Theorizing Audience and Spectatorial Agency

This chapter analyses Georgian audiences and spectatorial agency through several lenses: psychoanalytic film theory, theories of the public sphere and of mass publicity, and media studies of cultural convergence. The first section reads Georgian theatre’s heterogeneous playbills as a syntactical rendering of the audience, the imaginary community of the nation in process of negotiation. The second section shows theatrical paratexts blurring the boundary between theatre and coffee house, creating a theatrical public sphere in which the audience exercises daily public agency in saving or damning the play. The third section highlights the mingling of vulnerability and charisma in the celebrity prologue-speaker, a figure who both judges and entrances the audience while also embodying actors’ exposure to possible audience wrath. The final section looks at the theatres’ encouragement of spouting clubs as a means of channelling spectatorial agency

Beyond Representation: Philosophy And Poetic Imagination

The essays in this volume explore the ways in which traditional philosophical problems about self-knowledge, self-identity, and value have migrated into literature since the Romantic and Idealist periods. How do so-called literary works take up these problems in a new way? What conception of the subject is involved in this literary practice? How are the lines of demarcation between philosophy and literature problematized. The contributors examine these issues with reference both to Romantic and Idealist writers and to some of their subsequent literary and philosophical inheritors and revisers. Their essays offer a philosophical understanding of the roots and nature of contemporary literary and philosophical practice, and elaborate powerful and influential, but rarely decisively articulated, conceptions of the human subject and of valu

An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Art

In this book Richard Eldridge presents a clear and compact survey of philosophical theories of the nature and significance of art. Drawing on materials from classical and contemporary philosophy as well as from literary theory and art criticism, he explores the representational, expressive, and formal dimensions of art, and he argues that works of art present their subject matter in ways that are of enduring cognitive, moral, and social interest. His discussion, illustrated with a wealth of examples, ranges over topics such as beauty, originality, imagination, imitation, the ways in which we respond emotionally to art, and why we argue about which works are good, His accessible study will be invaluable to students and to all readers who are interested in the relation between thought and art

Radiotelemetry Of Heart Rates From Free-Ranging Gulls

A lightweight radiotelemetry system with a range of 80 km was used to monitor heart rate from free-ranging Herring Gulls on flights of up to 20 km. Heart rate varied from 130 beats/min in a resting bird to 625 beats/min for sustained flight. Soaring birds showed rates similar to those of birds sitting quietly on the ground. Simultaneous records of telemetered heart rate and intraspecific conflict on the nesting island revealed that cardiac acceleration preceded overt visual communication. Intensely aggressive behavior was accompanied by heart rates approaching those of sustained flight. Heart rate as a measure of metabolic cost indicates that the gull\u27s behavioral adaptations for long-distance flight, food location and intraspecific communication result in major energy savings