are aptly intended to be picture-read. The way forward, I argue, (...) is to look at more medium-specific non-depictive images (such as speech balloons and panels) to set comics apart from other hybrid media. (shrink)

An adequate account of the nature of genre and of the criteria for genre membership is essential to understanding the nature of the various categories into which comics can be classified. Because they fail adequately to distinguish genre categories from other ways of categorizing works, including categorizations according to medium or according to style, previous accounts of genre fail to illuminate the nature of comics categories. I argue that genres are sets of conventions that have developed as means of addressing (...) particular interpretative and/or evaluative concerns, and have a history of co‐instantiation within a community, such that a work’s belonging to some genre generates interpretative and evaluative expectations among the members of that community. Genres are distinct from styles in consisting of conventions, and are distinct from media both in consisting of conventions and in generating interpretative and evaluative expectations. (shrink)

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy’s philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own. With theoretical rigor, Nancy elaborates on the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of “making,” and outlines the tensions inherent in the faire, the “making” that characterizes the very process of production and thereby the (...) structure of poetry in all its forms. Nancy shows that this multiplication that belongs to the notion of art makes every single work communicate with every other, all material in the artwork appeal to some other material, and art the singular plural of a praxis of the finite imparting of an infinity which is actually there in every utterance. In the collection, Nancy engages with the work of, among others, François Martin, Maurice Blanchot, and On Kawara. (shrink)

This essay studies Edie Fake’s award-winning graphic novel Gaylord Phoenix from the perspective of Queer Theory and Transgender Studies. Nikki Sullivan’s use of the term transmogrification from her work on somatechnics provides a critical lens through which to examine Fake’s exploration of the transgender body in his narrative. Fake includes multiple images of bodies undergoing radical transformations through a combination of magic and surgery, blurring the distinction between modern science and the occult. The essay also explores Fake’s status as an (...) innovator in the world of comic books and graphic novels as he creates an idiosyncratic verbal and visual vocabulary largely unprecedented in the world of sequential art. (shrink)

Is finding someone funny a way of treating them as an object? And if so, does that make it immoral? In this paper, I argue that seeing someone as comic involves failing to take into account their subjectivity, which makes it a form of objectification. As for the morality of this ‘comic objectification’, I argue that regarding someone with a comically objectifying attitude is wrongful when such an attitude plays a role in legitimating the oppression of members of their social (...) group. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes References.

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy's philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own. With theoretical rigor, Nancy elaborates on the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of "making," and outlines the tensions inherent in the _faire_, the "making" that characterizes the very process of production and thereby the (...) structure of poetry in all its forms. Nancy shows that this multiplication that belongs to the notion of art makes every single work communicate with every other, all material in the artwork appeal to some other material, and art the singular plural of a praxis of the finite imparting of an infinity which is actually there in every utterance. In the collection, Nancy engages with the work of, among others, François Martin, Maurice Blanchot, and On Kawara. (shrink)

A number of philosophers of music have proved resistant to the idea that song should be considered as a hybrid art that combines language and music. Separately, Levinson in his influential account of hybrid art forms does not admit folk song, even though he does allow nineteenth-century lieder into the hybrid category. Folk songs are sometimes treated as if they are anterior to and therefore ontologically distinct from the more complex songs of Western art music, or even (...) of modern popular culture. In contrast, this article argues that in a historical perspective English-language folk songs constitute a category of considerable complexity, and that the combination of the two distinct media of language and music is fundamental to any consideration of such songs in an ontological perspective. (shrink)

Seeking to better understand how nonprofit organizations (NPOs) manage hybridity, we investigated what distinguishes NPOs that combine multiple logics in productive and unproductive ways. We collected and analyzed data from six case studies of NPOs delivering social services in Australia. Our findings reveal that organizational members of NPOs take a _perspective_ on their hybrid nature which comprises four elements: motivational framing, actor engagement, resourcing attitude, and governance orientation. NPOs that combine multiple logics in productive and unproductive ways, respectively, are (...) distinguished by (1) a compelling or confused motivational framing for combining logics; (2) actors having active and shared, or passive and isolated, engagement with multiple logics; (3) attitudes toward resourcing multiple logics that are either coherent or competitive; and (4) a governance orientation toward multiple logics as opportunities to leverage or problems to resist. Our findings contribute to the literature by deepening understanding of the interplay between complex constellations of multiple logics in NPOs, including religious and professional logics. We also develop a model of organizational perspectives on hybridity and their implications for distinguishing NPOs that productively harness tensions between logics. (shrink)

Seeking to better understand how nonprofit organizations (NPOs) manage hybridity, we investigated what distinguishes NPOs that combine multiple logics in productive and unproductive ways. We collected and analyzed data from six case studies of NPOs delivering social services in Australia. Our findings reveal that organizational members of NPOs take a perspective on their hybrid nature which comprises four elements: motivational framing, actor engagement, resourcing attitude, and governance orientation. NPOs that combine multiple logics in productive and unproductive ways, respectively, are (...) distinguished by (1) a compelling or confused motivational framing for combining logics; (2) actors having active and shared, or passive and isolated, engagement with multiple logics; (3) attitudes toward resourcing multiple logics that are either coherent or competitive; and (4) a governance orientation toward multiple logics as opportunities to leverage or problems to resist. Our findings contribute to the literature by deepening understanding of the interplay between complex constellations of multiple logics in NPOs, including religious and professional logics. We also develop a model of organizational perspectives on hybridity and their implications for distinguishing NPOs that productively harness tensions between logics. (shrink)

