Depictions of Genetic Research in Film Across Film Genres

When people do not have personal experience to draw on, the experiences of characters in film can serve in the mind as a substitute. This research sought to determine what kind of impression films depicting genetics research leave on the audience. These genres were romance (Code 46, 2004), horror (Splice, 2009), thriller (Children of Men, 2006), and drama (Gattaca, 1997). Scenes from the films were analyzed to determine their likely effect on the audience perception of genetics. The researcher hypothesized that the drama and romance films would portray genetics research as neutral, but the science would be less accurate, and that the horror and thriller films would portray genetics research negatively but contain more accurate science. The overall effect of the two factors on audience perception of genetics research was discussed, and a conclusion about overall depiction across the four films was then drawn

Virtual Aesthetics and Ethical Communication: Towards Virtuous Reality Design

This thesis argues that ethics can and should be applied to Second Life avatar design and behavior. Second Life is a unique virtual reality due to its connection to the physical world primarily through financial devices. Users buy and sell virtual and physical goods over these networks; the avatar, it is argued, is the primary instrument for persuasion in these contexts. Avatars facilitate a virtual aesthetic that is primarily \u27natural.\u27 By creating aesthetic avatars, the developers of Second Life enable audiences to affectively associate with other \u27residents.\u27 Not only is the avatar designed for aesthetic appeal, but it enables users to move, act, and interact in an online environment--to vicariously experience the emotions that accompany those actions. In the real world, individuals\u27 actions have ethical consequences. Behavior in Second Life, it is argued, should be subject to ethics as determined by democratic communities of users

Reconfiguring the Real: Art & Aesthetic Innovation in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Axiomatic Fictions

This study approaches six of Ishiguro’s novels –– A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), and Never Let Me Go (2005) – – through a treatment of these works as novelistic works of art. It derives its theoretical inspiration from aesthetic theories of art by Étienne Gilson, Graham Gordon, Peter Lamarque, Susanne Langer, and Nöel Carroll, as well as concepts found within the disciplines of philosophy of mind (especially phenomenology), post-classical narratology (possible world theory applied to literary studies), and studies on memory as well as narrative immersion. The point of departure of this study lies in its drawing attention to and placing of greater focus on the artistic character of Ishiguro’s style –– an examination of the aesthetic construction of his novels through close readings of his novels and early short stories. The thesis focuses on the ways in which the narrative form, voice, and structuration of Ishiguro’s works flaunt and flout the analytic unreal/real fictional paradox through a signposting of their fictionality, whilst paradoxically and simultaneously, producing an intensified feeling of the real through directed formal techniques. In so doing, my study also seeks to highlight a deceptive aspect of Ishiguro’s seemingly transparent prose, to show how it harbours a subtle experimental dimension working at the formal level of his novels. The duplicitous nature of his prose, I postulate, is the source of their original quality.1 What this results in consequently, the thesis postulates, is a mode of fiction that I term “axiomatic fiction” –– fiction that deftly negotiates fictional self-consciousness at the same time that it works to maintain a seamless semblance of poetic illusion that is able to captivate and enthral readers

Double time : Facing the future in migration’s past

Interpretations of Italian films about migration tend to refer to the historical experience of emigration or of colonialism as the historical coordinates through which these films are best understood. This article looks at four recent films featuring migrants in prominent roles that appear to elide such an interpretive framework. While the past and its intrusive effects do feature strongly in these films, it is difficult to produce a predictable linear and causal narrative that would link past, present, and future in predictable ways. Stylistically, the four films also represent a notable move away from the realist political agenda and aesthetic that has tended to dominate Italian film production on the topic of migration. This article argues that their adoption of the features that recall those of film noir (in its Italian manifestation) suggests a new range of thematic and social concerns that refer as much to possible futures as well as known pasts. There is a particular focus on the topic of bodily reproduction which is no longer limited to the sphere of the sexual. The opportunities offered by technology for the body to reproduce in new ways alters the parameters of how the nation might be imagined.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe