Bringing Arts Integration to Youth (BRAINY) at Colorado State University

In this chapter, the authors demonstrate how a university Art Education program assists the university art museum and trains students to lead tours for BRAINY (BRinging Arts INtegration to Youth), the museum's educational program for Title I schools. The authors present how they guide student educators to develop tours for BRAINY by applying different interpretive strategies. The impacts that BRAINY creates for the visiting students and local communities include 1) the enhancement of civic engagement for young citizens, 2) high-quality art experiences for Title I schools, 3) the extended community program—Family Day. The impacts on student art educators are 1) knowing how to teach art in different learning contexts that are outside of the classroom, 2) applying the questioning strategies to their classroom teaching for probing art dialogues with students, 3) learning to be prepared but also flexible for unexpected situations. This chapter provides a practical and positive example to address a wonderful collaboration between an art museum, community members, and higher education.

The Neo-Ijtihadist Phenomenon

This chapter evaluates and reconsiders some of the interpretive strategies and epistemological foundations of the current form of ijtihad. The basic thesis is that the moral rationalist presuppositions of Muslim reformers are diametrically opposed to the traditional jurists’ text-centered epistemological assumptions. The chapter contends that the current form of inferential jurisprudence (al-fiqh al-istidlali) should be replaced by neo-ijtihadism and that, should this transition occur, it will engender major paradigmatic shifts in the genre of rulings pronounced. An Islamic reformation also requires a revision of the epistemological and methodological foundations that undergird the current Islamic legal system. These are the key principles and procedures that guide a jurist in his interpretation and application of the rulings he deduces. The chapter also suggests different exegetical and hermeneutical strategies that neo-ijtihadism could adopt and proposes solutions that synthesize hermeneutical strategies with current exigencies so as to make Islamic law more moral, rational, and practical.

Works of Mykola Leontovych in the Performance Traditions of the Odesa Choral School

The purpose of the research is to identify the peculiarities of performing reading and conducting-methodical mastering of choral works by M. D. Leontovych in the activities of outstanding representatives of the Odesa choral school. The tasks of the work are determined: coverage of the concept of a performing school, in particular, the Odesa choral school; identification of the poetical-semantic features, intonational-expressive factors that influenced the performing approaches to the works of M. Leontovych; determination of the creative continuity’s features of generations in the context of interpretations, intonation and artistic images’ embodiment of M. D. Leontovych’s works in choral sound. The research methodology is based on the use of general scientific and special chorological approaches. An analytical-abstract approach was used to study the scientific literature on the outlined issues; in working with the memories of contemporaries, graduates – analytical and historical; in work with musical texts – choral, textual and selective methods; The system-structural method helped to present the phenomenon under study as a generalization of various research and practical tools – it became a unifying factor in the holistic understanding of experience. The scientific novelty of the research is due to the fact that for the first time an original view of the performing interpretation of individual works of M. Leontovych from the standpoint of performing, conducting, research experience of the Odessa Choral School; figurative-associative approaches in the context of chorological elaboration of the author’s text are covered; emphasis is placed on the relationship between musical and historical facts and current trends in the development of choral performance. Conclusions. M. Leontovych’s choral works are an original example of an individual author's concept of the folk song idea in choral elaboration, which forms multiple semantic vectors for performing interpretation. Genre-style, intonation-expressive priorities of the composer in the processing of folk song material become a kind of ‘guide’ in the interpretive strategies of performers and provoke them and the listener to certain reflections of associative, musical-semantic, theatrical and figurative composition. At the present stage of its development, the Odesa Choral School, declaring historically established approaches to the works of M. Leontovych in the repertoire of the student choir at the same time demonstrates their living performing tradition.

Mnemonic Fakery and Other Interpretive Strategies: Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall through Ethical Spectacle

Providing a glimpse of the ongoing wrestle with ethics and practice involved in the Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall exhibition, an iterative residential school Survivor-led reclamation project, this article considers critical methods for implementing museal projects reckoning with difficult knowledge, and the ethical latitude they require. Doing so, it discusses risks of misrepresentation/recognition and the necessity of hopeful wounding, exposing the manipulations, fakery, and the prosthetic memories that exhibitions with great affective force produce. Exploring a range of exhibition-focused museal strategies that seek both to redress and prevent the recurrence of genocide and mass violence, this article articulates the tensions between i) affective power and cultural safety, ii) absence and presence, and iii) prosthetic and “authentic” memory that permeate the process of exhibition design. Returning to the evidentiary landscape of the Shingwauk Indian Residential School, interventions hybridizing examples discussed, putting them into the service of Survivors, offer a direction for future reclamation.

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Pictures in ELT Textbooks: Modes of Communication in Focus

There is a tight nexus between visual literacy and textbook picture representations. This is of paramount importance when textbooks in general and ELT textbooks, in particular, are under question. To conduct a visual and verbal discourse analysis based on modes of communication, ELT textbook pictures were analyzed under the assumption that visual and verbal discourse interacts with reflected modes of communication. To this end, 50 ELT textbook pictures were used as the corpus and analyzed according to KvL's (2006) visual images analytical strategies in multimodal texts and Halliday’s (1985) transitivity system for verbal analysis of textbook pictures. The analysis of multimodal resources revealed that the analyzed visual images were used to represent non-human images; close-up images, frontal images, left-right compositions were the most frequent visual modes in the selected pictures. In the case of verbal mode, the relational main-type and verbal minor-type level with 39% and 2% were the most and least frequent verbal strategies, respectively. The findings might have significant theoretical and pedagogical implications for scholars, L2 teachers, and ELT textbook designers to consider the potential of using multimodal resources for non-pedagogical purposes while integrating textbook visual images and verbal strategies to create meanings. Keywords: Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Transitive System’s Processes, Visual Images Interpretive Strategies, Modes of Communication, ELT Textbooks.

Program Music

Studies of program music explore ways in which extra-musical material is expressed and interpreted through music. Conceptions of program music are broadly construed and vary throughout history in correlation with various aesthetic and philosophical perspectives—narrowly defined, programmatic compositions include an extra-musical program describing the musical expression, while a broader definition considers evocative titles, allusive musical material, and conventional musical significations as vehicles of extra-musical meaning. The question of aesthetic value arises in the debate surrounding the ability of music to communicate extra-musical ideas and the quality of music that claims to do so. This question is extensively explored through the polemics of the 19th-century “War of the Romantics,” pitting programmatic music against “absolute music.” Musical and theoretical writings of figures such as Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Hanslick provide rich source material informing many studies on program music. The distinction between program music and absolute music is blurred through various approaches to deriving meaning from both types of music. Theories of narrativity propose methods of interpreting formal structures, tonal progressions, and thematic devices interacting in ways reminiscent of literary narrative. Semiotic approaches explore meanings that arise from conventional significations of genre, style, and “topics,” evoking cultural understandings of social position, setting, and affect. Applying interpretive strategies such as these to programmatic music allows for hermeneutic readings mapping the extra-musical program onto the musical events to explore meaningful points of intersection or contradiction. Further studies draw connections to composer biography and sociohistorical context, positioning the music in philosophical perspectives and reception. Broader cultural and political situations inform readings of underlying implications such as nationalism or social commentary. Current studies of program music explore musical narratives in nuanced contexts that parse the historical and cultural atmospheres surrounding composers, their music, and reception to propose new readings and frames of interpretation.

Literature Review on Unnatural Narrative Theory

Unnatural narrative becomes a popular theory in literary criticism. In 2016, No. 4 issue of Style is a special issue on Brian Richardson’s Target Essay “Unnatural Narrative Theory”. Narratologists such as Marie-Laure Ryan, Shen Dan, James Phelan have responded actively to this new paradigm in narrative theory. In spite of its popularity, unnatural narrative remains controversial because of its diversified definitions, the hard-to-identified manifestations of unnaturalness, and its various interpretive strategies. Accordingly, this paper tries to comb the existing literature and provide a systematic review on the definitions, the manifestations, and the interpretive strategies of unnatural narrative theory.

Exploring the built-environment: heritage trails, values and perceptions

Understanding visitor preferences to heritage areas is essential in informing management planning and interpretive strategies for these places. This paper uses a quantitative method approach to investigate local Malaysian visitor preferences to heritage trails in the Old Town of central Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, to understand what values and qualities visitors are experiencing that informs their preferences. The findings of this research offers a ranking system of heritage trails and buildings based upon visitors’ preferences, that can aid in understanding of visitor preferences of heritage trails and the places and values along such trails.