In his “Translator’s Introduction” to The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann writes: “This book … mirrors all of Nietzsche’s thought and could be related in a hundred ways to his other books, his notes and his letters. And yet it is complete in itself. For it is a work of art.” Judging by their actual treatment of The Gay Science, few commentators have taken this claim to artistic completeness seriously. Instead, the usual practice has been to abstract passages from the book, (...) treating them either as initial statements of key Nietzschean doctrines or as casting light on general issues raised throughout Nietzsche’s works. Until now, no commentator of note has attempted an interpretation of The Gay Science as a unified whole. It is to this end that Higgins has written Comic Relief. (shrink)

What is right with this “comic” of Euripides's timeless and irreplaceable drama, The Trojan Women, is what was always right about a play that is relentlessly relevant. Carson's translation, spare and clear, distills the language of the original but keeps what is important, including some mouth-puckeringly wry lines. There is barbed wit and heartbreaking lullaby, sometimes coinciding on one page. Thus, the chorus comments, “Troy, you made a bad deal: / ten thousand men for a single coracle of cunt appeal.” (...) In the middle of the same page, the Greek herald Talthybius addresses Hector and Andromache's infant son Astyanax, whom he has come to carry off so that the baby can be thrown from the battlements: “Come along, little mushroom, / little rootlet, little sip, little milk fly, little asterisk, little welkin, / little silhouette, little sugar bubble—/ let go of your mother. / She's broken.” Then lower down on the same page: “It's time for your infinite leap / as decreed by the vote of men. / Take him. / The man to transact things like this / is one who doesn't know pity.”What is wrong with this new rendering is Bruno's awkward, amateurish drawings. Yes, the chorus are all animals, as are all the main characters except mad Cassandra (a partial exception might be made for Menelaus, who is some kind of machine); but Bruno is no Art Spiegelman, and this is no Maus. Spiegelman's cats, pigs, and mice make perfect sense and are elegantly and clearly depicted; they add resonance to the story without raising further questions. In this Trojan Women, it makes sense that Hecuba is an old bitch or Helen a svelte fox in high heels. Poseidon, a wave: okay. But Talthybius, a colossal raven? Athena, “a big pair of overalls, carrying an owl mask in one hand”? Andromache, “a poplar tree with trunk split and roots dragging out the back of the cart”? The infant Astyanax whom Andromache cradles in one Ent-like arm looks more like a cocoon or a hornet's nest or a hypertrophied oak gall than anything else. Menelaus, when he arrives, is “some sort of gear box, clutch or coupling mechanism, once sleek, not this year's model.” These surreal leaps might well work on the stage or screen, but the need to explain them in the text shows how uncomfortably they fit into the story. Carson's explanations, of course, constitute her only significant departures from Euripides.We do not need Bruno's drawings; Carson's pared-down text might work quite well on its own. But even grant the hypothetical that these drawings are an organic and crucial part of this version's vision, then the drawings should not need to be explained. Less would be more. What this version of the classic drama gains in succinctness it loses in tonal clarity—having said which, I would still like to try it out on my students, who might help me to change my mind. Does this retelling of the story remain heartrending and cruel, suffused with irony, sharpened by flashes of wit? Yes. Was it worth the experiment of turning the tragedy into a comic? Sure. Is this uneasy mix of verbal mastery and wobbly draftsmanship the ultimate version of The Trojan Women? Nope. (shrink)

The use of cross-media and transmedia-based art installation has generated new ways for the audience to appreciate, understand and experience art. Transmedia, the integration of multiple media forms to augment a single narrative, has not only been largely used in commercial films, but has also been used by artists to communicate their message more effectively. In this article, we explore some remarkable multi-channel video installations and transmedia artworks to highlight how this technology has shaped new uses of technology as a (...) new medium to express artistic concepts. We discuss one artwork, an experimental collaboration between artists and scientists, entitled Reefs on the Edge, which communicates valuable information about climate change to a general audience. (shrink)

This article explores the rise of comics-based research (CBR) as an innovative method for disseminating and translating academic findings to broader audiences. Rooted in the established use of comics in technical communication, CBR takes the unique strengths of graphic media—accessibility, multimodal engagement, and visual storytelling—to communicate complex concepts to diverse audiences, particularly in health-related disciplines. A recent development in this field is the comic research abstract, a concise, visually enriched alternative to traditional textual abstracts. By integrating clarity, brevity, and expressive (...) visuals, this format enhances research accessibility and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing on an example from the author’s work on intergenerational storytelling, this article introduces the comic research abstract as a transformative interdisciplinary tool that bridges the arts, humanities, and health sciences. It highlights how this format translates research into advocacy-driven narratives, fostering inclusion, activism, and public engagement. By combining written and visual content, the comic research abstract underscores the potential of comics for advancing health humanities, arts-based academic communication, and inclusive scholarship. (shrink)

__Teachers Bridging Difference_ describes how educators can move out of their comfort zones and practice connecting with others across differences to become culturally responsive teachers. _Based on a course developed for preservice teachers, the book illustrates how educators can draw on the visual arts as a resource to explore their own identities and those of their students, and how to increase their understanding of the ways our lives intersect across sociocultural differences. Drawing on scholarship from multiple disciplines and from her (...) own experience, Marit Dewhurst identifies four stances designed to help educators connect with students in today’s multicultural classrooms. To practice these stances, the book introduces eight arts-based activities that can be used by educators in multiple contexts. Ranging from community maps and conversation portraits to scenario comics and reflection zines, the activities are designed to be accessible to even those with little arts experience and can be executed with a wide variety of materials and media. Unique and timely, _Teachers Bridging Difference _is an arts-based tool kit for teachers interested in exploring issues of identity and difference as a foundation for creating a more just and equal society. (shrink)

