scholarly journals Beyond the Subject – towards the Object? Nancy K. Miller’s What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past (2011) and the Materiality of Life Writing

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 36-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Rueggemeier
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material World ◽  
Situated Knowledges ◽  
Object Based ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Relational Concept ◽  
The Subject

In contrast to a long scholarly tradition that “separated subject from object, mind from matter” (Hodder 2012, p. 15), current writers of autobiography do no longer ignore the fact that “the content of our so-called inner lives comes heavily freighted with material from outer sources” (Eakin 2009, p. 102). The focus on things runs counter to internal and essential concepts of selfhood as they are rooted in Western thinking and rather make visible the material world, the body and the environment as formative factors of selfhood. It thereby contrasts the Cartesian concept of self founded on thought and reflection with a concept of self based on materiality. Drawing on Nancy K. Miller’s autobiography What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past (2011) this paper will demonstrate that autobiographical objects foster a relational concept of self that is situated in the in-betweenness of subject and object, ego and autre as well as between the biographical and the autobiographical. Thus, the integration of objects highlights the fact that existence is not an individual affair, but that an autobiographical self emerges through and as part of his/her entangledness. Connected to this is the observation that objects function as a form of resistance against the processes of mind based epistemology and make a plea for “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988).Finally, the essay takes a glimpse at some contemporary autobiographies from Britain, Sweden and Germany to illustrate that object-based life writing and the specific epistemology connected to it are worthy of further investigation. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on May 6th 2015 and published on March 5th 2016.

scholarly journals Between Mirrors all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion May Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Material Practice ◽  
The Subject

Just as any body's cells are constantly dying and regenerating, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body draw its vitality from the teeming traffic of death, the fertile muck of the abject. Such is the suggestion of the title, sourced in Hélène Cixous' work (1991: 41), out of whose spell this life writing marks off its distinctive poetics of the fragment, drawing an ethics of openness from the mining of abjection. To be sure, this is no chronological memoir, building teleologically to a transformation and consolidation of social identity. Quite to the contrary: bold, brave, and disturbingly innovative, this work from Sydney-born Quinn Eades, formerly known as Karina Quinn, performs a body reinventing itself: scarified, 'surgeried', written into and out of, and endlessly reconfigured through the writing. Eades builds their story through a constellation of scenes staging the embodied, yet fractured self, the sujet en procès, the subject-on-trial and -in process (Kristeva 1977) from coruscating scintillation to depressive passivity, through what they call écriture matière -- writing as a material practice. 

‘A word will set the seed / of life and death’: Robin Robertson’s Protean Lyric

2019 ◽  
pp. 122-158
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Seasonal Cycle ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material World ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The World ◽  
Classical Myths ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Subject

The chapter discusses Robin Robertson’s poetry, stretched between the existential and the material, oscillating around edges, junctures and transitions. Focusing on legends and folk tales that are forged in the Scottish landscape, Robertson, for whom the sense of place is ‘absolutely crucial’, combines them with classical myths. The analysis centres around Robertson’s preoccupation with these themes, arguing that the inherent order of the world as evoked in his poems is governed by chaos and change. In various forms of being volatility dominates, occurring in transfigurations of the material world, standing against the claims about the inertness of matter. Vitality connects with epidermal vulnerability revealed in the poems’ frequent focus on metamorphosis. The apprehension of the temporality of the body is captured in Robertson’s enfolding of the subject into the seasonal cycle. The chapter thus investigates the corporeal drive as co-temporal with the rhythms of the non-human world.

scholarly journals The body in museology as expression of identity in contemporary thought

2020 ◽  
pp. 167-187
Author(s):  
Sara Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
The Body ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Self Knowledge

In the present article we seek to reflect, within the scope of an PhD investigation in ULHT, Sociomuseology department, about tattoo as an artistic expression for cotemporary museology, where we try to give visibility to a process of identity, to a mapping of experiences and of affirmation of a territory that belongs to each one of us – our body. If on one hand, we seek to answer to one of the problems that we consider important in the today’s world, we also seek to reflect about some issues that concern the Museology and the Museums. Throughout this investigation we also seek, through fieldwork expressed by interviews with the tattooed, to highlight the importance of the subject, in the museological processes, through self-knowledge, self-esteem and self-criticism, in which the subject is at the same time a museological object, considered as a work of art. Then the tattooed subject then shares many of the problems that are also common to the Sociomuseological universe: he is the subject and object of memory and forgetfulness - mapping his territory; he is also a subject of power, of his body; it is a point of heritage identification through its aesthetics; it is the search for an identity or a difference in its territory, and it is the result of the phenomenological processes of modernity. These are just some of the points that will be discussed in this text. Key words: Sociomuseology; Identity; Power; Artistic Expression; Postmodernity

