scholarly journals WEIGHING THE WORK OF LOVE: ON KATE DAVIS’S RE-VISIONED ICONOCLASM

ARTis ON ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Dominic Paterson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading

This essay offers a close reading of recent work by Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis to argue that her practice engages iconoclasm in ways importantly modified by her feminist commitments. Often Davis’s source material has significant historical, political or art historical import, as in her works dealing with the Suffragist attack on Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in 1914. What is at stake in her ‘re-visioning’ of such moments, which often involves labour-intensive drawing as a key method, is a formal commitment to a kind of delicate or caring vandalism, often pursued through labour-intensive drawing (iconoclasm as a means of making images) and a specifically feminist contention with existing hierarchies of value and systems of representation (iconoclasm as contestation). To reckon with these stakes, Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of ‘the pleasure in drawing’ and the feminist concept of the ‘work of love’ are brought into relation with Davis’s work. 

scholarly journals BRILLIANT DISGUISES: PERSONA, AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE MAGIC OF RETROSPECTION IN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S LATE CAREER

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Autobiographical Performance ◽  
Magic Trick ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Actual Life

Popular musicians with long careers provide rich source material for the study of persona, authenticity, endurance and the maintenance (and reinvention) of significant bodies of work. Successful artists’ songs create a soundtrack not only to their own lives, but also to those of their audiences, and to the times in which they were created and to which they bore witness. The work of singers who continue to perform after several decades can be heard in terms of their ‘late voice’ (Elliott 2015), a concept that has potentially useful insights for the study of musical persona. This article exploits this potential by considering how musical persona is de- and reconstructed in retrospective, autobiographical performance. I base my articulation of the relationship between persona, life-writing and retrospective narrativity on a close reading of two late texts by Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run, the autobiography he published in 2016, and Springsteen on Broadway, the audiovisual record of a show that ran from October 2017 through to December 2018. In these texts, Springsteen uses the metaphor of the ‘magic trick’ as a framing device to shuttle between the roles of autobiographical myth-breaker and lyrical protagonist. He repeatedly highlights his songs as fictions that bear little relation to his actual life, while also showing awareness that, as often happens with popular song, he has been mapped onto his characters in ways that prove vital for their sense of authenticity. Yet Springsteen appears to be aiming for a different kind of authenticity with these late texts, by substituting the persona developed in his recorded work with an older, wiser, more playful narrator. I appropriate Springsteen’s ‘magic trick’ metaphor to highlight the magic of retrospection and the magical formation of the life narrative as an end-driven process.

Selling Smartness: Corporate Narratives and the Smart City as a Sociotechnical Imaginary

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 540-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jathan Sadowski ◽  
Roy Bendor
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Smart Urbanism

This article argues for engaging with the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. By conducting a close reading of primary source material produced by the companies IBM and Cisco over a decade of work on smart urbanism, we argue that the smart city imaginary is premised in a particular narrative about urban crises and technological salvation. This narrative serves three main purposes: (1) it fits different ideas and initiatives into a coherent view of smart urbanism, (2) it sells and disseminates this version of smartness, and (3) it crowds out alternative visions and corresponding arrangements of smart urbanism. Furthermore, we argue that IBM and Cisco construct smart urbanism as both a reactionary and visionary force, plotting a model of the near future, but one that largely reflects and reinforces existing sociopolitical systems. We conclude by suggesting that breaking IBM’s and Cisco’s discursive dominance over the smart city imaginary requires us to reimagine what smart urbanism means and create counter-narratives that open up space for alternative values, designs, and models.

The Carinthian Slovene Question in the Light of Recent German Austrian Scholarship∗

1979 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Barker
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Secondary Materials

Carinthia's nationality struggle has raged more or less unabated since 1848. Until roughly two decades ago there was a relative dearth of secondary materials that one might regard as scholarly in any sense of the word. Polemics—admittedly of some value as a special kind of source material—predominated. Indeed emotional overtones still creep into serious studies. On balance, however, recent work in both Yugoslavia and Austria may be characterized as objective, solid, and methodologically innovative. While articles and books published in the former country are no less significant than those emanating from the latter, only titles that have appeared in German can be reviewed here.

Deflating Fascism in Max Steiner’s Score for The Most Dangerous Game

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lee
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Satisfaction ◽  
Piano Music ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach

This article examines Max Steiner’s original score for the 1932 RKO Production of The Most Dangerous Game. Steiner’s score quotes from a piece of piano music, “Russian Waltz,” which he composed for the film’s villain, Count Zaroff, to play within the film’s diegesis. His vast orchestral underscore liberally quotes the main motif of his piano work. Using a hermeneutic approach, the article argues that Steiner’s orchestral underscore reinforces the film’s anti-fascist narrative potentials by linking Count Zaroff’s motif to his enterprise of hunting human beings and specifically to the sexual satisfaction the Count draws from his gruesome fetish. The motif itself undergoes a myriad of expansions and contractions, intensifications and relaxations, charting the ups and downs of Zaroff’s fortunes. Based on archival research, hermeneutic analysis, and a close reading of both the film and its source material, the article concludes that Steiner participated in crafting an anti-fascist film at a signal moment in history.

scholarly journals What was sociology?