The essay examines the relation between the explicit aesthetic ideology of Proust’s Recherche and the structure of the “involuntary memory” that is supposed to serve as that ideology’s empirical basis. I challenge the apparent solipsism and idealism of the narrator’s aesthetics by focusing on the one experience of involuntary memory that he omits from his final reflections, in Time Regained, on the relation between memory and art: this is the involuntary memory, in the earlier volume Sodom and Gomorrah, of his (...) dead grandmother, a memory that he describes there as an experience of true otherness. Through a close reading of this passage, I argue that Proust’s interest in involuntary memory implies a concept of literary art as above all ethical in nature, in so far as it is the only means by which individuals can emerge from the solitude to which they are otherwise existentially condemned. In both the Sodom and Gomorrah passage and a later passage from Time Regained this emergence is cast in terms of a rhetoric of multiplicity that emphasizes both the disturbing and the productive dimensions connecting literature with life. (shrink)

This paper takes an initial but significant step toward penetrating the intricate historiography of the renowned siyin half seal, which appears on 199 surviving or now-lost canonical Chinese paintings and calligraphies. Through a forensic tracking of the siyin art pieces, Ming dynasty court diaries, legal statutes, and other official seals ending in the words si and yin, I refute the dominant twentieth-century theory by arguing that this seal could not have originated from the eunuch-run Dianli jicha si in 1373–84, nor (...) could it have been used by the Ming general Xu Da on the Yuan palace collection as previously hypothesized. The alleged Dianli jicha si characters do not match the siyin seal strokes. New evidence suggests that the siyin seal came into existence after 1385, by which time the Directorate of Ceremonial had superseded the shuttered Dianli jicha si office. Instead of simply dividing the various siyin seal impressions into binary genuine/forged categories as past studies have done, I demonstrate that three types of siyin seals can be considered authentic, all of which were used by different branches of the jingli si. The fact that a half seal was employed suggests that the jingli si registry office followed the kanhe inventory system, which imposed an official seal on the seam of both an inventorying object and its complementary ledger. By deconstructing the siyin historiography, this paper raises new socio-political questions about ownership, censorship, and imperial competition over the siyin-marked art pieces. It also builds a foundation for the further investigation of the role inventory systems played in mapping, defining, and legitimizing the royal power of the Ming dynasty. (shrink)

Phenomenology is often described as a paradigm shift that calls for a re-assessment of inherited themes and concepts. One of its most important contributions is the central role given to the embodied subject as opposed to the conception of the disembodied subject that has dominated philosophy since Descartes. If perspectival painting best represents the paradigm of modern philosophy since the Renaissance, it is the multiple perspectives of Cubist painting that best represent the phenomenological paradigm. While the relationship between phenomenology and (...) art has been widely studied, my aim in this article is to focus on the way in which Cubism represents the embodied, horizonal structure of our perception, and then to discuss the new form of contemporary art installation as an actualization of Cubist principles in the age of digital reproduction. The embodiment of the subject necessarily involves intersubjectivity, for others appear in the subject’s contextual frame of public space. While for Arendt the shift from private subjective space to public intersubjective space is effected through dialogue, I argue that it is also effected architecturally, for architecture facilitates dialogue by offering multiple perspectives on common space and shared time. I suggest, finally, that architecture’s multiperspectival strategies offer the humanities a useful model of a multidisciplinary methodology. (shrink)

We show that the rule that allows the inference of A from A ⊗ B is admissible in many of the basic multiplicative systems. By adding this rule to these systems we get, therefore, conservative extensions in which the tensor behaves as classical conjunction. Among the systems obtained in this way the one derived from RMIm has a particular interest. We show that this system has a simple infinite-valued semantics, relative to which it is strongly complete, and a nice cut-free (...) Gentzen-type formulation which employs hypersequents . Moreover: classical logic has a simple, strong translation into this logic. This translation uses definable connectives and preserves the consequence relation of classical logic . Similar results, but with a 3-valued semantics, obtain if instead of RMIm we use RMm. (shrink)

The instructions inscribed in French on a strip of metal glued across Marcel Duchamp’s work, also known as Small Glass, translate into English as follows: ‘To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour’. In exploration of the implications of such strenuous procedure the original instructions will be expanded upon: ‘To Be Looked at (from Multiple Sides) with more than One I, Close to and Even Closer, for Almost an (...) Instant’ - an invitation to exercise the polyphibic awareness of multiplicity of appearances, the ability to look at a phenomenon not only from one or the other side but from multiple sides, in its multiple potential apparitions. (shrink)

