Meaning Generation

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-447
Author(s):  
Hongbing Yu
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Close Reading

Abstract Meaning generation reaches beyond the convenient code-based distinction between the encoding versus the decoding of information. What we need is a more comprehensive perspective that can encompass code-based communication and agency-oriented interpretation, both of which are treated as two subordinate mechanisms of meaning generation or signification. Based on a close reading of Saussure, there are only forms in signification; signs and signification are one. Given the complexity of its usage over the years, the term sign should be reevaluated. In its stead, the present article proposes using Sebeok and Danesi’s term model, although with some modifications, in order to shed a new light on meaning generation. The present article also demonstrates that cultural memory, or culture understood in the sense proposed by Lotman and Uspensky, coupled with emotions and human agency, act as three determinants of the process of meaning generation and make it a semi-autonomous process.

„Raps“

POETICA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 282-313
Author(s):  
Robert Stockhammer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Cultivated Plant ◽  
Materiality Of Language

Abstract The recent controversy about the possibility of defining a new geological era called ‘Anthropocene’ has far-ranging consequences. The new notion forces us to rethink the dichotomy between the entities formerly referred to as men and nature and to conceive of their relation as an interrelation. The relevance of these considerations for literary studies is not limited to the anthropocene as a subject matter of literature, or to the possible use of literature as a means of enhancing the reader’s awareness of climate change. Rather, what is at stake is the relation of language to the new interrelation between man and nature, including the poetical and metalinguistic functions that emphasize the materiality of language. The present article explores the relation between the materiality of language and the materiality of things by way of a close reading of a single poem written by Marcel Beyer. Devoted to the cultivated plant rape, the literary traditions which this poem invokes reach beyond nature lyrics into georgic. An excursus recalls this genre of agriculture poetry and distinguishes it from pastoral, especially with regard to its use of language.

Modes of Relational Agency among Welfare-reliant Mothers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hagit Sinai-Glazer ◽  
Boris H J M Brummans
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Relational Agency ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Seeking Help ◽  
Depth Interviews

Abstract How do welfare-reliant mothers enact their agency in relationships with social workers and social services? The present article addresses this question by investigating how twenty Israeli welfare-reliant mothers expressed different modes of human agency in in-depth interviews. Results show how research participants enact agency through (i) expressing anger, (ii) seeking help, (iii) resisting and (iv) engaging in non-action. By highlighting the multidimensional and situational nature of agency, this article offers a new relational lens for conceptualising and empirically studying human agency in social work.

scholarly journals “Okay ladies, now let’s get in formation!”: Music Videos and the Construction of Cultural Memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. F. Bertens
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Limited Length ◽  
Diverse Audience

Abstract This paper explores strategies for constructing and perpetuating cultural memory through music videos, using Beyonce’s Formation (2016) and Janelle Monae’s Many Moons (2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (2013) as case studies. The medium’s idiosyncrasies create unique ways of communicating and remembering, explored here within a framework of Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. Easy dissemination and the limited length of most videos ensure a large, diverse audience. The relative freedom from narrative constraints enables the director to create original imagery, and most importantly, the medium allows an intricate blending of performance and performativity; while the videos evidently are performances, they are strongly performative as well, not only with respect to gender and ethnicity but in significant ways also cultural memory. A close reading of Beyonce’s video Formation shows how she explicitly does the cultural memory of the New Orleans flooding. The videos by Monae are shown to produce counter-memories, relying heavily on the strategy of Afrofuturism. As such, these densely woven networks of visual symbols become palimpsests of black lived experience and cultural memory, passed on to millions of viewers.

‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Michelle Charalambous
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Works

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

Concealing the urban dominant: The socio-spatial dialectic and urban protest in Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s La saga/fuga de J.B.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Michael L. Martínez, Jr
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Critical Pathway ◽  
Urban Protest ◽  
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

In the post-Fordist world, cities emerged as increasingly contested terrains upon which capital and ordinary citizens struggled to control the urban process. Henri Lefebvre discerned this contestatory dynamic early on and in response developed the ‘urban’, a concept that cleaves a critical pathway towards a host of material, cultural and ideological processes that attach to capitalist modernity. Around the same time, the Spanish novelist Gonzalo Torrente Ballester was working to sketch the contours of his magnus opus La saga/fuga de J.B. Torrente would eventually come to recognize the roles that the urban process and the socio-spatial dialectic play in mediating contemporary urban life. The present article thus carries out first a close reading of Torrente’s personal journals to detail the ascendency of the ‘urban dominant’ as a central structuring component of his fictional writings. Thereafter, the critical analysis of La saga/fuga de J.B. will reveal that the ‘urban dominant’ stands concealed at the heart of this notoriously complicated novel. This urban cultural studies reading of La saga/fuga de J.B. will argue that, like Lefebvre, Torrente denounces capital’s static conception of space at the same time that he draws upon historical movements of urban protest for textual inspiration. And what will eventually emerge is that, beyond a master of the metafictional novel, Torrente was also an astute observer of everyday life in the urban context.