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Compulsive Bodies, Creative Bodies: Beckett'sQuadand Agency in the 21stCentury

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Amanda Dennis
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Illustrative Case ◽  
Repetitive Movement ◽  
Repetitive Tasks ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Geological Space ◽  
Alternative Reading

Lying in ditches, tromping through mud, wedged in urns, trash bins, buried in earth, bodies in Beckett appear anything but capable of acting meaningfully on their environments. Bodies in Beckett seem, rather, synonymous with abjection, brokenness, and passivity—as if the human were overcome by its materiality: odours, pain, foot sores, decreased mobility. To the extent that Beckett's personae act, they act vaguely (wandering) or engage in quasi-obsessive, repetitive tasks: maniacal rocking, rotating sucking stones and biscuits, uttering words evacuated of sense, ceaseless pacing. Perhaps the most vivid dramatization of bodies compelled to meaningless, repetitive movement is Quad (1981), Beckett's ‘ballet’ for television, in which four bodies in hooded robes repeat their series ad infinitum. By 1981, has all possibility for intentional action in Beckett been foreclosed? Are we doomed, as Hamm puts it, to an eternal repetition of the same? (‘Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended.’)This article proposes an alternative reading of bodily abjection, passivity and compulsivity in Beckett, a reading that implies a version of agency more capacious than voluntarism. Focusing on Quad as an illustrative case, I show how, if we shift our focus from the body's diminished possibilities for movement to the imbrication of Beckett's personae in environments (a mound of earth), things, and objects, a different story emerges: rather than dramatizing the impossibility of action, Beckett's work may sketch plans for a more ecological, post-human version of agency, a more collaborative mode of ‘acting’ that eases the divide between the human, the world of inanimate objects, and the earth.Movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology challenge hierarchies among subjects, objects and environments, questioning the rigid distinction between animate and inanimate, and the notion of the Anthropocene emphasizes the influence of human activity on social and geological space. A major theoretical challenge that arises from such discourses (including 20th-century challenges to the idea of an autonomous, willing, subject) is to arrive at an account of agency robust enough to survive if not the ‘death of the subject’ then its imbrication in the material and social environment it acts upon. Beckett's treatment of the human body suggests a version of agency that draws strength from a body's interaction with its environment, such that meaning is formed in the nexus between body and world. Using the example of Quad, I show how representations of the body in Beckett disturb the opposition between compulsivity (when a body is driven to move or speak in the absence of intention) and creative invention. In Quad, serial repetition works to create an interface between body and world that is receptive to meanings outside the control of a human will. Paradoxically, compulsive repetition in Beckett, despite its uncomfortable closeness to addiction, harnesses a loss of individual control that proposes a more versatile and ecologically mindful understanding of human action.

Predicting the citation and impact factor of terms for scientific publications using machine learning algorithms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksey Klokov ◽  
Evgenii Slobodyuk ◽  
Michael Charnine
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Semantic Processing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Text Data ◽  
Semantic Relationships ◽  
Subject Areas ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scientific Environment

The object of the research when writing the work was the body of text data collected together with the scientific advisor and the algorithms for processing the natural language of analysis. The stream of hypotheses has been tested against computer science scientific publications through a series of simulation experiments described in this dissertation. The subject of the research is algorithms and the results of the algorithms, aimed at predicting promising topics and terms that appear in the course of time in the scientific environment. The result of this work is a set of machine learning models, with the help of which experiments were carried out to identify promising terms and semantic relationships in the text corpus. The resulting models can be used for semantic processing and analysis of other subject areas.