SummaryHistorians have explored the continuities between science and the arts in the Industrial Revolution, with much recent historiography emphasizing the hybrid nature of the activities of men of science around 1800. Chemistry in particular displayed this sort of hybridity between the philosophical and practical because the materials under investigation were important across the research spectrum. Inflammable gases were an example of such hybrid objects: pneumatic chemists through the eighteenth century investigated them, and in the process created knowledge, processes (...) and instruments essential for the creation of a new gaslight industry from 1800. Once this industry began to expand and mature, the interests and experiments of the gas industry stimulated new research work which in turn had relevance for theoretical debates.This paper explores how the emergence of the gas industry from 1800 provided an impetus for new work in theoretical chemistry. Boulton & Watt, important pioneers of the gas industry, explored the compositions of inflammable gases for practical purposes: the composition of these gases had an important effect on the luminosity of gaslights, and hence the economics of the new technology compared to older forms of lighting. As they explored these questions in their engineering work, they stimulated their friend William Henry to explore the nature of these gases further, and he carried out a series of experiments to determine their composition more exactly than Boulton & Watt had done. Henry published a series of paper between 1805 and 1820 where he made arguments about the compositions of inflammable airs, and further related these to contemporary debates about the laws of multiple and definite proportions, as well as John Dalton's atomism. Henry's research was also a hybrid of the theoretical and practical in that he tried to develop results useful for the fledgling gas industry. Specifically, he suggested the best kind of coal to use, and showed how gas quality varied with distillation time and temperature. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effects of group interaction in a storytelling situation for children using two robots: a reader robot and a listener robot as a side-participant. We developed a storytelling system that consists of a reader robot, a listener robot, a display, a gaze model, a depth sensor, and a human operator who responds and provides easily understandable answers to the children’s questions. We experimentally investigated the effects of using a listener robot and either one or two children during (...) a storytelling situation on the children’s preferences and their speech activities. Our experimental results showed that the children preferred storytelling with the listener robot. Although two children obviously produced more speech than one child, the listener robot discouraged the children’s speech regardless of whether one or two were listening. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 415-428 [Access article in PDF] Brief Mention Tantalus Helene P. Foley John Barton's Tantalus bills itself repeatedly as "leftovers from the epic cycle." 1 Although his cycle of plays--nine in the stage performance and ten, with prologue and epilogue, in the published script--also remakes some late Euripidean plays, the spirit of the piece as a whole is far more reminiscent of what we (...) know of cyclic epic than tragedy or even the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, which, as Aristotle's Poetics points out, are plotted in a distinctively tragic manner with a single unifying action. Sir Peter Hall and Edward Hall's performance version, which premiered in fall 2000 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and then traveled to England, is conveniently divided into hour-long segments with intermissions and meal breaks that cater to the sensibilities and attention spans of viewers accustomed to televised series like Masterpiece Theater. Any attempt to recapture the tight plotting, intensity, complexity, and tension of tragedy would inevitably fail in a performance of this scale. Instead, the viewer is drawn into a long and varied narrative replete with surprising shifts in tone, ranging from ironic to lyrical, from painful to comic; episodes drawn from obscure mythological sources or, occasionally, invented, take center stage, while episodes familiar from Homer and tragedy are deliberately deleted. Viewers can follow characters and children of characters over the series of plays and see the traits of siblings and parents emerge with variation in close relatives--an effect enhanced onstage by the fact that these relatives are often played by the same actors. Like cyclic epic, Tantalus fills in the gaps left by Homer [End Page 427] in the Trojan saga and aspires to tantalize its viewers with the possibi415lity of multiple and unstable versions of mythic truth. In addition, although the play repeatedly evokes the image of the rock of Tantalus poised to crash with finality on everyone's head, it largely espouses a cyclic and inconclusive view of history, in which events and human errors relentlessly repeat themselves without acquiring accessible meaning. "Until the great rock falls / What has happened already / Will happen again: / That is god-law, Agamemnon, / As it's man-law on earth. / Epikou Kuklou leipsana" (362).Playwright Barton and the directors fell out during the rehearsal process; the Irish playwright Colin Teevan shortened, revised, and in some critical ways transformed and trivialized Barton's original script. The stage version retains Barton's concern with the futility of war and human action but radically revises the major point of the original. Barton's script above all engages its audience in the myth-making process and the elusive truth of stories: "Who is to Blame? What is the Truth? Could it be Otherwise?" His script opens with a group of twelve "girls" (Barton's term) sleeping on barren ground. Nine (in the performance, ten) of the girls become a chorus, and the remaining ones (the script says four, though the total of twelve demands three, so there may be an error in the script here) play various female parts throughout the cycle. The group has missed the (real or mythical) boat and begins to tell one another conflicting myths about the origin of the world. The chorus, which claims to know all the traditional Greek myths, wants to know which version is true. It debates whether to drink from the nearby oracular streams of Trophonius. (One stream makes one forget the present moment; the other makes one remember even things one does not consciously know.)A poet (and tutor to Dionysus) enters with a wine bag. The skeptical chorus, which at first prefers its own stories and one truth, is lured into testing out the poet's bag of masks and engaging with multiple conflicting stories. "If you want to know the future / You must go into the past" (511). The poet and the four women don new roles and reenact story fragments for the increasingly engaged chorus. The chorus women toss stones over their shoulders in imitation of the Greek creation... (shrink)

