Literary Neurophysiology

Writing about neurophysiology more than a century ago, what were US authors doing? Literary Neurophysiology: Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914 examines their use of literature to experiment with the new materialist psychology, which bore upon their efforts to represent reality and was forging new understandings of race and sexuality. Sometimes they emulated scientific epistemology, allowing their art and conceptions of creativity to be reshaped by it. Sometimes they imaginatively investigated neurophysiological theories, challenging and rewriting scientific explanations of human identity and behavior. By enfolding physiological experimentation into literary inquiries that could account for psychological and social complexities beyond the reach of the laboratory, they used literature as a cognitive medium. Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Gertrude Stein come together as they probe the effects on mimesis and creativity of reflex-based automatisms and unconscious meaning-making. Oliver Wendell Holmes explores conceptions of racial nerve force elaborated in population statistics and biopolitics, while W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins contest notions of racial energy used to predict the extinction of African Americans. Holmes explores new definitions of “sexual inversion” as, in divergent ways, Whitman and John Addington Symonds evaluate relations among nerve force, human fecundity, and the supposed grave of nonreproductive sex. Carefully tracing entanglements and conflicts between literary culture and mental science of this period, Knoper reveals unexpected connections among these authors and fresh insights into the science they confronted. Considering their writing as cognitive practice, he provides a new understanding of literary realism.

Universities, Sustainability, and Neoliberalism: Contradictions of the Climate Emergency Declarations

UK universities have been successively declaring a climate emergency, following the University of Bristol’s lead in 2019. Universities are key actors in climate change education, and potentially progressive organisations researching, teaching and implementing low carbon futures. Using universities’ sustainability strategies, we present a secondary analysis identifying neoliberalism’s significant role in influencing universities’ sustainability policies and practices. This plays out through university boosterism where universities use their sustainability work to claim sustainability leadership, representing a form of sustainability capital to attract funding and potential students. Furthermore, we suggest a cognitive-practice gap exists between those <em>researching</em> sustainability and those <em>implementing</em> sustainability in universities. Thus, we conclude that there are inherent tensions in universities’ sustainability governance, with universities embodying contradictory sustainability discourses and advancing a form of green capital. Entrenched neoliberal ideologies present challenges for those declaring a climate emergency and how such declarations are subsequently operationalised.

An Analysis of the Use of Terminological Determinants “Art of Islam”

This article follows from the previously published paper and pertains to a distinctive phenomenological analysis of the structure/form and the production of the modality of miniature/illumination/pictorial representation, namely the productive-reflective orientation of homo islamicus with a separate analysis of his profanely-aestheticized discourse of action/arrangement/design. A particular attention is paid to the paradigm of reduction, i.e. to a possible transformation of the cognitive and productive-reflective orientation by means of denaturalization/ stylization, as well as to the analysis of the status of homo islamicus's paradigmatic and predefined position within both the profane-cognitive and recognitive-sacral production. The characterization of his work and his fulfillment of religious life within the aesteticized discourse of qadar/ṣināʿat was also used to discuss the opposition to the occidental academic approach/understanding, imposed by the inappropriate need to reduce any form of creative action to common Western denominators. Substance of the emergence of creative action is theoretically elaborated by means of the cognitive discourse of qadar/ṣināʿat, together with activating figurality on the idea of the closed concept of the collaborative-cognitive practice. The expansion of theoretical discourse allowed the presence of a new view on the religious-aesthetic philosophy and associated terms, respecting the specifics deriving from the basic traditional interpretations of the Islamic forms of aestheticized orientation. This brief analysis is intended to initiate a discussion on the issues of theoretical and historical other part of the „history of arts“ and „artistic production“ in the critical framework of both occidental and Islamic attitudes/views. This brief analysis is intended to initiate a discussion on the issues of theoretical and historical other part of the „history of arts“ and „artistic production“ in the critical framework of both occidental and Islamic attitudes/views. At the same time, it will contribute to a possible fundamental discourse for defining the expression homo islamicus's Islamic creative action' as an academic field within a broader discipline entitled as the „history of arts“.

10 Studying as Embodied, Social, and Aesthetic Practice: A Phenomenological Critique

In this essay, we provide a phenomenologically based critique of Western concepts of studying as individualized, cognitive practice. This very idea is closely connected to Eurocentric privileges of the so-called “far senses” of both vision and audition. We lay out how studying is an inherently embodied and social practice that undermines any rigid division and hierarchization of the human sensorium. We argue that by overcoming the traditional and hegemonic concept of studying for the benefit of a more embodied, social, and aesthetic approach to this phenomenon, we can analyze and do justice to the matter more accurately.

Research on the Cognition Education of Art Design—Taking the JMI Experience Design Season as an Example

The art and design major group of the College of Humanities and arts reformed the course of cognitive practice. In the form of “theory lecture” and “practice experience”, it created the “JMI Experience Design Season” which runs through September to December in the second half of 2019, with two theory lectures and two practice experience activities each month, enriching the students’ theoretical and practical art accomplishment, and improving the teachers’ micro course construction ability and theory Practice teaching level and enrich the life of teaching staff of JMI in combination with labor union activities.

The Devil Is a Woman

This chapter relies on The Devil Is a Woman (1935), the last film Sternberg and Dietrich made together, to develop an account of Sternberg’s antagonistic relation to the off-screen. More than most directors, he is a maker of self-sufficient images: this informs his understanding of narrative. In the face of the positive treatment of the off-screen in film studies over recent decades, the chapter defends Sternberg against the criticisms leveled at cinemas of mere spectacle. The carnival atmosphere and unreliable narrator of The Devil Is a Woman are prompts for investigating and contesting the fictional world by which a viewer frames the individual shots of a film. The eccentric architectural space of The Blue Angel (1930) is treated as a reason for attributing to Sternberg a longer-term interest in disentangling cinema from the viewer’s cognitive practice of elaborating, with the help of the off-screen, a world around the shots of which a film is composed.