SHNEI KETUVIM AND RABBINIC INTERMEDIATION

2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Azzan Yadin
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Third ◽  
Presence Of God

AbstractThe present article argues that in the legal midrashim associated with the school of Rabbi Ishmael, the Mekhilta and the Sifre Numbers, "Two Verses Contradict and a Third Resolves" is not a general rule meant to resolve logical difficulties, as is generally assumed. The third verse resolution is employed in only two of the derashot that discuss biblical contradictions. A close reading of these derashot suggest that the issue at hand is not logical but theological and that in each case the third verse introduces a theological intermediary, denying the unmediated presence of God in the Tent of Meeting and at Sinai.

Situative Werkpolitik. Nietzsches Retraktationen der Geburt der Tragödie

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-172
Author(s):  
Axel Pichler
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Dynamic Character ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
Ecce Homo ◽  
Subsequent Comparison

Abstract Nietzsche has repeatedly commented on his already published works, and thus continuously reinterpreted them, in order to shape their public reception and to foreground the communication of specific aspects of his works. As such, he followed a specific “work politics,” or Werkpolitik. The resulting retractions are not only revealing for the reconstruction of Nietzsche’s self-understanding, but also demonstrate both the development and the dynamic character of his thinking. In the present article, this is shown through a so-called “contrasting reading,” which contrasts a posthumous note about The Birth of Tragedy, the Attempt at a Self-Criticism from 1886, with the book itself and with the chapter in Ecce Homo that is dedicated to BT. Starting from a close reading of note Nachlass 1888, 17[3], which also takes into account the genesis of BT, I argue that Nietzsche’s self-commentaries combine his current philosophical reflections with work-political objectives. The subsequent comparison reconstructs the philosophical differences between the note and the texts mentioned above, thus demonstrating the dynamic character of Nietzsche’s philosophizing, which is often stated but seldom reconstructed on the basis of the actual texts.

scholarly journals Towards a situated reading of L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités. Une anthologie (1965), organized by Françoise Choay

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Priscilla Alves Peixoto
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Close Reading

The present article is dedicated to undertaking a close reading of L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités. Une anthologie (1965), organized by Françoise Choay. It seeks to situate this anthology within the intellectual trajectory of the author, as well as in the discursive, urban culture in which it was conceived and had it first distribution. In order to develop this work, the approach adopted was based on authors who study books as “practices and representations”, with particular emphasis on Roger Chartier. It has also been guided by the notion of "nebula", as conceived by Margareth da Silva Pereira. The article has been structured into three parts: in the first, the anthology is presented, especially, its introductory text; following on, situations are investigated in which it is possible to contemplate its conception process and how it was received; and, lastly, the findings are problematized by returning to a reading of the introduction to Françoise Choay’s anthology.

TRACING A CULTURAL MEMORY: COMMEMORATION OF 1857 IN THE DELHI DURBARS, 1877, 1903, AND 1911

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 799-815 ◽  
Author(s):  
SONAKSHI GOYLE
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Site Selection ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Successive Formation ◽  
Indian Mutiny ◽  
The Military ◽  
Selection Of

ABSTRACTThe three imperial durbars held in Delhi for the coronation of British monarchs as the rulers of India were gatherings of royalty, administration, and the military, organized in the years 1877, 1903, and 1911. As impressively invented, improvised, and self-styled orientalist representations of the late Victorian tradition, these durbars were pageants of power, prestige, and authority, creations of their organizing viceroys: Robert Lytton (1877), George Curzon (1903), and Charles Hardinge (1911). But, as this article shows, they were also commemorative exhibitions of the triumphant memory of the event of 1857 (variously called the Indian Mutiny, Sepoy war, War of Independence), especially in Delhi which had to be emphasized regularly for perpetuating myths about British superiority and invincibility. Spread over a period of thirty-five years, these rituals of commemoration were performed through four illustrative choices. These were the selection of site, selection of mutiny veterans as participants, the construction of mutiny memorials, and contribution to the growth of mutiny pilgrimage tours. Drawing attention to the successive formation of 1857 as a seminal ‘cultural moment’ through its periodic commemoration, the present article brings to focus the enduring significance of the event for the British empire in India, which had to be re-visited time and again for purposes of legitimation and cultural appropriation.

scholarly journals Peter Howson and the Language of Salvation

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 76-99
Author(s):  
Caleb Froehlich
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
Religious Paintings ◽  
The Grotesque

Abstract Since his conversion to Christianity in 2001, Peter Howson’s religious paintings have generally been met with critical incomprehension. A case in point was his 2012 exhibition Redemption, where reviewers suggested an irreconcilable incongruity between its grotesque imagery and redemption, the exhibition’s title. In response to this critical bewilderment, the present article argues for the appropriateness of the grotesque in Howson’s depictions of salvation by examining the significance of his conversion experience and providing a more sophisticated and developed analysis of the grotesque as his visual language. More specifically, it utilizes insights from an analysis of the content and practice of the artist’s belief system and a new taxonomy of the grotesque in a close reading of the Hades cycle, featured in Howson’s Redemption exhibition, in order to show how the artist communicates salvation through the grotesque. It is hoped that this article may serve as useful groundwork for other scholars engaging with Howson’s extraordinary religious art.

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