We develop and defend a novel interpretation of mainstream Marvel Comics—an interpretation we call the Fictional Journalism Interpretation. We then show how this interpretation of Marvel comics (i) challenges standard accounts of the manner in which fictional truths are generated by fictions and (ii) provides us with novel, interesting, and in some cases simpler explanations of, and understandings of, phenomena within these comics that are hard to deal with adequately on more traditional accounts, including both contradictions in the fiction and (...) various metafictional storytelling strategies. We conclude by defending the view from a number of objections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Elizabethan Bacchae STEPHEN ORGEL Euripides’s Bacchae, with its antic hero and celebration of the joys of revenge, would seem to be especially relevant to Elizabethan drama, an ancestor of The Spanish Tragedy or Hamlet. In fact, however, it seems to have been practically unknown to the Elizabethans. With the new ProQuest version of EEBO (Early English Books Online) it is now possible to search early English books for (...) specific references; so I paired the name Euripides with books printed in England before 1640 to see what came up. I got 474 hits. Many of these, of course, were duplicates, appearing in works that were issued in multiple editions—the actual figure, however, was still something over three hundred. Most of those, however, were cases in which Euripides’s name simply appears in a list of famous ancient authors. Citations which actually quoted Euripides for the most part indicated no knowledge of the work cited, but were only bits of wisdom that might have come from any of the multitude of collections of aphorisms and moral stories throughout the period. There was only one English edition of a play of Euripides in Greek, The Trojan Women, published by John Day in 1575— continental editions were, of course, easily obtainable, but it must be to the point that English publishers did not see a sufficient market to produce them domestically; and there were no subsequent editions of Day’s Trojan Women. As for The Bacchae, I found only a single case where I believe it is being cited, and in a context, moreover, that indicates some familiarity with the play. John Bishop’s Beautiful Blossoms, a collection of historical anecdotes published in 1577, recounting the history of Demetrius, king of Macedonia, says, “Then fled Demetrius unto Thebes, where one scoffingly applied vnto him that verse arion 28.3 winter 2021 64 the elizabethan bacchae of Euripides: he came vnto the Dyrcean springs, and Ismenus, his divine and goodly fourme and shape being chaunged in to a mortall.”1 This is a version of a bit of Dionysus’s opening speech, I am here at the springs of Dirce, the river Ismenos, Changing my shape from divine to mortal... There is no reason to assume that John Bishop (about whom I can learn nothing) knew the play, but he is certainly citing someone who did. The play, then, to the Elizabethans was either practically unknown or deliberately ignored. It was not translated into English until the 1780s, and then two translations were published within a year of each other—for the English, it was an enlightenment and romantic text. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (delivered 1806, published 1846) and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) were the works that established The Bacchae as the quintessential Greek tragedy, though for Nietzsche, ironically, the two destroyers of the Greek tragic sense, the two great cultural villains, were Euripides the ironist and Socrates the arch-rationalist. But Nietzsche sees Euripides, at the end of his life, having a major change of heart, realizing that Dionysus was simply too powerful to be expunged from art and society; and The Bacchae was thus the fullest expression of this tragic truth. The problems with this argument are manifold: Euripides the ironist is quite evident in The Bacchae, so it hardly represents a change of heart; and the claims of the irrational are fully present in his earlier plays, for example, in Hippolytus, where all the poetic energy is in expressing the uncontrollable violence of passion, and the virtues of morality and self-control are meagre indeed. The essay was soundly refuted in its own time, and Nietzsche withdrew and recanted it. Its celebrity is a modern phenomenon: whatever its historical defects, it speaks to the dangerous attractions of unreason. There is a perverse element in Nietzsche’s argument, too: Dionysus, as the embodiment of revelry, is surely as essential Stephen Orgel 65 to comedy as to tragedy; and one could press this further. At the end of The Symposium, Socrates tells Agathon and Aristophanes, tragic and comic dramatists, that their arts (or crafts: the word is techne) are essentially the same. Heavy weather has... (shrink)

