The Experimental Gothic

This essay proposes that the crucial movements of the historical avant-garde looked to the first wave of Gothic literature (1760s–1820s) in developing their respective variants of experimental prose. To date, the linguistic and textual characteristics (non-mimesis, ineffability) of the literary mode here called Experimental Gothic have not been comprehensively investigated, neither in Avant-Garde nor Gothic Studies. The proposed poetics of the Experimental Gothic indicates that the early avant-gardes did not straightforwardly recycle Gothic material but rather wove the praxis of contemporary theories of representation into their prosaic exploits, which were immersed in the imaginary, supernatural and irrational. The linguistic features of recognised works of avant-garde prose by luminaries such as Carl Einstein, Hugo Ball and Julien Gracq reveal the Experimental Gothic to be a language project spawned from anarchist backgrounds, which leads readers to reject their naïve belief in conventional representation in order to gain a renewed sense of reality.

The World Essay Film and the Politics of Traceability

Genèse d’un repas(Moullet, 1979), Ananas(Gitai, 1984) and The Forgotten Space (Burch & Sekula, 2010) constitute three cinematic attempts at representing the global production and distribution networks of commodities. Giorgio Avezzù and Giuseppe Fidotta argue in this chapter that these films, due to their central concern with late capitalism and globalisation, can be labelled ‘World Essay Films’. They question, however, the multi-layered dynamics of global economy and cinema from the standpoint of Cultural Geography and Visual Studies. Although the World Essay Film’s central question pertains to the ways in which the interconnectedness of the world can be made visible, material, spatial, these films also play, as they argue, on the anxieties related to the invisibility of late-capitalist world, whose flows and networks seem to escape conventional representation. This inherent contradiction poses a challenge to realistic aesthetics and the documentary.

Persiguiendo la utopía. Medios de comunicación Mapuche y la construcción de la utopía del Wallmapu

<p>In recent years, the demand for collective rights of the Mapuche people has increased. This has taken place in a global context in which alternative media have become effective tools for empowering vulnerable communities. Mapuche peoploe have fractured the «media landscape» in order to make their voices hearable, making their claims included in the (inter)national political agendas (inter) and transforming the conventional representation that mainstream media offer of the Mapuche subjetcs. This article offers a reflection emanating from an ethnographic work conducted in southern Chile in 2012 and pays attention to the place of indigenous media in the pro-indigenous rights struggle of the Mapuche mouvement and the importance of media in the constructiones and enhancement of the utopia of returning to the Mapuche Country as a political project.</p><p><strong>Published online</strong>: 11 December 2017</p>

Alien Visions

This chapter surveys animation’s depictions of aliens and alien worlds throughout the pre-war era, with an emphasis on two common approaches: depicting the other in a conventionally exotic manner and trying to convey a sense of what H. P. Lovecraft termed strangeness. With this iconic element animation also demonstrates another dimension of its intersection with modernism, particularly that movement’s questioning of conventional representation, while also underscoring its emphasis on what has been termed a “new visuality.” In addition, the chapter argues that these comic alien figures and strange worlds, much as in SF literature, often defy efforts to categorize animation under the heading of a conservative modernism, because of the way they are used to address a number of contemporary cultural concerns, including political, economic, and social issues.

Maritime Modernism: The Aqueous Form of Virginia Woolf's The Waves

Despite the rise of eco-critical approaches to Woolf's writing and a thriving debate as to whether her 1931 novel perpetuates or challenges colonialist axiomatics, The Waves has not inspired an extended, focused investigation of its articulation of aqueous nature and the latter's reshaping under imperial maritime power. This essay examines how a critique of maritime modernity emerges from The Waves' modernist orchestration of the seas. I contend that the work sets a conventional representation of the waters as facilitators of national and imperial progress against a counter-articulation that formally challenges it. The novel thus allows us to place it in the context of inscriptions of the seas by techno-sciences and international law during high imperialism and re-organizations of the seas as the empire contracts. Viewed in relation to the maritime recoding of the planet's hydrosphere, and the perceptual modes, narratives, and ethos of mastery it engenders, The Waves elucidates an alternative vision to a life-world made uneven by this recoding. Concentrating on waters, I conclude, allows us to glean a textured view of an understudied but persistent feature in Woolf's fiction.

Dream-Work of Dispossession

Essentially a cinema of occupation and dispossession, Palestinian cinema disrupts standard notions of national cinema, complicating conventional expectations of national aesthetics or national dreams. As the borders of Palestine's historical territory are continuously under erasure, so too are the symbolic boundaries of its language, which is flexible and inventive; the language of Palestinian cinema is a limit-language. No one has expressed this “limit condition” more succinctly than Elia Suleiman, whose cinematic language exemplifies a poetics of dispossession that depicts the asphyxiating spaces and truncated temporalities of Palestinian life with tragic humor and bold fantasy in defiance of narrative simplicity. Suleiman's films run counter to the conventional representation of Palestinian existence and are arguably the sharpest expressions of what can be deemed to be the dream-work of that existence against its conventional representation.

Domain Partitioned Transformation of Pump-Turbine Characteristic Curves in 3-D Space

Pump-turbine characteristic curves are the most important boundary condition in the hydraulic transient simulation of a pumped-storage hydropower station. Conventional representation of them, however, has serious defects, For instance, the “S” and “hump” shapes, composed of multiple values and steep twists, lead to the difficulty in interpolation between known guide-vane opening curves, which is necessary in hydraulic transient simulations. Here, a new transformation method was figured out to settle this problem thoroughly and to improve the accuracy of interpolation between the constant opening curves. Prior to the transformation, the characteristic curves are partitioned into eight domains. Curves of each domain were transformed through different formulae that fit the curves well. Eight characteristic surfaces in the 3-D space can be obtained by adding the guide vane opening as the coordinate axis. The theoretical method has been validated by the excellent agreements achieved by comparing the curves interpolated on the characteristic surfaces with the measured data.

Dismantling Heroism: The Exhaustion of War in Don Quijote

A la guerra me llevami necesidad;si tuviera dinerosno fuera en verdad.My poverty takes me off to war;if I had money, believe me, I wouldn�t go.War is everywhere and nowhere in don quijote. It consumes don quijote's thoughts but seldom appears in the guise he expects. War animates the protagonist's most elaborate, potent fantasy of self-aggrandizement and social climbing, in which he lends his strong arm to a king to help him fight his wars and is rewarded with the king's daughter (Cervantes, Don Quijote 211–15). Yet as Don Quijote sets about trying to make his name through daring feats, actual war seems both elusive and overwhelming. Instead, Cervantes gives us a series of fantasies that ironize the conventional representation of heroism in a romance key, registering the anachronism of the single knight in a world marked by the collective allegiances of epic. At the same time, through a series of burlesque battles, the text reflects on the incommensurability of humanist pieties about war and its actual experience. Finally, in its engagement with problems of religious and ethnic difference, Don Quijote registers the contrast between war as it might be and the conflicts Spain actually experienced both within and beyond its borders.