Living with Barren Truths: A Tale of Triumphalism and Tribulations of a Technology

2021 ◽  
pp. 097168582110159
Author(s):  
Sital Mohanty ◽  
Subhasis Sahoo ◽  
Pranay Kumar Swain
Keyword(s):  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

Science, technology and human values have been the subject of enquiry in the last few years for social scientists and eventually the relationship between science and gender is the subject of an ongoing debate. This is due to the event of globalization which led to the exponential growth of new technologies like assisted reproductive technology (ART). ART, one of the most iconic technological innovations of the twentieth century, has become increasingly a normal social fact of life. Since ART invades multiple human discourses—thereby transforming culture, society and politics—it is important what is sociological about ART as well as what is biological. This article argues in commendation of sociology of technology, which is alert to its democratic potential but does not concurrently conceal the historical and continuing role of technology in legitimizing gender discrimination. The article draws the empirical insights from local articulations (i.e., Odisha state in eastern India) for the understandings of motherhood, freedom and choice, reproductive right and rights over the body to which ART has contributed. Sociologically, the article has been supplemented within the broader perspectives of determinism, compatibilism alongside feminism.

scholarly journals Comprehension and Eye Movements in the Processing of Subject- and Object-Relative Clauses: Evidence from Dyslexia and Individual Differences

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 915
Author(s):  
Marianna Stella ◽  
Paul E. Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Sentence Type ◽  
Main Effect ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Processing Difficulty ◽  
Object Relative

In this study, we examined eye movements and comprehension in sentences containing a relative clause. To date, few studies have focused on syntactic processing in dyslexia and so one goal of the study is to contribute to this gap in the experimental literature. A second goal is to contribute to theoretical psycholinguistic debate concerning the cause and the location of the processing difficulty associated with object-relative clauses. We compared dyslexic readers (n = 50) to a group of non-dyslexic controls (n = 50). We also assessed two key individual differences variables (working memory and verbal intelligence), which have been theorised to impact reading times and comprehension of subject- and object-relative clauses. The results showed that dyslexics and controls had similar comprehension accuracy. However, reading times showed participants with dyslexia spent significantly longer reading the sentences compared to controls (i.e., a main effect of dyslexia). In general, sentence type did not interact with dyslexia status. With respect to individual differences and the theoretical debate, we found that processing difficulty between the subject and object relatives was no longer significant when individual differences in working memory were controlled. Thus, our findings support theories, which assume that working memory demands are responsible for the processing difficulty incurred by (1) individuals with dyslexia and (2) object-relative clauses as compared to subject relative clauses.

scholarly journals Mechanotendography in Achillodynia shows reduced oscillation variability of pre-loaded Achilles tendon: a pilot study

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-257
Author(s):  
Laura Schaefer ◽  
Frank Bittmann
Keyword(s):  
Achilles Tendon ◽  
Rank Correlation ◽  
Achilles Tendinopathy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mechanical Pressure ◽  
Mechanical Oscillations ◽  
Pressure Impact ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Intrapersonal Variability

The present study focuses on an innovative approach in measuring the mechanical oscillations of pre-loaded Achilles tendon by using Mechanotendography (MTG) during application of a short yet powerful mechanical pressure impact. This was applied on the forefoot from the plantar side in direction of dorsiflexion, while the subject stood on the ball of the forefoot on one leg. Participants with Achilles tendinopathy (AT; n = 10) were compared to healthy controls (Con; n = 10). Five trials were performed on each side of the body. For evaluation, two intervals after the impulse began (0-100ms; 30-100ms) were cut from the MTG and pressure raw signals. The intrapersonal variability between the five trials in both intervals were evaluated using the arithmetic mean and coefficient of variation of the mean correlation (Spearman rank correlation) and the normalized averaged mean distances, respectively. The AT-group showed a significantly reduced variability in MTG compared to the Con-group (from p = 0.006 to p = 0.028 for different parameters). The 95% confidence intervals (CI) of MTG results were disjoint, whereas the 95% CIs of the pressure signals were similar (p = 0.192 to p = 0.601). We suggest from this work that the variability of mechanical tendon oscillations could be an indicative parameter of an altered Achilles tendon functionality.

scholarly journals II.—Notes on Chondrosteus acipenseroides, Agassiz

1887 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 248-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. H. Traquair
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Transitional Form ◽  
Additional Species ◽  
The Subject

The now well-known Liassic Acipenseroid fish Chondrosteus acipenseroides was named by Agassiz in 1843, but not described by him. It subsequently formed the subject of an elaborate memoir by Sir Philip Grey-Egerton, Bart., in which, besides giving a minute account of the structure of the genus, he named two additional species—C. pachyurus and C. crassior. Putting the results of Sir Philip's investigations as briefly as possible, he maintained that while “in all essential points” Chondrosteus resembled the recent Sturgeon, nevertheless in certain others, and notably in the structure of the opercular and hyoid regions, it constituted a transitional form towards the more ordinary Ganoids. Moreover, the skin of the body presented the same naked condition seen in the recent Polyodon.

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