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are (...) presented with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: 1. The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. 2. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. 3. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. 4. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception’s relation to language. Keywords aesthetics, perception, nonconceptual content, hybrids, visual metaphors. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and aesthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright (...) laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afromodernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on DuchampBergson ReadymadeFederico Luisetti (bio)Translated by David Sharp[I]nside the person we must distinctly perceive, as through a glass, a set-up mechanism.—Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1901)In spite of the enormous critical attention paid to Marcel Duchamp’s art and theoretical background, the dialogue with Bergsonism is mostly confined to scattered references and erudite observations.1 Paradoxically, the major obstacle to this encounter has been (...) the immense popularity of Henri Bergson’s philosophy since the initial decade of the twentieth century. Such success has come with a price, however, for the proliferation of neutralizing schematizations has progressively suffocated the specificity of his thought and subsequently impeded the understanding of his epistemological radicalism, so cherished by Duchamp and the historical avant-garde.2Consider, for example, how the specter of Bergson constantly hovers over Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s authoritative discussion of Duchamp’s scientific sources. Although Henderson recognizes the diffuse presence in Duchamp of various Bergsonian motives, because she regards Bergson as the antiscientific philosopher of the “inner self” and of “profound self-expression,”3 Bergsonian notions seem to her incompatible with the artistic revolution prompted by Duchamp. A historiographical exorcism is therefore needed in order to heal the consequences of the traumatic Bergson-Duchamp incest. Herein lies Henderson’s solution: since Duchamp rejects the aesthetic principles of the Puteaux Cubists, he also abandons Bergsonism, which represents their philosophical matrix. Thus, the Bergsonian ideas “undoubtedly” present in Duchamp’s artistic lexicon are nothing but debris accumulated in the course of his battle with the Cubist disciples of Bergson.4To counter these approaches, in the following pages I will map Duchamp’s absorption and creative distortion of Bergsonism,5 concentrating on key terms of both Bergson’s philosophy and Duchamp’s speculations on art: space, “readymade,” delay, body, virtual, circuit, machine.6 I will then discuss the theoretical implications of Duchamp’s Bergsonism and place the readymade7 within its proper context: the deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of reflection. [End Page 77]SpaceBeginning with Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson distinguishes between two types of multiplicities: on the one hand, “duration” (durée), “an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination... a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers,” and on the other, “a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differentiation... a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual.”8 This opposition is generally understood as a clear-cut differentiation between the inner experience of time and the objective consistence of space. In Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory (1896), there are several passages that can be read accordingly, since duration is often described as a continuous, indivisible temporal experience, and space as that which “by definition, is outside us.”9Yet for Bergson space and time are mixed terms, and their internal complexity does not coincide with the semantic distinction between the two multiplicities. Deleuze has clearly formulated the central difficulty that a reductionist theory of space and time would imply, a problem of which Bergson is fully aware. Since the concept of duration has an ontological span, space must find a place within time and vice versa: “If things endure, or if there is duration in things, the question of space will need to be reassessed on new foundations. For space will no longer simply be a form of exteriority.... Space itself will need to be based in things... to have its own ‘purity’” [Deleuze, Bergsonism 49]. Hidden behind the motif of the “spatialization of time,” Bergson has devised a stratified theory of space, whose origins we can trace back to his philosophical apprenticeship [see Heidesick 29–42].Departing from Kant, Bergson introduces a boundary between the “perception of extension” and the “conception of space,” between qualitative space, which he calls “extensity” (étendue), and “abstract,” “homogeneous” space: “We must thus distinguish between the perception of extensity and the conception of space.... [S]pace is not so homogeneous for the animal as for us... determinations of space, or directions, do not assume for it a purely geometrical form” [Bergson, Time... (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to carve out a political understanding of the Muslim identity. The Muslim identity is shaped within a religious mold. Inseparable from this religious understanding is a political one that is valuable in its own right in order to secure any sustainable possibility of participating politically as Muslims within a democratic liberal democracy, such as the United States. Here I explore not the historical or theological formation of the Muslim identity, rather a metaphysical understanding of (...) it, in order to mobilize politically while avoiding the traps of essentialism. I begin with a brief overview of the early understandings of the term “identity politics” in the United States. Moving beyond interest-based movements I explore María Lugones' particular understanding of the self as multiplicitous. I then offer examples of the Muslim identity within the context of a social movement and individualist claims, in order to draw out the political aspects of the Muslim identity. In the final section I argue that the theological criteria that define “who counts as a Muslim” is a crucial aspect of how many Muslims may understand their identity as Muslims. However, I claim that in order to avoid the traps of marginalization of Muslim minorities, one must understand oneself as a multiplicitous political agent and that, furthermore, such an understanding is not at odds with Islam or one's own understanding of their identity as Muslim. (shrink)

Most mass-art comics (e.g., “superhero” comics) are collectively produced, that is, different people are responsible for different production elements. As such, the more disparate comic production roles we begin to regard as significantly or uniquely contributory, the more difficult questions of comic authorship become, and the more we view various distinct production roles as potentially constitutive is the more we must view comic authorship as potentially collective authorship. Given the general unreliability of intuitions with respect to collective authorship (coupled with (...) our general unfamiliarity with the medium), we must look to find a principle of comic authorship out of which authorship questions can be settled for comics simpliciter. Furthermore, any such principle found must also be capable of grounding a principled distinction between collective production and collective authorship; should this distinction be absent, any proper manner of framing the central descriptive and evaluative questions for comics must likewise be absent. Quite obviously we need a theory of comic authorship. To this end, I suggest how we should proceed and exactly what such a theory should look like. (shrink)

Combating the identity problem is crucial and urgent as false identity has become a common denominator of many serious crimes, including mafia trafficking and terrorism. Without correct identification, it is very difficult for law enforcement authority to intervene, or even trace terrorists’ activities. Amongst several identity attributes, personal names are commonly, and effortlessly, falsified or aliased by most criminals. Typical approaches to detecting the use of false identity rely on the similarity measure of textual and other content-based characteristics, which are (...) usually not applicable in the case of highly deceptive, erroneous and unknown descriptions. This barrier can be overcome through analysis of link information displayed by the individual in communication behaviours, financial interactions and social networks. In particular, this paper presents a novel link-based approach that improves existing techniques by integrating multiple link properties in the process of similarity evaluation. It is utilised in a hybrid model that proficiently combines both text-based and link-based measures of examined names to refine the justification of their similarity. This approach is experimentally evaluated against other link-based and text-based techniques, over a terrorist-related dataset, with further generalization to a similar problem occurring in publication databases. The empirical study demonstrates the great potential of this work towards developing an effective identity verification system. (shrink)

Many forms of printmaking involve drawing or painting onto a plate to produce a matrix and then producing prints from that matrix by mechanical processes. One might be skeptical about the artistic significance of such prints, on the basis that only the process of drawing or painting the matrix enables printmakers to exercise intentional control over the features of the resultant prints. This might lead one to think that such forms of printmaking lack artistic significance independent of drawing and painting. (...) I examine whether or not such skepticism is warranted and argue that it is not. Nevertheless, I identify limitations on the independent artistic significance of another form of printmaking, namely that which involves producing prints from multiple matrices. (shrink)

Teaching is often framed in terms of performance: an orator stands before a crowd, attempting to capture attention and to deliver material prepared in advance. This analogy falls apart, however, when one considers the extent to which teaching is a dialogical endeavor. Looking to the Meno, the Symposium, and the Republic, this paper offers an interpretation of these texts which deepens our understanding of Plato’s theory of education. First, a Platonic view of education recommends a view of educators not as (...) imparters of wisdom upon passive recipients, but as mediators of student growth. Second, the tragic and comic nature of the above Platonic dialogues suggests that the content of a lesson will always be inflected by the personal characters of the students and teacher. This has direct implications for how philosophers approach their task as teachers, the most notable being that the personal characters and classroom dynamics are factors which must be taken into account in the formulation and development of effective pedagogical methods. (shrink)

