On Jon Snow’s death: Plot twist and global fandom inGame of Thrones

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Héctor J Pérez ◽  
Rainer Reisenzein

The death of Jon Snow at the end of the fifth season of the TV serial Game of Thrones prompted an intense reaction among the fans of the serial on social media. Thousands of viewers all over the world contributed to the discussion of the meaning and implications of this event, turning it into a global event in the participatory culture of contemporary seriality. In this article, we propose an explanation of this remarkable cultural phenomenon. Based on a theory of plot twists as surprise structures, we argue that the reactions of fans can be understood as concrete, contextually adapted realizations of the characteristic cognitive reactions evoked by the emotions of surprise and shock caused by unexpected negative events. Our analysis focuses in particular on the contributions of viewers to the establishment of the beliefs disconfirmed by the plot twist and on the cognitive activities that served to adapt their minds to the new reality revealed by the twist, which also included reflections on the aesthetic aspects of the plot twist and the narrative in which it was embedded. By providing a public platform for these reflections, the fan forums allowed the individual attempts to adapt to the plot twist to become a collective endeavor. The study illustrates how universal cognitive mechanisms interact with culturally produced contents to generate similar reactions to a fictional event across the globe.

Author(s):  
Andrew Hui

When we think of ruins and literature, we usually think of Romanticism. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature dislodges this critical commonplace by locating European literature’s fascination with architectural decay in the aesthetic culture from Petrarch to Spenser. The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as category of discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. The ruin thus became the material sign—the broken cipher—that marked the rupture between the world of the humanists and their idealized classical past. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future. To make this case, Hui embraces a philological method, a venerable tradition that has recently undergone a resurgence of interest. Philology is particularly appropriate to the study of ruins, since philology and ruins are both fundamentally about imagining the whole through its parts. Specifically, the book traces three words in three authors as semantic case studies: vestigia in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. By starting from the smallest unit of linguistic speech—the word—and enlarging our view to its larger cultural context, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature not only revises some of our most basic ideas about early modern texts and how they came to be, but also offers a new way for understanding the fundamental theme of survival in the classical tradition at large.


Author(s):  
Татьяна Черкашина ◽  
Tatiana Cherkashina ◽  
Н. Новикова ◽  
N. Novikova ◽  
О. Трубина ◽  
...  

The article considers the conceptualization of the world from the point of view of its methodological paradigm assessment in the context of the globalizing world. A retrospective analysis of the relationship between language and human speech activity is given. The authors explain the role of language as a socio-cultural phenomenon in the formation of worldview systems that develop in the consciousness with the help of minimal units of human experience in their ideal meaningful representation in special concepts, which allows the individual to think within the boundaries of a certain linguistic picture of the world. Analyzes the problems of the functioning of communicative norms with regard to the hierarchy of the spiritual representations of the world. The article attempts to consider the impact of the “blurring” of the information boundaries of the globalizing world on the cognitive abilities of the individual in the nomination, qualification of the subject, phenomenon, process.


Author(s):  
Maria Dulce Loução

O mundo hoje, tal como refere Leach, é “uma cultura da cópia”. O mundo tornou-se infinitamente policopiado, onde a imagem, hiper real, se converte em simulacro e, pela sua própria natureza, destituída da própria realidade que se propõe reflectir. Hoje, o mundo de uma certa arquitectura, é o mundo da Imagem, que conduz a um deficiente reconhecimento do espaço construído, sem conteúdo social, sem toque na realidade tangível. È deste distanciamento da Disciplina da Arquitectura que resultam imagens sedutoras, consumíveis e sem discurso, onde a produção arquitectónica se reduz a manipulações filosóficas que legitimam a forma sem conteúdo. A sedução é sempre superficial. O acto de projectar enquanto antevisão de um futuro pressupõe a existência de uma Ideia gerada a partir da invenção, imaginada. Assim, o projectar, o inventar por imagens é a própria essência da arquitectura. Embora baseado na experiência individual, intuitiva e intangível, o ensino da arquitectura sustenta-se em “factos convencionais” como diz Moneo, transcendidos em valor social que lhe confere o sentido, revestindo, assim, a aprendizagem da arquitectura de uma dimensão de transcendência. A arquitectura é, assim, e por via do social e do artístico, fenómeno cultural, e o arquitecto um produtor de cultura inserido num contexto convencional, no qual a arquitectura ganha sentido.  The world today, as said by Leach, is “a culture of copy”. The world has become infinitely multi-copied, where the image, hipper real, is converted in simulation and, by its own nature, dismissed from reality itself on which a reflection is proposed. Today, the world of a certain architecture, is a world of Image, which leads to a deficit when recognizing the constructed space, without social content, without touching the tangible reality. It is through the detachment from the Subject of Architecture that seductive images result, consumable and without speech, where the architectural production is reduced to philosophical manipulations that validate form, without content. Seduction is always superficial. The act of designing as a preview of a future, assumes the existence of an Idea generated from the imagined invention. Therefore, designing and inventing through images is the exact essence of architecture. Although it is based on the individual experience, intuitive and intangible, the teaching of architecture is sustained by “conventional facts” like it was said by Moneo, transcended in social value that gives it meaning, thus filling the learning of architecture with a transcendent dimension. Architecture is then, by a social and artistic way, a cultural phenomenon, and the architect, a producer of culture, inserted on a conventional context, in which architecture acquires meaning.


OxIPO ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-37
Author(s):  
Mihaela Birescu

Play is a very effective learning tool for children, and most of the educational systems admit this. Play activities are linked to: exploration, fun, freedom, investigation, enquiry, learning, social development, coping with anxieties, making sense of the world and using up energy. Through play, children develop abilities – for example they learn languages, and they do so, by four principles: enjoyment, method, system, and patience. Bilingual practice improves cognitive mechanisms, which may lead to increased creative potential. By combining bilingual and creative education, the cognitive mechanisms would help the individual creative performance and would create a synergetic bilingual creative model of education.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1029
Author(s):  
Jessica Frazier

The idea of a univocal property of ‘goodness’ is not clearly found in classical Sanskrit sources; instead, a common ethical strategy was to clarify the ontological nature of the self or world in such a way that ethical implications naturally flow from the adjustment in our thinking. This article gives a synoptic reading of sources that treat features of ethics—dispositions, agents, causal systems of effect, and even values themselves—as emergent phenomena grounded in complex, shifting, porous configurations. One conclusion of this was that what ‘goodness’ entails varies according to the scope and context of our concern. Firstly, we examine how the Bhagavad Gītā fashions a utilitarianism that assumes no universal intrinsically valuable goal or Good, but aims only to sustain the world as a prerequisite for choice. Recognising that this pushes problems of identifying the Good onto the individual; secondly, we look at accounts of malleable personhood in the Caraka Saṃhitā and Book 12 of the Mahābhārata. Finally, the aesthetic theory of the Nāṭya Śāstra hints at a context-constituted conception of value itself, reminding us that evaluative emotions are themselves complex, curate-able, and can expand beyond egoism to encompass interpersonal concerns. Together these sources show aspects of an ethical worldview for which each case is a nexus in a larger ethical fabric. Each tries to pry us away from our most personal concerns, so we can reach beyond the ego to do what is of value for a wider province of which we are a part.


2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
Diana Lohwasser

Abstract The Regime of the Aesthetic As a preliminary, the text deals with the question of what can be understood by a regime of the aesthetic. The aesthetic regime generates patterns of perception that guide people in their behavior and actions. The regime of the aesthetic oscillates between social regression and emancipation. The regression of the individual aesthetic perception of the world and of the self is evident in all areas of social life. Through the mass media, the aesthetic regime has the ability to manipulate people and influence perceptions and judgment. The ability of the self to defend itself against manipulation regresses. The adoption of given perception, explanation and assessment systems makes life easier than having to question contexts. The difficult task is to emancipate oneself from the regressive aesthetic regime. Referred to Rancière, it requires an ›emancipated viewer‹ capable of emancipating itself from the assigned structures of an aesthetic regime. This endeavor represents an infinite task.


CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Visions of the posthuman are almost inevitably tied up with questions of scale. The size of Frankenstein's creation sets him apart from humanity, the longevity of Virginia Woolf's Orlando makes her / him uncannily posthuman, and the travels of Gulliver constantly confront the protagonist with the issue of physical scale. This article investigates different dimensions of posthuman scale with examples from fiction, film, and transhumanist writings. From the sizes of bodies and the length of lives to the more complex matters of the scale of consciousness and the magnitude of social connections, what happens when an element of human existence is changed and becomes either very large or very small is a recurrent and important question. Such changes have consequences for ethical dispositions towards the lives of others, for the aesthetic appreciation or dislike of new beings, and for the ability to envision completely new ways of connecting to the world and others, for example through a cloud of shared thoughts, as Olaf Stapledon imagined. One special case of posthuman scale is the replication of the individual and the number of possible lives an individual can live without losing individuality, a question that is also pivotal for the idea of the human as a simulation that has been proposed by writers, filmmakers, and futurists alike.


2019 ◽  
pp. 86-95
Author(s):  
Iryna Ivanenko

The article analyzes models of metaphorical description of sounds that are relevant to M. Vinhranovsky’s individual poetic picture of the world. It is determined that the most productive type of audio metaphorization is related to the verbalization of associative sound-to-nature relationships. Its relevance is determined by the collective (secured by verbal tradition) and individual (author) experience of perceiving objects of national space, such as river, sky, water, forest, grove, trees, as well as related phenomena of nature (wind, storm, thunder, rain). and living things (birds, animals, insects). The persistence of associations in the poetic texts motivated by this experience has been consistently confirmed. The collective and individual experience of perception of the phenomena of the nature of rain, thunderstorm, rain, wind, water motivates the active use of «sound» verbs, which metaphorize the various actions and intensity of manifestation of these phenomena. The stylistic performance of common linguistic formulas with stylistically neutral verbs – carriers of the archives of ‘sounds of nature’ is traced. It is proved that an important fragment of the sound definition of the world in the national linguistic-poetic practice and in the idyllic style of M. Vinhranovsky as its symbolic fragment is the image of “silence”. Updating the “zero” manifestation of audio semantics, it creates a semantic opposition to images with the seven “sound”. The aesthetic unfolding of the image of silence in various structural metaphorical structures: verbal predicative, verbal object, oxymoronic, tautological is attested. Analyzed metaphors confirm that the aesthetized verbalization of sound impressions is one of the dominants of M. Vinhranovsky’s individual poetic phrase, in which the metaphors with the seven ‘sound’ are indisputable artistic dominants.


Author(s):  
Olga Fialkovskaya

In the modern socio-cultural space, which is based on globalization processes, the principles of transculturalism and technocentrism, the idea of comprehension of the cultural code and value absolute manifestly comes itself to the forefront. The comic beginning as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon is a way of expressing the value worldview system, it is verbalized as an ethno-marked substrate in the axiological picture of the world of the people. The article is devoted to the comprehension of the mode of the comic on the basis of the plays "The old hare" of N. Kolyada and "33 happiness" of O. Bogaev. This category is studied in the aesthetic and philosophical context as a way of dialogue with traditions, the search for national archetypes and overcoming the socio-cultural crisis. The dominant features of the poetics of the comic beginning, which is significantly complicated by philosophical searches are determined using the following artistic strategies: carnivalization (a system of images, models of heroes, linguistic experimentalism, plot-compositional beginning), irony, grotesque, binary opposition (tragic – comic), defamiliarisation, game intertextual beginning as a way of comprehending the cultural tradition and dialogue with the classics, mythologization, intermediality, artistic technique of the mask, trickster myth, the Menippean nature of the text canvas, the compositional structure of theater-in-the-theater, the motive of repetition. The signs of the semiotic system are analyzed as a way of expressing transitional thinking and the implementation of an axiological picture of the world: a goldfish (a symbol of deification of a miracle), an old man and an old woman (national archetypes, images of fairy-tale heroes), "Public Paradise", "Chungova Changa" (mythological codification, symbols of Paradise, resurrection of the soul), a hare (a symbol of a lost man in a crazy, insane world, a metaphor of a "little man"), a "dancing negrito" (a symbol of a "divine puppet", "a wonderful doll of the Gods"), a black beetle (a sign of an imminent meeting of heroes, a symbol of a lost soul, the semantics of crossing the semiotic border), a cat (a symbol of loneliness, wildness), "legs on a frosty window" (a symbol of a "little man").


