scholarly journals Ecocriticism as Subversive Aesthetics

2019 ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Jelka Kernev Štrajn
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Minority Literature ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
Level Of Consciousness

Art is subversive when it crosses the boundary of the generally acceptable, though over time such art can and does become mainstream. A much more complicated question is what is subversive in aesthetics? Ecocriticism has already become, along with ecofeminism and animal studies, an academic discipline. It can be defined as subversive if it is understood in terms of an attitude, which is not anthropocentric. And here is the catch: how can the human also encompass the alien? The question that emerges here is all but rhetorical: how can we decentre and amplify our human consciousness and perspective to include zoocentric, biocentric or geocentric positions? At this point the contemporary theory creates contrasting opinions, which cross the boundaries of aesthetics, poetics and ecocriticism since they reach out to the fields of metaphysics and antimetaphysics. Within the phenomenon of perception the other always appears, as Deleuze said in his Logic of Sense, as “a priori Other”. We have to deal, henceforth, with a kind of pre-reflexive level of consciousness and amplified sensory perception, which, as we know, is the basic condition of artistic creation. Thus, this paper – because it seeks to penetrate into the node of these questions – takes literary art as its starting point. In the spirit of the above-mentioned observations, I have attempted to investigate in ‘minority literature’ (female authors of contemporary Polish and Slovene literature) how this decentred attitude, which Jure Detela, a Slovene poet, poetically defined, corresponds to our thesis on a particular ecocritical stream, which can be defined as an ecofeminist aesthetics. The ‘minoritarian literature’ here is meant exclusively in the sense that was defined by Deleuze and Guattari’s books Kafka and A Thousand Plateaus. Article received: April 12, 2019; Article accepted: July 6, 2019; Published online: October 15, 2019; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Kernev Štrajn, Jelka. "Ecocriticism as Subversive Aesthetics." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 20 (2019): 17-25. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i20.321

scholarly journals Translation, Systems and Research: The Contribution of Polysystem Studies to Translation Studies

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Descriptive Research ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Translation Systems ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Ambiguous Position ◽  
Specific Profile

Abstract Translation, Systems and Research: The Contribution of Polysystem Studies to Translation Studies — The aim of this article is not at all to examine Polysystems theory nor Polysystems research as such, but rather to discuss the impact Polysystems research has had in the development of a new discipline, i.e. Translation Studies. The ambiguous position of PS research within Translation Studies is due to its interdisciplinary claims and, on the other hand, to the necessity to work in a real world of disciplines where institutionalization is inevitable and even needed. The starting point of PS theory is not translation at all, but rather the dynamic functions fulfilled by translation within (inevitably) heterogeneous cultures and societies. On the basis of such hypotheses about culture(s) a rich panorama of new questions for research on translation has been worked out, as well as methodological models, and individual and collective descriptive research has been started in many countries on many cultural situations. Hence it may be accepted that descriptive research on translation would hardly have existed without the programmatic PS contribution and that the establishment of Translation Studies as an academic discipline is greatly indebted to PS. The gradual extension through various countries and disciplines (film studies, media studies, social organization, etc.) has favoured combinations with other approaches while making less clear the specific profile of the PS approach. It may be said that PS has served research as such, much more than its own sake, but wasn't this exactly the goal it wanted to achieve?

scholarly journals ‘I realised then how “Parisian” Egypt was’: challenges and rewards of de-westernising travel journalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (8) ◽  
pp. 1151-1166
Author(s):  
Andrew Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
The West ◽  
Travel And Tourism ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Newspaper Articles

Bypassing the dominant Western bias in journalism scholarship is a challenge; it raises the question of what might replace it. Similarly, to evade the Western post-imperialism orthodoxies recurrent in cultural studies scholarship into travel and tourism would require other perspectives. This study combines the two and attempts to circumvent the Western bias in scholarship on travel journalism, given that its constituent parts are – for different reasons – becoming de-centred from the West. Textual analysis of Singaporean newspaper articles in Mandarin and English shows that questions of privilege and power remain but need not be associated with narratives of post-imperialism. Instead, destinations are textually constructed to justify the writer’s decision to travel. The intention for this article is to suggest ways that dominant Western perspectives in media studies may be balanced by other viewpoints which still expose issues of power and privilege but offer a less hegemonic, more culturally neutral starting point

scholarly journals Optimal Analysis Method for Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Diffuse Optical Tomography

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ghijsen ◽  
Yuting Lin ◽  
Mitchell Hsing ◽  
Orhan Nalcioglu ◽  
Gultekin Gulsen
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Imaging Modality ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Optical Tomography ◽  
Diffuse Optical Tomography ◽  
Dynamic Contrast Enhanced ◽  
Promising Tool ◽  
Reconstruction Methods ◽  
Contrast Enhanced

Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) is an optical imaging modality that has various clinical applications. However, the spatial resolution and quantitative accuracy of DOT is poor due to strong photon scatting in biological tissue. Structurala prioriinformation from another high spatial resolution imaging modality such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been demonstrated to significantly improve DOT accuracy. In addition, a contrast agent can be used to obtain differential absorption images of the lesion by using dynamic contrast enhanced DOT (DCE-DOT). This produces a relative absorption map that consists of subtracting a reconstructed baseline image from reconstructed images in which optical contrast is included. In this study, we investigated and compared different reconstruction methods and analysis approaches for regular endogenous DOT and DCE-DOT with and without MR anatomicala prioriinformation for arbitrarily-shaped objects. Our phantom and animal studies have shown that superior image quality and higher accuracy can be achieved using DCE-DOT together with MR structurala prioriinformation. Hence, implementation of a combined MRI-DOT system to image ICG enhancement can potentially be a promising tool for breast cancer imaging.

scholarly journals An historical framework for psychiatric nosology

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (12) ◽  
pp. 1935-1941 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. S. Kendler
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Illness ◽  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Early History ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Species Definition ◽  
Psychiatric Nosology ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

This essay, which seeks to provide an historical framework for our efforts to develop a scientific psychiatric nosology, begins by reviewing the classificatory approaches that arose in the early history of biological taxonomy. Initial attempts at species definition used top-down approaches advocated by experts and based on a few essential features of the organism chosena priori. This approach was subsequently rejected on both conceptual and practical grounds and replaced by bottom-up approaches making use of a much wider array of features. Multiple parallels exist between the beginnings of biological taxonomy and psychiatric nosology. Like biological taxonomy, psychiatric nosology largely began with ‘expert’ classifications, typically influenced by a few essential features, articulated by one or more great 19th-century diagnosticians. Like biology, psychiatry is struggling toward more soundly based bottom-up approaches using diverse illness characteristics. The underemphasized historically contingent nature of our current psychiatric classification is illustrated by recounting the history of how ‘Schneiderian’ symptoms of schizophrenia entered into DSM-III. Given these historical contingencies, it is vital that our psychiatric nosologic enterprise be cumulative. This can be best achieved through a process of epistemic iteration. If we can develop a stable consensus in our theoretical orientation toward psychiatric illness, we can apply this approach, which has one crucial virtue. Regardless of the starting point, if each iteration (or revision) improves the performance of the nosology, the eventual success of the nosologic process, to optimally reflect the complex reality of psychiatric illness, is assured.

scholarly journals Perpetual Vanishing: Animal Lives in Contemporary Scottish Fiction

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The World ◽  
Marilyn Monroe ◽  
Broad Cross Section ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
Bear Witness

Animals, writes Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘exist in a state of perpetual vanishing’: they haunt human concerns, but rarely appear as themselves. This is especially notable in contemporary Scottish fiction. While other national literatures often reflect the ‘animal turn’ in contemporary theory, the number of twenty-first-century Scottish novels concerned with human–animal relations remains disproportionately small. Looking at a broad cross-section of recent and understudied novels, including Mandy Haggith’s Bear Witness (2013), Ian Stephen’s A Book of Death and Fish (2014), Andrew O’Hagan’s The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (2010), Malachy Tallack’s The Valley at the Centre of the World (2018), James Robertson’s To Be Continued (2016), and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border (2015) highlights the marginalisation of both nonhuman animals and texts centred on them. The relative absence of engagement with animal studies in Scottish fiction and criticism suggests new opportunities for reevaluating the formulation of environmental concerns in a Scottish context. By moving away from the unified concepts of ‘the land’ to a perspective that includes the precarious relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and their environment, these texts highlight the need for greater, and more nuanced, engagement with fictional representations of nonhuman animals.

The Mark of Theory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Bachner
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Material Surface ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Representational Politics ◽  
Conceptual Thought ◽  
Ethical Choices ◽  
To Come

What imaginaries, tropes, and media have influenced the way we theorize now? The Mark of Theory argues that inscription constitutes one of the master metaphors of contemporary theory. The book understands inscription as a scene that takes place where and when a material surface is breached and forced to bear marks. As a trope that draws on a wide array of practices of marking, from tattooing to circumcision, from photographic imprints and phonographic grooves to marks on a page, inscription provides an imaginary that orients, governs, and irritates theoretical thought. By tracing inscriptive imaginaries from the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century up to today, The Mark of Theory offers a wide-ranging conceptual genealogy of contemporary thought. With its poststructuralist attention to figurative language and its media studies focus on objects, phenomena, and practices of mediation, this book works through core theoretical formations of poststructuralism, understanding them as a past legacy of a thought to come, as a prehistory of our current moment. By focusing on the ways in which theoretical works express, illustrate, and concretize their conceptual tenets, The Mark of Theory also reflects on the role of materiality and mediation in theory. As a theoretical tropology that takes the medium and materiality of metaphor seriously, it argues that different inscriptive practices and media imaginaries not only shape conceptual thought but that they determine representational politics and ethical choices.