Ever since the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, East Asians across the globe have been ostracized, othered, pathologized, and subjected to numerous anti-Asian hate crimes. Despite contemporary China’s rapid modernization, the country is still perceived as an Oriental and primitive site. Taking these cues, the current article aims to investigate the Sinophobic attitudes in the wake of COVID-19 through a detailed analysis of sequential comics and cartoons by artists of East Asian descent, such as Laura Gao and (...) Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom. Drawing theoretical insights from Alexandre White’s “epidemic orientalism” and Priscilla Wald’s “medicalized nativism,” this essay investigates how these chosen comics function as counternarratives through first-person storytelling. In so doing, these comics, while reinstating the dignity of East Asians, also challenge and resist the naturalized methods of seeing that justify violence and dehumanization. The article further argues that Sinophobia and anti-Asian hate crimes are motivated as much by the origins of COVID-19 in China as by the political, economic, and technological variables that have shaped modern China. (shrink)

The Hybrid Constitution/Melez Anayasa defines the principles upon which a Hybrid Constitution between nature and technology is based. This is an artistic task, because nature and technology cannot inscribe their Magisteria as beings and rights inside a ‘Constitution’, but a beginning for a new utopic non-human-centred vision. The Hybrid Constitution is based on the assumption that best constitution is a mixed system, including human, nature, and low- and high-tech elements. This constitution distinguishes between human citizens, who had (...) the right to participate in the state, and non-citizens and Others, who had the right to be represented. The otherness. The Hybrid Constitution/Melez Anayasa is an artwork presented at the Amber Festival in Istanbul in 2011 and the argument of an essay published in the AUT AUT issue 361/2014 and titled La condizione postumana. (shrink)

Although Plotinus’ two treatises on beauty could be taken to reflect an evolution in his thought, a careful examination shows that he consistently argues for a conception of beauty as the illuminated unity in multiplicity of the Intellect.

The main notion of this article is that the blurring of the limits between offline and online dimensions of knowledge and experience, in addition to the manipulation of genes, neurons, atoms and bits, is dissolving the distinction between subjectivism (i.e. idealism) and materialism (i.e. objectivism and realism). As a consequence, in the moistmedia (from Ascott) ecology in which we are increasingly immersed, a radical kind of experience of matter, time, space and self is emerging. In this form of experience, the (...) blending of subjectivist and materialist approaches help in overcoming the classical Cartesian polarity: we feel part of an extended reality, and we feel this extended reality in ourselves by combining bodies, points of view and multiple senses with digital layers of everything. The article proposes these research questions: Which are the main factors that shape the change toward a moistmedia ecology resulting from the impact of the manipulation of genes, neurons, bits and atoms? Which transformation is being shaped in relation to the previous model of experience? What are the features of the new forms of materiality, sensitivity and action? How artists are putting themselves at risk in the moistmedia ecology? The hypothesis is that a hybrid kind of interval is opening between different layers of reality: analogue versus digital; nature versus culture; here versus there; past versus future; I versus others; and human versus non-human. In this recombination process, a third dimension of reality – that I call ‘radical reality’ – emerges in the moistmedia ecology. This article will analyse the radical experience (Wilson) in moistmedia environments by crossing the five dimensions (matter, space, time, identity and action) with the practices of manipulation of genes, atoms and bits using examples from art and design. This crossing shows the basic dimensions and sub-dimensions of the ‘Model of Radical Experience’ to reveal the nature of this third dimension between subjectivism and materialism, which is explored by artists who put themselves at risk in the turbulent zone between the physical and the digital. (shrink)

