First Report of Passerilepis parina (Cestoda: Hymenolepididae) from Parus major in Iran: A Probable Fatal Case Due to Hyperin-fection

Cestodes are important parasites that can affect the health of humans and wildlife. Among these, the genus Passerilepis is an important endoparasite of Passeriform birds while poorly studied in Iran. During a parasitological field survey in central parts of Iran in 2018, thirty-two cestodes, as an obstructive intertwined mass, recovered from the intestine of a recently dead Parus major (great tit). Morphological characteristics of recovered cestodes were drawn carefully by a camera lucida equipped microscope and identification was carried out using standard keys. All of the collected cestodes were identified as P. parina. In the current study, we recorded P. parina from great tit for the first time in Iran.

Sounding the “Spirit of My Silence”

Sufjan Stevens’s 2015 album Carrie and Lowell threw indie rock fans into collective mourning with its sonic depiction of feeling so much to the point of experiencing an overwhelming affective nothingness. Written as an elegy for Stevens’s mother, the album performs Stevens’s loss by creating a static soundscape punctuated by moments of stark sonic absence. Some moments evoke the emotionally ineffable (rhythmic stutters between phrases), some occupy a sonically liminal space with white noise negating silence, and others are calls to physical action (flipping over the LP) that literally give the listen pause. This paper places an autoethnographic encounter with a Carrie and Lowell pre-release “silent listening party” in conversation with Roland Barthes’s theory of affect and grief as originally developed in Camera Lucida: A Note on Photography. This paper explores the possibility that Barthes’s theory offers an infrastructure for approaching affect and musical listening by highlighting the ways in which the individual functions as an affective archive, navigating culturally-coded and pre-cognitive physiological responses to aesthetic objects. Drawing upon Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’s work on structured silences, this paper argues that moments of foregrounded silence in Carrie and Lowell provide musical analogies for Barthes’s punctum of time and death.

Barthes avec Derrida, ou vers un après-punctum social et écologique

In “Camera Lucida”, Roland Barthes comes into a personal and autobiographical exploration of photography, trying to grasp the sharp and piercing emotion which he terms punctum. Defying signs and codes, the punctum leads to an irreducible subjective experience of the photographic image as that-has-been. Reading Roland Barthes’s theory of photography through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s essays on mourning and otherness, this article questions whether the notion of punctum can have a social and political meaning.

Means of harmonization of composition and optimization of the design of photographic images

The subject of this research is such a means of harmonization of composition of the image in a plane as the contrast. The article assesses the possibility and factors of using contrast for increasing the attractiveness of the designed photographic image. The author reviews the examples of photo images with appropriate use of contrast; provides the research data on the perception[WU1]  of contrast by human visual system.; explores correlation between contrast and the conditions for a harmonious composition; as well as reviews the connection between the properties of compositional elements of photography and the components of visual perception, discovered by R. Barthes in his work “Camera Lucida”. The author carries out the analysis of photographic images; compares the empirical data on the study of perception of contrast by a human; applies the methods of induction and deduction in analyzing the acquitted results and comparing them with the characteristics of a harmonious composition. The author’s special contribution consists in comparison of the results of empirical research of perception of contrast by a human in the context of dependence of the sensitivity of human visual system on the size of observable alternating contrast lines and the size of the dominant in relation to the image field object of composition. It is proposed to use high contrasts of the elements of detail drawing for reaching harmonization of composition of the designed image elements.  [WU1]

Morphology of the early larval stages of Lysmata lipkei Okuno & Fiedler, 2010 (Caridea: Lysmatidae): an invasive shrimp in the Western Atlantic

Considering the importance of establishing different approaches to the early detection of invasive species, the present study aimed to describe and illustrate the morphology of the early larval stages of the shrimp Lysmata lipkei, an invasive species in the Western Atlantic. Additionally, we did a morphological comparison and a review of the other Lysmata species from the Western Atlantic Ocean with a known larvae description. The larvae used in this study were obtained by the maintenance, under laboratory conditions, of ovigerous hermaphrodites of L. lipkei, collected in the wild. Then, larvae were dissected under a stereo microscope and illustrated using a microscope equipped with a camera lucida. The first three larval stages (zoeae) of L. lipkei were illustrated, described, and compared to other species of Lysmata previously described of the Western Atlantic. Some features of the larval morphology of L. lipkei are very similar when compared to other Lysmata species with previous larval descriptions, such as a rostrum long and simple, the eyes stalked with a long peduncle from the second zoeae, one pterygostomian spine and several denticles along the anterior ventral margin of the carapace, similarities in the segmentation of the maxillipeds, and the presence of dorsolateral spines on the posterior margin of the 5th pleomere, among other features. Also, unique features were observed for L. lipkei, such as differences in the setation of some structures, including the antennule, antenna, maxillule, and maxillipeds. Using the morphological descriptions, we expect to identify species from the plankton, especially invaders, that might be present in the Western Atlantic, as well as assist in several areas in which the larval morphology is relevant.

El periodismo literario del conflicto en Colombia: Olga Behar, El clan de los doce apóstoles y María T. Ronderos, Guerras recicladas

The armed conflict in Colombia has generated a flow of journalistic and literary corpus that aimed to understand and reflect upon the violence that permeates the country. Telling the facts has become a duty, and analyzing them in the light of the truth, a responsibility. This essay analyzes two representative works of literary journalism that have had an impact on public opinion and, furthermore, have revealed important issues about recent national events: El clan de los doce apóstoles (The Twelve Apostles Club) by Olga Behar (Icono, 2011) and Guerras recicladas: una historia periodística del paramilitarismo en Colombia (Recycled Wars: A Journalistic History of Paramilitarism in Colombia) by María Teresa Ronderos (Aguilar, 2014). The objective is to explore the authors narrative techniques to create critical awareness about one movement that generated the major impact on Colombia’s armed conflict: the paramilitarism. I analyze the narrative techniques building upon the concepts studium and punctumproposed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, as discursive strategies for transmitting powerful messages about Colombian realities.

Photography between Affective Turn and Affective Structure

The affective turn in photography theory takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s move from semiology to affective phenomenology in Camera Lucida. This article, however, considers the way affective phenomenology is itself grounded in the semiological structure of photography. It looks at how, before Camera Lucida was even written, Thierry de Duve had already discussed the affective implications of Barthes’s understanding of photography’s indexical nature. The article then proceeds to rethink the structural affectivity of photography beyond Barthes’s and de Duve’s emphasis on a direct relation between indexicality and loss. Reconsidering photography through Jacques Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime of art, the article rather puts emphasis on the indeterminacy of photography, which results from the way the camera captures and isolates a spatio-temporal fragment. Shifting the focus from indexicality to indeterminacy sheds a different light on the loss implied by the structure of photography, parallel to how Freud understood the difference between mourning and melancholy.