Textheterotopien von Sabah al-Kharrat Zwayn, Iman Mirsal und Suzanne Alaywan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lana Mzhavia
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Creation

In the present work, the literary elaboration of the concept of Foucault's heterotopia is related to the creation of poetically reflected writing concepts and poetic worlds in the texts of three modern Arab female authors, the starting point of which is often place-related vision or obsession with places. In creating the alternative, heterotopic text- worlds, the memory-work motivated by the displacement plays a central role. The attempt at interpretation presented here is inspired by the three Arab female authors in the very opposite written movements of the traditional reading of the past.

No Character or Personality

2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Harman
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Personality Theory

Abstract:Solomon argues that, although recent research in social psychology has important implications for business ethics, it does not undermine an approach that stresses virtue ethics. However, he underestimates the empirical threat to virtue ethics, and his a priori claim that empirical research cannot overturn our ordinary moral psychology is overstated. His appeal to seemingly obvious differences in character traits between people simply illustrates the fundamental attribution error. His suggestion that the Milgram and Darley and Batson experiments have to do with such character traits as obedience and punctuality cannot help to explain the relevant differences in the way people behave in different situations. His appeal to personality theory fails, because, as an intellectual academic discipline, personality theory is in shambles, mainly because it has been concerned with conceptions of personality rather than with what is true about personality. Solomon’s rejection of Doris’s claims about the fragmentation of character is at odds with the received view in social psychology. Finally, he is mistaken to think that rejecting virtue ethics implies rejecting free will and moral responsibility.

scholarly journals Dioxin Cancer Risk — Example of Hormesis?

Dose-Response ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. dose-response.0 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jouko Tuomisto ◽  
Juha Pekkanen ◽  
Hannu Kiviranta ◽  
Erkki Tukiainen ◽  
Terttu Vartiainen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soft Tissue ◽  
Soft Tissue Sarcoma ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Normal Population ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Subcutaneous Fat ◽  
Body Burden ◽  
Inverse Correlation ◽  
Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry ◽  
Surprising Result

A recent case-control study implied an inverse correlation between the measured body burden of dioxins (polychlorinated dibenzo- p-dioxins and polychlorinated dibenzofurans, PCDD/F) and the risk of soft tissue sarcoma in normal population exposed to dioxins mainly via food. The surprising result could not be explained by biases or confounding. There is no a priori confounding by occupational chemicals in a random sample from general population, but exposures to other lipid soluble chemicals with similar sources might be expected to associate with that of dioxins. One such group is polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB). Therefore three most relevant dioxin-like PCB compounds PCB 77, PCB 126, and PCB 169 were now analyzed from the same patients. Cases were 110 soft-tissue sarcoma patients undergoing surgery for their disease, and referents were 227 patients operated for appendicitis. Dioxin and PCB concentrations were analyzed from subcutaneous fat samples by high-resolution gas chromatography—mass spectrometry and TCDD equivalent concentrations (WHO-TEq) were calculated by using toxicity equivalency factors of WHO. The highest risk of sarcoma was found in the septile with the lowest body burden of sum WHO-TEq, and the differences of septiles 2 and 6 from septile 1 were statistically significant. If soft sarcoma risk is true at high occupational levels of dioxins, the provocative result suggests that a possibility of a J-shaped dose-response curve should be taken into consideration and studied further. This is also supported by the similar J-shaped dose responses in animal studies.

scholarly journals An Optimal Estimation Method for Nonlinear Models of Mechanical Systems

1994 ◽  
Vol 116 (4) ◽  
pp. 805-810 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. G. van de Molengraft ◽  
F. E. Veldpaus ◽  
J. J. Kok
Keyword(s):  
Nonlinear Models ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Mechanical Systems ◽  
Estimation Method ◽  
Optimal Estimation ◽  
Model Structure ◽  
Unknown Parameters ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Nonlinear Mechanical ◽  
Nonlinear Mechanical Systems

This paper presents an optimal estimation method for nonlinear mechanical systems. The a priori knowledge of the system in the form of a nonlinear model structure is taken as a starting point. The method determines estimates of the parameters and estimates of the positions, velocities, accelerations, and inputs of the system. The optimal estimation method is applied to an experimental mechanical system. The unknown parameters in this system relate to inertia, friction and elastic deformation. It is shown that the optimal estimation method on the basis of a relatively simple model structure can lead to a useful description of the system.

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