This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on comics and the anarchist imagination. The curators of the 2014 British Library exhibition, "Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK," noted that "there has always been a certain anarchic streak" in comics. Indeed, since Ralph Chaplin's Black Cat appeared alongside the work of Ernest Riebe and Ern Hanson in the IWW's Industrial Worker in the early twentieth century, comics and cartoons have been prominent fixtures in anarchist (...) publications, while comic books themselves have often featured anarchist heroes. To take a few more examples: in the 1960s and 70s, Donald Rooum's Wildcat comics strips featured... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Comic Business: Theatricality, Technique, and Performance Contexts in Aristophanic ComedyC. W. MarshallMartin Revermann. Comic Business: Theatricality, Technique, and Performance Contexts in Aristophanic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xiv + 396 pp. 15 black-and-white plates. 3 black-and-white figs. 5 tables. Cloth, $115.The cover illustration of Martin Revermann's book on Aristophanic performance betrays the author's personal and intellectual debts: caricatures of five scholars thanked in the preface, drawn as (...) if they were characters in Clouds, including Oliver Taplin in a swing looking down from above like Socrates. It is a shame many libraries will not keep the cover, since the lighthearted image is quite revealing about the nature of this study, though without any intended association with the academic pedantry of the Thinkery. Following chapter 1, entitled "Comic Business" (3–7), really a short whirlwind of an introduction that raises many of the sorts of questions the book addresses, the structure of the book falls neatly into two parts: three chapters examine the nature of performance criticism of ancient comedy and address a wide range of specifics; three chapters address individual plays, Clouds, Lysistrata, and Wealth. Each chapter falls into well-labeled sections, which will facilitate ongoing reference to the book. Revermann's study aims at a theoretical sophistication that is needed if the study of ancient performance is to proceed meaningfully. While he does not engage with every issue he raises in sufficient depth, Revermann provides a crucial advance on previous discussions (the book comes thirty years after C. W. Dearden's Stage of Aristophanes and twenty-six years after Kenneth McLeish's Theatre of Aristophanes).Chapter 2, "Performance Criticism: Point and Methods" (8–65), addresses some important and underexplored methodological questions that often go unmentioned in such studies. After arguing that "no ancient statement known to [End Page 431] me... claims a necessary link between meaning and dramatic performance" (15), Revermann identifies a "nexus of competitive agendas and social performances" (22), building on those Wilson has described for the choregos. Many of the issues raised (non-competitive performances, pay for poets, the relative importance of dramatic festivals) are equally important for the study of tragedy, and the book generally raises issues that students of tragic performance will need to consider. A general vocabulary of theatre semiotics is introduced, helpfully, with specific examples examining how performance generally is framed.Revermann embarks on an ambitious project of replacing the "significant action" hypothesis (which assumes that every significant action within a Greek play is indicated by the words a character says) that has dominated discussions of ancient stagecraft. This is a very helpful discussion, and it is surely correct, culminating in a good articulation of Revermann's methodology (63–64). Again, the principal examples come from tragedy. However, when Revermann invokes the question of on-stage frogs (agreeing with my 1996 discussion, which in its way sought also to challenge the "significant action" hypothesis), I think he needlessly muddles the matter by imagining the possibility of subsequent, frogless performances, when, I would say, a great deal is lost as a result. Revermann's interest is more with the possibilities offered by performance generally (65: "'Why frogs?,' irrespective of their visibility"), and sometimes the nitty-gritty of specific staging choices is not pressed (comparison is made with the offstage songs of the cloud chorus on 200).Chapter 3 (66–106) addresses "Two Fundamental Problems." The first relates the performance script (as attested in our manuscripts) to a concept of authenticity, considering that many plays were reperformed in the fourth century and after. Given that issues of reperformance were barely acknowledged until the last decade (Easterling's 1994 discussion is subtitled "A Speculative Note"), Revermann provides a solid discussion, arguing that the scripts of both tragedy and comedy closely match what was performed in Athens. Inconsistencies exist, but they are mentioned; context-specific references in Aristophanes point to the primary script surviving. An appendix on the time allocated to a performance during a festival is relevant (333–37). Revermann argues that the scripts as we have them may not have been performed in their entirety during their initial performance, suggesting, for example, that one... (shrink)

Ultra-short-term wind speed prediction can assist the operation and scheduling of wind turbines in the short term and further reduce the adverse effects of wind power integration. However, as wind is irregular, nonlinear, and nonstationary, to accurately predict wind speed is a difficult task. To this end, researchers have made many attempts; however, they often use only point forecasting or interval forecasting, resulting in imperfect prediction results. Therefore, in this paper, we developed a prediction system integrating an advanced data preprocessing (...) strategy, a novel optimization model, and multiple prediction algorithms. This combined forecasting system can overcome the inherent disadvantages of the traditional forecasting methods and further improve the prediction performance. To test the effectiveness of the forecasting system, the 10-min and one-hour wind speed sequences from the Sotavento wind farm in Spain were applied for conducting comparison experiments. The results of both the interval forecasting and point forecasting indicated that, in terms of the forecasting capability and stability, the proposed system was better than the compared models. Therefore, because of the minimum prediction error and excellent generalization ability, we consider this forecasting system to be an effective tool to assist smart grid programming. (shrink)

During nearly two centuries, American storytellers have celebrated comic figures, ebullient showoffs who turned up on one frontier after another—in the old South, in Kentucky and Tennessee, along the great inland rivers, in the mountains and the mines and on the prairies. Often, the stories went, when these characters engaged in a favorite pastime—playfully bragging about their strength, their skill and their exploits—they used animal metaphors such as Opossum, Screamer, Half-Horse Half-Alligator, the Big Bear of Arkansas or Gamecock of the (...) Wilderness to furnish nicknames. Often they were also identified as fictional or real frontiersmen—Mike Fink, Nimrod Wildfire, Jim Doggett, Pecos Bill—and tall tales clustered around them. Explaining a metaphor and a nickname, an Ohio newspaper in 1830 cited the most famous braggart of this sort: "Ring-tailed roarer—A most vicious fellow—a Crockett." . . . The stories did not have to have roots in reality and often were not new. The real Crockett was well built, handsome, ruddy-cheeked. But traditional jokes made ugliness a funny quality. Falstaff claimed Bardolph's crimson proboscis glowed with a flame that made torches inoperative. The Spectator in 1711 told about "Spectator's" election to England's Ugly Club. Joke 177 in Joe Miller's Jests was about the British kingdom's champion ugly man. When Gus Longstreet entered law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1813, a student welcomed him: "Here, sir, is a knife always given to the ugliest student. . . . Until now it has been mine, but beyond doubt, sir, since you are here, I have now no right to it any longer." Andy Jackson—"Old Hickory"—won a like award. Lore had it that Davy was so repulsive looking that if he grinned at a raccoon, it tumbled from its tree. Once, worried because he grinned and grinned without bringing down his victim, he was relieved when a close look showed he had mistaken a knot for a beast. All the same, he had grinned all the bark off the branch. Walter Blair is professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Chicago. His many influential works include Native American Humor and Horse Sense in American Humor. "Americanized Comic Braggarts" appears in a slightly different version in the book America's Humor from Poor Richard to Doonesbury. (shrink)