Introduction: Telling Stories

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Directed Movement ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Collective Data

The introduction traces the divide in scholars’ views of the Jacquerie as either a spasmodic explosion or a carefully directed movement, and sets forth the book’s understanding of the revolt as heterogenous and fluid. It introduces the main chronicle and documentary sources for the Jacquerie and discusses their interpretative difficulties, paying specific attention to the problems of retrospection, composition, and the over-representation of some kinds of rebels. The methodology adopted combines the analysis of collective data and the close reading of individual texts in order to tell a story about how individuals reacted to a specific set of circumstances, how events both planned and accidental altered their course, and what and how they chose to remember (or to forget) in its aftermath.

Breeched and Unbridled: Bifurcated Equestrian Garments for Women in Early Modern Europe

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Valerio Zanetti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Affective Meaning ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Modern Europe

This article discusses the wearing of bifurcated equestrian garments for women in early modern Europe. Considering visual representations as well as documentary sources, the first section examines the fashion for red riding breeches between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worn for their comfort and functionality in the saddle, these garments were also invested with powerful symbolic and affective meaning. The second section provides new insights about female equestrian outfits in late seventeenth-century France. Through the close reading of two written accounts, the author sheds light on the use of breeches as undergarments in the saddle and discusses the appearance of a hybrid riding uniform that incorporated knee-length culottes. By presenting horsewomen who wore bifurcated garments in the pursuit of leisure rather than transgression, this study revises historical narratives that cast the breeched woman exclusively as a symbol of gender upheaval.

Analyzing reactions of single mechanoenzyme molecules by light microscopy

1992 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 426-427
Author(s):  
Jeff Gelles
Keyword(s):  
Image Processing ◽  
Reaction Mechanisms ◽  
Transient State ◽  
Nanometer Scale ◽  
Reaction Intermediates ◽  
Enzyme Molecule ◽  
Directed Movement ◽  
Enzyme Molecules ◽  
Individual Enzyme ◽  
Single Reaction

Mechanoenzymes are enzymes which use a chemical reaction to power directed movement along biological polymer. Such enzymes include the cytoskeletal motors (e.g., myosins, dyneins, and kinesins) as well as nucleic acid polymerases and helicases. A single catalytic turnover of a mechanoenzyme moves the enzyme molecule along the polymer a distance on the order of 10−9 m We have developed light microscope and digital image processing methods to detect and measure nanometer-scale motions driven by single mechanoenzyme molecules. These techniques enable one to monitor the occurrence of single reaction steps and to measure the lifetimes of reaction intermediates in individual enzyme molecules. This information can be used to elucidate reaction mechanisms and determine microscopic rate constants. Such an approach circumvents difficulties encountered in the use of traditional transient-state kinetics techniques to examine mechanoenzyme reaction mechanisms.

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
To The Lighthouse

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Resonance in Dhvani Aesthetics and the Deleuzian Logic of Sensation

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Time Image

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.

On the Primacy of Matter: Neoplatonism Right-Side Up

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Tritten
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
After Effect ◽  
The One

This chapter provides a close reading of Schelling’s early commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and then contrasts this reading with Neoplatonism’s, particularly Proclus’, understanding of this same text. While Neoplatonism views being according to a hierarchy of degradation or descent, with matter at the bottom, Schelling affirms that being potentiates itself into higher and greater degrees of order such that matter is not the last but the first. He is able to do this, however, only by rejecting the Platonic notion of participation. For Schelling, the participating acquires an independence from the participated so that an effect can be greater than its cause and, moreover, the effect exerts a retroactive after effect on the cause. The identity of a cause or antecedent is only constituted in and through its consequents. If matter is said to process from the One, then matter, in turn, is the consequent condition of the identity of the One as one rather than as many.

Transformation and Education in GDR Youth Literature: A Script Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Jean E. Conacher
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Script Theory ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Youth Literature

Youth literature within the German Democratic Republic (GDR) officially enjoyed equal status with adult literature, with authors often writing for both audiences. Such parity of esteem pre-supposed that youth literature would also adopt the cultural–political frameworks designed to nurture the establishment of socialism on German soil. In their quest to forge a legitimate national literature capable of transforming the population, politicians and writers drew repeatedly upon the cultural heritage of Weimar classicism and the Bildungsroman, Humboldtian educational traditions and Soviet-inspired models of socialist realism. Adopting a script theory approach inspired by Jean Matter Mandler, this article explores how directive cultural policies lead to the emergence of multiple scripts which inform the nature and narrative of individual works. Three broad ideological scripts within GDR youth literature are identified which underpin four distinct narrative scripts employed by individual writers to support, challenge and ultimately subvert the primacy of the Bildungsroman genre. A close reading of works by Strittmatter, Pludra, Görlich, Tetzner and Saalmann reveals further how conceptual blending with classical and fairy-tale scripts is exploited to legitimise and at times mask critique of transformation and education inside and outside the classroom and to offer young protagonists a voice often denied their readers.

Patrick Kavanagh and the Authentic ‘Dispensation’: Rereading the Role of Narrator in The Great Hunger

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kilcoyne
Keyword(s):  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Peasant Farmer ◽  
Nineteen Forties ◽  
Death Knell

This essay posits a challenge to the continued reading of The Great Hunger (1942) as a realist depiction of the Irish small-farming class in the nineteen forties. The widespread critical acceptance of the poem as a socio-historical ‘documentary’ both relies upon and propagates an outmoded notion of authenticity based upon the implicit fallacy that Kavanagh's body of work designates a quintessence of Irishness in contradistinction to his Revivalist predecessors. In 1959 Kavanagh referred to this delusion as constituting his ‘dispensation’, for indeed it did provide a poetic niche for the young poet. Kavanagh's acknowledgement of this dispensation came with his rejection of all prescriptive literary symbols. While this iconoclasm is widely recognised in his later career, the relevance of The Great Hunger to this question continues to be overlooked. In fact, this poem contains his strongest dialectic upon the use of symbols – such as the peasant farmer – in designating an authentic national literature. The close reading of The Great Hunger offered here explores the poem's central deconstruction of ruralism and authenticity. The final ‘apocalypse of clay’ is the poem's collapse under the stress of its own deconstructed symbolism; the final scream sounds the death knell to Kavanagh's adherence to his authentic dispensation.

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