Entanglement as a Hermeneutic Tool for Interpreting Humanities Texts: The Case of Oedipus the King and The Book of Job

The essay seeks to develop the foundations of a general hermeneutics, by which I mean a strategy of interpretation that not only encompasses the sciences and the humanities, but also seeks to integrate them. More specifically, certain classic texts in the humanities (i.e., those deemed representative of certain cultural traditions) are accordingly interpreted by way of categories derived from physics. In the present case, categories associated with quantum entanglement are applied to the classic or foundational humanities texts: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and the Old Testament Book of Job. The main categories brought to bear in this experiment in hermeneutics are the following: (1) entanglement itself, (2) locality-non-locality, (3) realism-non-realism, (4) latent and manifest levels of reality, and (5) internality-externality. After an introductory section defining the foregoing categories, the second section applies them to the texts in question with a view to redefining the relationship between two major components of the ancient world: the Greco-Roman and the Hebraic. The final section concludes the essay by outlining the framework of a general hermeneutics whereby schemas and objects of interpretation are structured in terms internality and externality. The former pertains to mind and culture while the latter is associated with a non-conscious materiality. Thus, four interpretive strategies can be deployed to give a comprehensive understanding of the world: (1) externalist schemas of interpretation applied to internalist objects of interpretation; (2) internalist schemas applied to externalist objects; (3) externalist schemas applied to externalist objects, and (4) internalist schemas applied to internalist objects. Received: 8 July 2021 / Accepted: 19 August 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021

Verbing and Linguistic Innovation

Denominal verbs are produced by a syntactic category shift, conversion, in which the word’s inflectional and combinatory potential change while its internal composition does not (Valera, 2015: 322). Perhaps no language owes as many of its verbs to the conversion strategy as English (Koutsoukos, 2021), the majority being denominal (noun-derived) verbs, e.g., Widespread seedless cultivars typically fruit twice yearly in the Caribbean. Denominal conversion has been the predominant method of verb creation since the 13th century (Gottfurcht, 2008), with the result that denominal verbs present a continuum of conventionality ranging from conventional verb-phrase replacements like paint, trash, pocket, mother to evanescent innovations like adulting and criming. Language users must rely on certain inferential strategies to figure out what novel denominal verbs mean, combining information from multiple sources, including salient properties of the source noun’s denotatum, the event structure of the clause in which that noun serves as a predicator, and socio-cultural knowledge. How exactly does this work? Our answer recalls the major lessons of Clark and Clark’s seminal 1979 paper “When Nouns Surface as Verbs”: denominal verbs have context-dependent rather than fixed meanings, and their interpretations rely on cooperation between speaker and hearer. These are lessons seemingly forgotten by proponents of recent, influential derivation-based accounts, which leverage the formal similarity between denominal verbs and noun-incorporating verbs like backstab and manspread. While, as discussed here, syntacticized approaches to semantic representation fail to account for the interpretive latitude that denominal verbs actually display, there are reasons to reject a strong view of context dependence as well. For Clark and Clark, interpretations of innovative denominal verbs either directly reflect criterial features of their source nouns or are ad hoc, derived from “moment-to-moment cooperation,” including gestures, allusions, and “other momentarily relevant facts about the conversation” (1979: 783). We argue that denominal interpretations are more tightly regulated, and involve reconciling the results of four distinct interpretive strategies: nominal frame computation, verb-construction integration, co-composition and, finally, conceptual blending. To describe these interpretive strategies, we bring to bear a suite of analytic tools developed to model everyday language understanding: Construction Grammar (Michaelis, 2004; Goldberg, 2006; Michaelis, 2011), enriched composition (Pustejovsky, 1998; Pustejovsky, 2012), Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2004), and Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 2006; Andor, 2010). In line with Clark and Clark’s (1979) convention for the interpretation of innovative denominal verbs, we argue that nouns used in innovative denominal formations are chosen based on relational properties of entities denoted by those nouns, whether common or proper (e.g., shape, behavior, composition, use, provenance). At the same time, the descriptive framework that we propose leaves fewer interpretive factors to vagaries of context.