15,535 research outputs found
Spectatorsâ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance
In this paper we present a study of spectatorsâ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performersâ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performersâ breathing had a significant impact on spectatorsâ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences
Exceptional scale: metafiction and the maximalist tradition in contemporary American literary history
This dissertation reexamines the narrative practice of self-reflexivity through the lens of aesthetic size to advance a new approach to reading long-form novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whereas previous scholarship on the maximalist tradition relies on the totalizing rhetorics of endlessness, exhaustion, encyclopedism, and excess, I interpret the formâs reflexive awareness of its own enlarged scale as a uniquely narrative âknowledge workâ that mediates the readerâs experience of information-rich texts. Thus, my narrative and network theory-informed approach effectively challenges the analytical modes of prominent genre theories such as the Mega-Novel, encyclopedic narrative, the systems novel, and modern epic to propose a critical reading method that recovers the extra-literary discourses through which scalarity is framed. Following this logic, each chapter historicizes prior theories of literary scale in postwar U.S. fiction toward redefining cross-national differences that vary across the boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. Chapter two addresses the scholarly discourse of encyclopedism surrounding the Mega-Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Joseph McElroy. Posing an ethical challenge to popular critiques of metafictional aesthetics, both authors, I argue, contest one of the critical orthodoxies of realist formâthe âexceptionality thesisââwhich rests on an assumed separation between an audienceâs experience of fictional minds in a literary work and its understanding of actual minds in everyday life. In constructing a suitably massive networked platform on which to stage identity as a pluralistic work-in-progress, Gravityâs Rainbow and Women and Men, I contend, narrativize those operations of mind typically occluded from narrative discourse, and so make literal their authorsâ meta-ethical visions of a âmultiplying realâ as much a part of our world as the novelâs own. Chapter three focuses on the mise en abyme as a discursive practice in the labyrinthine narratives of Samuel R. Delany and Mark Z. Danielewski. My analysis posits The Mad Man and House of Leaves as immersive case studies on the academic reading experience by interrogating the satirical strategy of âmock scholarship,â in which a textual object at plotâs center is gradually displaced by the intra-textual reception history that surrounds it. Subtly complicating an increasingly imperceptible line between fact and its fictional counterpart, Delany and Danielewski, I assert, propose new forms of knowledge production through a multiplicity of potential âresearch spacesâ that micromanage the interpretive process while exceeding the structural contours that frame it. Chapter four considers the problem of literary canon formation in the polemical epics of Gayl Jones and Joshua Cohen. Across vast surveys of the stereotypes that mark their marginalization, Jones and Cohen transgress the metaphorical borders constructed between individual voice, collective identity, and the literary institutions that reify âethnoracial diversityâ as a belated form of cultural capital. Explicitly foregrounding the ideological gaps, errors, and omissions against which canonical classification is typically defined, Mosquito and Witz, I suggest, promote not so much a representative widening of the canonâs historically restrictive archive as a complete dissolution of the exclusionary practices it honors and preserves
1968 and transnational history in Emine Sevgi Ăzdamarâs Die BrĂŒcke vom Goldenen Horn
This article considers the representation of transnational political movements around 1968 in Ăzdamarâs autobiographical novel Die BrĂŒcke vom Goldenen Horn (1998). The transnational perspective enables Ăzdamar to articulate cultural transfers between Turkey, West Germany, Greece, Spain and Italy in the context of Cold War political activism. The article will show how the novel reappraises the political movements of the late sixties and early seventies as transnational phenomena which in West Germany included the participation of âGastarbeiterâ, thus serving as a corrective to Eurocentric histories of 1968. This is followed by a consideration of the cultural practices of the political activists. The characters continually reference a canon of revolutionary authors including Brecht, Lorca, Rosa Luxemburg and NĂązım Hikmet in order to foster a sense of transnational identity. The article comments on the relevance of Hikmetâs concept of secular resurrection for Ăzdamarâs novel. Finally the article considers how words are depicted as physical presences and bodies are subjected to physical transformation. These techniques are central to Ăzdamarâs utopian presentation of transnational political activism as an erotic experience
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The imaginary constitution of financial crises
This article proposes an alternative sociological framework for dealing with the imaginary constitution of financial crises. Theorisation of financial crises is often limited by dualistic juxtaposition of the rational and irrational, moral and immoral, calculative and intuitive, thus neglecting the imaginary structuring of such dyads in the construction of financial and fiscal realities. To address this lacuna, we introduce ideas from philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, and develop a framework that unpicks the often-suppressed, mediating and generative role of imagination in finance. On the one hand, we show how dominant forms of imagination enable the financialisation of contemporary societies, serving to sustain existing debt practices and lenderâdebtor relationships. On the other hand, we propose a re-animated âsociological imaginationâ that offers potential avenues for establishing alternative social visions of the future that will enable re-thinking of the nature of debt, money and financial institutions
"FlashForward": an experiment in Collective Memory Studies
"The thesis investigates the case of the modern Television drama series FlashForward and sets out to chart the employment of concepts of Collective Memory Studies in the narrative in order to reflect upon the ways of how social perceptions of the past and Collective Memory are remediated in the course of the narrative.
To achieve that goal, the thesis provides a selection of concepts and theories concerned with Collective Memory and its medial presentation. Then the series is set into context of a classification of âmegamoviesâ in order to identify characteristics inherent in complex narratives of series such as âBattlestar Galacticaâ, âBreaking Badâ, âLostâ,â Fringeâ,â Vâ and âFlashForwardâ. As a means of illustrating the complexity of the seriesânarration, an appendix provides additional information such as the first episodeâs mise-en-scĂšne, a chronological sequencing of this episode and an overview of the social relations evolving during the whole season of the show.
Subsequently, the characteristics are compared to the discourse of Collective Memory and relations such as the series as âfiction of memoryâ and âfiction of meta-memoryâ, the presence of intra- and extradiegetic remediations, and the specific role of the narrator in such a fiction of memory are revealed.
Finally, the thesis concludes that this television series plays with multiple concepts of Media of Collective Memory and adds a new dimension to the larger discussion about individual and collective memories. What is found in particular is a narration that adds a twist to the definition of memory, because it turns the temporal directionality of memories around.
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