538 research outputs found
To have done with theory? Baudrillard, or the literal confrontation with reality
Baudrillard, Eluding the temptation to reinterpret Jean Baudrillard once more, this work started from the ambition to consider his thought in its irreducibility, that is, in a radically literal way. Literalness is a recurring though overlooked term in Baudrillardâs oeuvre, and it is drawn from the direct concatenation of words in poetry or puns and other language games. It does not indicate a realist positivism but a principle that considers the metamorphoses and mutual alteration of things in their singularity without reducing them to a general equivalent (i.e. the meaning of words in a poem, which destroys its appearances).
Reapplying the idea to Baudrillard and finding other singular routes through his âpasswordsâ is a way to short-circuit its reductio ad realitatem and reaffirm its challenge to the hegemony of global integration. Even in the literature dedicated to it, this exercise has been rarer than the âhermeneuticalâ one, where Baudrillardâs oeuvre was taken as a discourse to be interpreted and explained (finding an equivalent for its singularity).
In plain polemic with any ideal of conformity between theory and reality (from which our present conformisms arguably derive, too), Baudrillard conceived thought not as something to be verified but as a series of hypotheses to be repeatedly radicalised â he often described it as a âspiralâ, a form which challenges the codification of things, including its own. Coherent with this, the thesis does not consider Baudrillardâs work either a reflection or a prediction of reality but, instead, an out-and-out act, a precious singular object which, interrogated, âthinksâ us and our current events âbackâ.
In the second part, Baudrillardâs hypotheses are taken further and measured in their capacity to challenge the reality of current events and phenomena. The thesis confronts the âhypocriticalâ position of critical thinking, which accepts the present principle of reality. It questions the interminability of our condition, where death seems thinkable only as a senseless interruption of the apparatus. It also confronts the solidarity between orthodox and alternative realities of the COVID pandemic and the Ukrainian invasion, searching for what is irreducible to the perfect osmosis of âvirtual and factualâ.
Drawing equally from the convulsions of globalisation and the psychopathologies of academics, from DeLilloâs fiction and Baudrillardâs lesser-studied influences, this study evaluates the irreversibility of our system against the increasingly silent challenges of radical thought. It looks for what an increasingly pessimistic late Baudrillard called ârogue singularitiesâ: forms which, often outside the conventional realms one would expect to find them, constitute potential sources of the fragility of global power.
âTo have done with theoryâ does not mean abandoning radical thought and, together with it, the singularity of humanity. It means, as the thesis concludes, the courage to leave conventional ideas of theory and listen to less audible voices which, at the heart of this âenormous conspiracyâ, whisper â as a mysterious lady in Mariupol did to Putin â âItâs all not true! Itâs all for show!â
Microbe Hunters
Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif was first published in 1926 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. It dramatically recounts the breakthrough discoveries of the fundamental elements of bacteriology. It features exciting profiles of Antony Leeuwenhoek, Lazzaro Spallanzani, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Ămile Roux, Emil Behring, Ălie Metchnikoff, Theobald Smith, David Bruce, Ronald Ross, Battista Grassi, Walter Reed, and Paul Ehrlich. Their development of germ theory and its scientific proofs led to the first effective treatments for human diseases like anthrax, rabies, diptheria, malaria, sleeping sickness, syphilis, and yellow fever. They also made discoveries that saved the dairy, wine, beer, silk, and cattle industries. These determined experimenters proved time and again that tiny living beings only seen by microscope can have huge impacts on human life, and they emphatically demonstrated the value of science for modern civilization. A best seller in its time, the work is an enduring classic that has inspired many scientific careers.
Paul de Kruif (1890â1971) was an American microbiologist and World War I veteran who turned to writing after his dismissal from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research because of his controversial opinions on current medical practice published in a book of essays. Among his other works, he also assisted Sinclair Lewis with the background of science for the novel Arrowsmith (1925).
doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.zea.1503https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1147/thumbnail.jp
Iterative musical collaboration as palimpsest: Suite Inversée and The Headroom Project
Suite inversée is a musical work, co-composed by the two authors asynchronously
online by means of file transfer alone and digitally presented using a self-made web
app called The Headroom Project. The Headroom Project mediates the compositional
project during creation as well as allowing the listener to browse a historical thread
that weaves through the developmental process: through this app, each audio file that
was shared between the two composers can be heard and considered both in and out
of the context of its creation. The framework of the project provided the opportunity
for the authors to reflect on issues of remote digital collaboration and the palimpsest
nature of a work revealed in varying stages of evolution through a novel mode of
presentation. This paper discusses the mode of creation by situating it within narratives
of composition and technology
Manifestation: masculinity on the female body in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
At the end of Michael Shapiroâs highly influential Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (1996) was an appendix comprising a âChronological list of Plays with Heroines in Male Disguiseâ from 1570-1642 (221). This thesis focuses on the plays written in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in order to establish the development of a subgenre of female to male crossdressing and examines the expectations for female crossdressing characters and gender expression. Organized by authorial groupings and then an overview of outlying plays, the thesis seeks to contextualize heroine crossdressing as a trope contributed to by a substantial cohort of playwrights. Although Shakespearean drama is discussed first, this is not to prioritize his work but rather seeks to demonstrate how conservative his use of such tropes is in comparison with later playwrights. His plays provide evidence of an Elizabethan adherence to structure and limitations for female crossdressers that are later developed. Thomas Heywoodâs plays exemplify the growing attention and interest in heroine crossdressing. He features a character who is minor and rudimentary; another who is derivative but reflects newly popularized archetypes; while his most detailed is an epic character who serves as the main protagonist of her narrative. Plays by Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and John Webster are at the heart of the new genre and testify to an established public desire for female crossdressing characters onstage, while their characters begin to evolve the trope and introduce diverse new traits, relationship arcs, and resolutions. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, in collaboration with Phillip Massinger, abandon the restrictions of Elizabethan standards in exchange for increasingly transgressive innovations. Over the course of eight plays, they become masters in creating crossdressing heroines. Finally, an evaluation of individual dramas written by several authors establishes how the creation, growth, and scope of such heroine crossdressers reveals evolving expectations for gendered performances in early modern England
Ophelia
Ophelia (1851-2) is the title of a Pre-Raphaelite painting by John Everett Millais narrating the final moments of Shakespeareâs heroine in Hamlet (1599-1601): the former is considered the best-known picture in all Victorian art and the latter, the greatest work in English literature. Nonetheless, Ophelia owes its significance and enduring popularity to these monumental artworks, as well as the fantasies of âWomanâ she embodies in successive discourses, and the material, semantic, and social networks she progressively integrates. The eight-hundred years span of such networks, their size and complexity across media and cultures, seem proof enough to consider Ophelia a âhyperobject.â Although Timothy Morton introduced it as a philosophical and ecological concept to deal with âthings that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans,â Ophelia shows the same characteristic properties (viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undularity, phasing, interobjectivity) and ontological structure, a mesh constituted by a dynamic mixture of strands in which component objects interact, and gaps in which they withdraw remaining unknowable. The reconceptualization constructs Ophelia as a new object of transdisciplinary research, overcoming limitations of previous studies that focused on character analysis, historical period, or discipline. Further, the hyperobject provides an ideal medium in which Ophelia arises, develops, and is resolved or abandoned as problem, and of which the answers to that problem are also part. The chapters that follow will address three questions about Millaisâ Ophelia: What is Millaisâ answer to Ophelia? Where does Ophelia fit in art history and modernity? What did Millais want from Ophelia and what does Ophelia want from the public
Romantic Citation and the Receding Future
This dissertation reads citation in Romantic literature as an aporetic movement between present and past, whereby what is cited becomes the receding ground on which the present and futureâs erosion is inscribed. Citation exceeds quotation in that it forwards a disastrous intertextuality that retroactively determines not only past texts but events, histories, objects, and genres as accelerants that overshadow and ghost the present with its own extinction. Against generative modes of intertextuality such as those of Kristeva and Bakhtin in which textsâ repetitions of other texts facilitates the open-ended overturning and transformation of prior writing, citation precipitates a no future. This no future of Romantic citation, inflected by the periodâs geological insights into the earthâs history as layers of sedimented disasters and extinctions, registers anteriority as topographical depths whose pre-spent force attenuates futurity. Citation thus discloses the destructive feedback loop underlying the generation of âprogressâ or open-ended futures from the past. Chapter 1 examines how in Childe Haroldâs Pilgrimage Byronâs re-collection of historyâs ruins becomes a symptom of a post- and pre-post-Waterloo history entropically recycling itself and backdating its âend of historyâ further into the past and expansively across the globe. In chapter 2, Mary Shelleyâs The Last Man cites literary texts as a form of dĂ©jĂ vu by which we discover ourselves as extinct proleptically in the literary past. Chapter 3 proposes that Percy Shelleyâs re-cycled tropes and circular plots in the later poems encode the later poetryâs archaeological pull toward his corpusâs dark ground in the form of his early novel St. Irvyne and his other early Gothic texts that shadow his corpus with the specter of its exhaustion. And in chapter 4, Blakeâs Jerusalem ends (Blakeâs) history by re-citing his earlier works as if they were engines of apocalypse conspiratorially orientated toward Jerusalemâs abyssally predestined redemption, a volatile redemption that accelerates the burnout of Blakeâs âSystemâ rather than its survival into the future
An Age of Crisis
Originally published in 1959. This book examines the French Enlightenment by analyzing critical thought in eighteenth-centruy France. It examines the philosophes' views on evil, free will and determinism, and human nature. This is an interesting group to look at, according to Crocker, because French Enlightenment thinkers straddled two vastly different time periods
Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature
This is the first part of a new narratological history of Greek literature, which deals with the definition and boundaries of narrative and the role of narrators and narratees.; Readership: All those interested in ancient Greek literature, narrative theory, literary history, comparative literature
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