Take-Em!

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 24-31
Author(s):  
Charles Williams ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Bonding Time ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Father And Son ◽  
Undue Pressure

At what point is a discussion a debate, and at what point is it undue pressure? Is all unwanted pressure a kind of manipulation and violence? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, the narrator is invited by his father to go duck hunting as part of their bonding time. The narrator wants to spend time with his father, but expresses ethical concerns about hunting ducks. The father asserts hunting is a natural part of human evolution. The debate continues as the narrator decides to go on the hunt, but is undecided if he will pull the trigger. The story ends with father and son in the blind just at the moment before the narrator must decide if he is going to pull the trigger.

A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Petraglia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Double Dose ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Father And Son ◽  
Otto Rank

This chapter posits a psychoanalytic reading of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s short story ‘I fatali’ (‘The Fated Ones’) published posthumously in the collection Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) (1869). It focuses on the mortal rivalry between the father and son figures, Count Sagrezwitch and Baron Saternez, who become known in late nineteenth-century Milanese society of the short story as true embodiments of fatal beings belonging to popular superstition, known as jinxes – bringers of bad fortune, illness, harm, and even death to others. Drawing from Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of the Doppelgänger, it is argued that these protagonists emerge as complementary doubles for one another, as opposing incarnations of Death in the form of mysterious foreigners. This chapter also highlights the post-Unification, socio-cultural undertones of Tarchetti’s fantastic tale, affirms the existence of an Italian Gothic, and reveals the author’s portrayal of death’s spectacular nature.

Mieczysław Jastrun w Łodzi 1931–1939

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Robert Mielhorski
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
World View ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Professional Work ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Source Materials

The paper discusses the inter-war Łódź stage in the biography and work of Mieczysław Jastrun, which forms a part of a broader first period of the writer’s activities (1923–1941). The author of the text, based on source materials and historical documents, reconstructs the sources of the contemporary world-view of Jastrun, characterises philosophical inspirations of the poet and the feeling of threat by fascism (short story “Civitas Diaboli”), as well as the moment of his left-wing ideological turn, including consequences of Marxist reflections. The paper also focuses on the contemporary social relations of the author of Dzieje nieostygłe [History Is Cooling Down], presents Jastrun’s critical opinion of the Łódź literary milieu and some of its initiatives (e.g. the Wymiary [Dimensions] magazine), as well as sketches the image of Łódź as a juggernaut-city of the 1930s, manifested in the poems and the prose of the writer, and combines it with the contemporary personal stance of Jastrun (professional work, marriage to Krystyna Bilska, friendship with painter Karol Hiller).

My Grandfather's Spoon

Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Russell Ayres
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Short Story ◽  
World War ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Administrative Services ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
Father And Son ◽  
Australian Department

This short story is about a public servant with the Australian Department of the Arts and Administrative Services, Ayres writes of generational change in the professional and persona} lives of a father and son working in the Service. They hold the last of their 1raditional chess games on the father's final day of his career. The prize for the winner is a family "heirloom" --a spoon stolen by the father's father from a U.S. Navy warship during World War II.

David I. Dubrovsky and Merab Mamardashvili: Adam’s Second Fall and the Advent of the Cyber-Leviathan

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-341
Author(s):  
Inti Yanes-Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Digital Interface ◽  
Technological Structure ◽  
Technological Singularity ◽  
Mental Operations ◽  
Merab Mamardashvili ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Moment

In his speech “The European Responsibility,” the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili summarizes his utopia of a fulfilled humanity by presenting it as an integration of two main traditions: the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ones. In contrast, David Dubrovsky launches a new perspective for present and future human evolution: the cyber-superman, i.e. the perfect merging of human mind and digital brain—or the bio-digital interface. “Intelligence” here is not just an artificial by-product of a highly organized technological structure, but the reproduction of mental operations through the techno-replication of the bio-brain as material substrate: the Dubrovskyan avatar. In the present article, I focus on Dubrovsky’s and Mamardashvili’s anthropological paradigms, and their relationship to the phenomena of cyberbeing and cyberculture. I examine the phenomenon of cyberbeing as a “built-in” feature of a bio-electronic, transhuman ontology that impacts and transforms personhood into “cyborghood” in the context of an interactive digital framework of fictional transcendences, body-deconstruction and bio-technological interplays. My aim is to develop a critical approach to Dubrovsky’s cybernetic anthropology and avatar-theory, along with its meaning and implications for our world-epoch, in contrast to Mamardashvili’s ontology, which proves essentially incompatible with the moment of technological singularity—i.e. with the creation of a transhuman bio-digital avatar as envisioned and prophesized by Dubrovsky.

Virginia Woolf's Imaginary Museum of the Medieval in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-184
Author(s):  
Caroline Marie
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
British Museum ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article shows that the Middle Ages Virginia Woolf imagines in her 1906 short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ are influenced by the staging of the medieval in late-Victorian museums and reflects late-Victorian medievalism. From the perspective of material culture studies, Woolf's tale reflects the representation and fabrication of the medieval by the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum and shapes a similar narrative of the Middle Ages. Relying on Michel Foucault's definitions of ‘heterotopia’ as well as on Tony Bennett's analysis of Victorian museums, this article argues that Woolf's fictionalisation of the medieval evidences a new, complex temporality of knowledge and consciousness of the past which also defines late-Victorian curatorial philosophy and practices. It analyses each regime of that new temporality: first, the archaeological gaze and its contribution to the grand national narrative via the literary canon and, second, the theatrical gaze, with its focus on spectacularly displayed artefacts, that partakes of an image's mystique. In temporal terms, this results in a tension between the tangible remains of a past clearly separated from the present and the mystical fusion of past and present reinscribing Woolf's poetics of the moment within a sense of history.

The art of keeping time

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-206
Author(s):  
Paula Quigley
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Short Film ◽  
The Moment

Abstract Like the protagonist, both the short story and the short film are subject to the demand to arrive 'on time'. Violently freed from the imperatives of conventional storytelling, this film considers the moment when the laws of time and language fall away in favour of an eternal 'they is'.

scholarly journals THE EMERGENCE OF ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS IMPORTANCE TO REACH THE TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (25) ◽  
pp. 111-127
Author(s):  
Luiz Raimundo Tadeu da Silva SILVA (UnB) ◽  
Alex Fernandes da Veiga MACHADO (IF Sudeste – MG) ◽  
Pablo De Lara SANCHES (IF Sudeste – MG)
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Intelligent Agents ◽  
Machine Discovery ◽  
John Searle ◽  
Alan Turing ◽  
Artificial Consciousness ◽  
The Future ◽  
Technological Singularity ◽  
The Moment

The men admired a way to swim the fish, but today they sail faster than anyone. They'd like flying like the birds, but have been a lot higher. They searched for wisdom, now they have all the knowledge accumulated in the story available in a few clicks. Human evolution is about to meet its peak through the Technological Singularity, which can be understood as the future milestone reached at the moment that a computer program can think like a human, yet with quick access to all information already registered by society. It will not be like a man, but more intelligent than all mankind in history. So we have a big question: will this new entity has consciousness? Through a study of the levels of intelligent agents autonomy and in a timeless dialogue with Alan Turing, René Descartes, Ludwic Wittgenstein, John Searle and Vernor Vinge, we show the possibility of an artificial consciousness and thatthe quest for intentionality, promoted by sophisticated algorithms of learning and machine discovery, is the key to reach of Technological Singularity.

HYBRID NARRATIVES: THE MAKING OF CHARACTER AND NARRATIVE AUTHORITY IN RUDYARD KIPLING'S “HIS CHANCE IN LIFE”

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-359
Author(s):  
Jean Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Narrative Authority ◽  
Mixed Blood ◽  
Large Brood ◽  
The Moment ◽  
At Home

When Rudyard Kipling offeredhis wry observations on officialdom in Imperial India to his cousin, Margaret Bourne-Jones, in 1885, he might have been toying with the kernel of one of his more perplexing stories on race and hybridity, written for his 1888 anthology,Plain Tales from the Hills. When Kipling actually came to address this theme fictionally, in his short story entitled “His Chance in Life,” he made one crucial change: he substituted a dark-skinned telegraphist of mixed race for an Englishman, thereby engaging with the illogics of character that hybridity posed for narratives on race and Empire. In Kipling's story, his hybrid hero, stationed in the mofussil town of Tibasu, experiences a sudden surge of Britishness in the mixed blood flowing in his veins at the moment when crisis strikes, and leads a group of terrified policemen in quelling a communal riot between Hindus and Muslims. He is found guilty of exercising unconstitutional authority by a Hindu sub-judge, but the verdict is set aside by the British Assistant Collector. As a reward, he is promoted to an up-country Central Telegraph Office, where he proceeds to marry his ugly sweetheart, also of mixed race parentage, and live happily with a large brood of children in quarters on the office premises, a loyal government servant, “at home” with officialdom and Empire.

Contemporary Feminism and Women's Short Stories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Young
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
First Century ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Comprehensive Introduction ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Zadie Smith ◽  
The Moment

The short story has received renewed attention and notable popular acclaim in the twenty-first century. This book offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary women’s short stories and introduces a new way of theorising feminism in the genre through the concept of ‘the moment’. By considering the prominent themes of motherhood, marriage, domesticity, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, this work engages with a spectrum of issues that are central to feminism today and, in the process, offers insightful new readings of the contemporary short story. Readers will find new perspectives on both canonical as well as lesser-discussed contemporary writers, including Kate Atkinson, Nicola Barker, A.S. Byatt, Aminatta Forna, Victoria Hislop, Jackie Kay, Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Kate Mosse, Michèle Roberts, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Rose Tremain. While serving as a comprehensive introduction to the central themes of feminist politics, the study shows what makes the short story a desirable literary vehicle for creatively and critically contributing to feminist debates.

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