Author(s):  
Р.Я. Фидарова ◽  
И.А. Кайтова

Суть методологического подхода Коста Хетагурова к проблемам культурноисторического развития осетинского народа в том, что он рассматривал общественное бытие и общественное сознание осетин как взаимосвязанные и взаимообусловленные феномены, составляющие единое целое, целостную систему, формирующую фундаментальную основу реалистического типа мышления, преследующего цель в удивительно жизненных, созидаемых им образах, глубоко и основательно раскрыть эстетическую специфику философского, духовнонравственного, культурноисторического освоения горцами объективного мира, мира их национальной действительности. Теоретическим инструментарием при этом для Коста является метод восхождения от абстрактного, включающего в данном случае в себя такие компоненты духовной культуры, как национальный менталитет, обычаи, обряды, традиции, Агъдау как нравственный кодекс жизни горцев, к конкретному, т.е. к судьбе и характеру отдельного человека, члена горского общества носителя его родовых качеств и родимых пятен . Кроме того, в состав теоретического инструментария Коста, при формировании им реалистического типа художественного мышления, включаются и принцип объективности, позволяющий ему анализировать противоречивый характер как действительности, так и характер отдельного человека принцип развития, помогающий Коста учитывать диалектический характер горского бытия принцип преемственности, давший возможность поэту глубоко осмыслить органические связи прошлого и настоящего. Ну а системноисторический подход помогал Коста выявить наиболее существенные, постоянные, т.е. константные связи явлений в общественной жизни и общественном сознании, тогда как детерминизм давал возможность обнажать их объективную зависимость от социальноисторических и природногеографических факторов. Столь богатый теоретический инструментарий помогал Коста глубоко и основательно осмысливать метафизические проблемы жизни горского общества. И это явилось основой формирования его реалистического типа мышления, способного дать удивительно органичный, объективноконцептуальный, художественноэстетический анализ критического состояния мира . А из данного анализа логически следовал убедительный вывод, призывающий народ к беспощадной борьбе за свободу, равенство и братство людей, а именно: мир враждебен человеку, губит его физически и развращает нравственно. И, следовательно, в данных социальноисторических обстоятельствах человек обречен на гибель, если не станет на защиту своей жизни и свободы. При решении столь сложной художественноэстетической задачи Коста умело использовал осетинскую мифологию как важнейший компонент структуры реалистического типа мышления, основы которого он же и заложил в формирующейся осетинской литературе. The essence of Khetagurovs methodological approach to the problems of cultural and historical development of the Ossetian people is that he considered the social existence and social consciousness of Ossetians as interrelated and interdependent phenomena making up a single whole, an integral system that forms the fundamental basis of a realistic type of thinking, pursuing the goal in a surprisingly vital, created by them images, deeply and thoroughly reveal the aesthetic specificity of the philosophical, spiritual, moral, cultural and historical development of the highlanders of the objective world, the world of their national reality. The theoretical tools for Kosta is the method of ascent from the abstract, which in this case includes such components of spiritual culture as the national mentality, customs, rituals, traditions, Agdau as a moral code of life of the highlanders to the specific, i.e. to the fate and character of the individual, a member of the mountain society the carrier of his generic qualities and birthmarks. In addition, the theoretical tools of Kosta, when forming a realistic type of artistic thinking, include the principle of objectivity, allowing him to analyze the contradictory nature of both reality and the nature of the individual the principle of development, which helps Kosta to take into account the dialectical nature of mountain life the principle of continuity, which gave the poet a deep understanding of the organic connections of the past and the present. But the systemhistorical approach helped Kosta to identify the most significant, permanent, i.e. constant connections of phenomena in public life and public consciousness, while determinism made it possible to expose their objective dependence on sociohistorical and naturalgeographical factors. Such a wealth of theoretical tools helped Kosta to think deeply and thoroughly about the metaphysical problems of mountain society. And this was the basis for the formation of his realistic type of thinking that can give a surprisingly organic, objectively conceptual, artistic and aesthetic analysis of the critical state of the world. And from this analysis logically followed a convincing conclusion, calling people to ruthless struggle for freedom, equality and brotherhood of people, namely: the world is hostile to man, destroys it physically and corrupts morally. And, therefore, in these sociohistorical circumstances, a person is doomed to death if he does not protect his life and freedom. In solving such a complex artistic and aesthetic problem Kosta skillfully used Ossetian mythology as an important component of the structure of the realistic type of thinking, the foundations of which he laid in the emerging Ossetian literature.


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