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-137
Author(s):  
Des Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Urban Stress

This article is about the future of sociology, as transformations in the digital and biological sciences lay claim to the discipline’s jurisdictional hold over ‘the social’. Rather than analyse the specifics of these transformations, however, the focus of the article is on how a narrative of methodological crisis is sustained in sociology, and on how such a narrative conjures very particular disciplinary futures. Through a close reading of key texts, the article makes two claims: (1) that a surprisingly conventional urge towards disciplinary reproduction often animates accounts of sociology’s crisis; (2) that, even more surprisingly, these same accounts are often haunted by a hidden metaphorical architecture centred on biology, vitality, vigour and life. The central gambit of the article is that, perhaps in spite of itself, this subterranean image of life actually hints at less reproductively conventional ways of understanding – and intervening in – sociology’s methodological ‘crisis’. Drawing, empirically, on the author’s recent work on urban stress and, theoretically, on Stefan Helmreich’s (2011, 2016) account of ‘limit biologies’, the articles ends with a call for a ‘limit sociology’ – a form of attention that could, similarly, expand rather than contract the present moment of transformation. At the heart of the article is a hope that thinking with such a limit may help sociologists to imagine a less deadening future than that on offer from a canonised discipline cathected by endless crisis-talk.

scholarly journals New Woman as Seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Lexicon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 224
Author(s):  
Rheavanya Winandhini ◽  
Rahmawan Jatmiko
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper discusses the influence of feminism in the classic Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The New Woman is a feminist ideal that appeared in the 19th century, more specifically amidst the rise of the first wave of feminism. The method of research used in this study covers close reading of the source material and analyzing the characters of the novel through the perspective of the New Woman ideals. The female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrayed the New Woman characteristic to some degree. Women’s independence, intellect, hyperfemininity, and hypersexuality, are some of the aspects of the movement that go against the norm and values of women in Victorian Britain, such as Mina’s “man’s brain” and Lucy’s hyperfemininity, while the Brides of Dracula provide contrast as the oppressed women with their submissive and compliant attitude towards him. Without erasing their representation of these New Woman ideals, Mina and Lucy also portrayed the complexity and dimensionality of being a woman in the Victorian era; their beauty and appeal were praised while their more “unwomanly” aspects present some threats towards men.

scholarly journals New Woman as Seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Lexicon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Rheavanya Winandhini ◽  
Rahmawan Jatmiko
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper discusses the influence of feminism in the classic Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The New Woman is a feminist ideal that appeared in the 19th century, more specifically amidst the rise of the first wave of feminism. The method of research used in this study covers close reading of the source material and analyzing the characters of the novel through the perspective of the New Woman ideals. The female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrayed the New Woman characteristic to some degree. Women’s independence, intellect, hyperfemininity, and hypersexuality, are some of the aspects of the movement that go against the norm and values of women in Victorian Britain, such as Mina’s “man’s brain” and Lucy’s hyperfemininity, while the Brides of Dracula provide contrast as the oppressed women with their submissive and compliant attitude towards him. Without erasing their representation of these New Woman ideals, Mina and Lucy also portrayed the complexity and dimensionality of being a woman in the Victorian era; their beauty and appeal were praised while their more “unwomanly” aspects present some threats towards men.

Methodological challenges involved in compiling the Nahua pharmacopeia

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula De Vos
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Global Approach ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Science

Recent work in the history of science has questioned the Eurocentric nature of the field and sought to include a more global approach that would serve to displace center–periphery models in favor of approaches that take seriously local knowledge production. Historians of Iberian colonial science have taken up this approach, which involves reliance on indigenous knowledge traditions of the Americas. These traditions present a number of challenges to modern researchers, including availability and reliability of source material, issues of translation and identification, and lack of systematization. This essay explores the challenges that emerged in the author’s attempt to compile a pre-contact Nahua pharmacopeia, the reasons for these challenges, and the ways they may – or may not – be overcome.

Abdullahi dan Fodio and Muhammad Bello’s Debate over the Torobbe-Fulani: Case Study for a New Methodology for Arabic Primary Source Material from West Africa

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Naylor
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Critical Commentary

This paper explores the conflict between Abdullahi dan Fodio and his nephew, Muhammad Bello, over the origin of their ethnic group, the Torobbe-Fulani. Initially open to his uncle’s theories of an Arabocentric migration narrative, Bello went on to change his views abruptly and undermine his uncle’s work. Through sketching the background to the conflict followed by a close reading of the documents themselves–Abdullahi’s īdāʿ al-nusūkh and Bello’s critical commentary to it, the ḥāshiya–I suggest these documents offer different models for political legitimacy. Prefaced by a critical analysis of the use of the Fodiawa’s Arabic writings in Sokoto historiography, I suggest that future approaches must take into account the political nature of these documents, the specific contexts in which they were produced and the personal relationships of their authors.

The Feeling of Freedom, Planetary Affect, and Feminist Emotion

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-91
Author(s):  
Kathleen Woodward
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Social Emotions ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Mode Of Being

Video artist Cecelia Condit’s recent work offers a rich visual and sonic poetics of feeling, engaging multiple varieties of sensation, affect, and emotion. Drawing on Erin Manning’s theory of preacceleration, this essay provides a close reading of Condit’s beguiling Within a Stone’s Throw (2012) as an environmental piece and in the context of her other work and her life. It argues that Condit’s solitary video work in Ireland’s rocky region resulted in a feeling of freedom that not only enabled her to create Within a Stone’s Throw—part environmental artwork, part performance piece, part impersonal self-portrait—but also served as a catalyst for feminist emotion that explodes in triumph in I’ve Been Afraid (2020). Paradoxically, then, in Within a Stone’s Throw we find the emergence of “planetary affect,” a mode of being on Earth that doesn’t center human subjectivity in forceful psychological and social emotions, but does enable them.

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