68,507 research outputs found
Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity
Copyright lawyers talk and write a lot about the uncertainties of fair use and the deterrent effects of a clearance culture on publishers, teachers, filmmakers, and the like, but know less about the choices people make about copyright on a daily basis, especially when they are not working. Here, Tushnet examines one subcultural group that engages in a variety of practices, from pure copying and distribution of others\u27 works to creation of new stories, art, and audiovisual works: the media-fan community. Among other things, she discusses some differences between fair use and fan practices, focused around attribution as an alternative to veto rights over uses of copyrighted works
Measure for Measure: A Critical Consumers' Guide to Reading Comprehension Assessments for Adolescents
A companion report to Carnegie's Time to Act, analyzes and rates commonly used reading comprehension tests for various elements and purposes. Outlines trends in types of questions, stress on critical thinking, and screening or diagnostic functions
âYou will see the logic of the design of thisâ: from historiography to taxonomography in the contemporary metafiction of Sarah Watersâs Affinity
Although, in some ways, Sarah Watersâs Affinity looks akin to historiographic metafiction, M.-L. Kohlke has persuasively argued that the text is more accurately dubbed ânew(meta)realismâ, a mode that demonstrates the exhausted potential of the form. This article suggests that genre play and a meta-generic mode, dubbed taxonomography, might be a further helpful description for the mechanism through which Watersâs novel effects its twists and pre-empts the expectations of an academic discourse community. This reading exposes Watersâs continuing preoccupation with the academy but also situates her writing within a broader spectrum of fiction that foregrounds genre as a central concern. Ultimately, this article asks whether Watersâs novel can, itself, be considered as a text that disciplines its own academic study in the way that it suggests that the academy has become, once more, blind to class
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Back to where we came from: evolutionary psychology and childrenâs literature and media
In 2010, The New York Times ran an article which announced that âthe next big thing in English [Studies]â was âusing evolutionary theory to explain fictionâ. This announcement may be considered somewhat belated, given that the interest in the potential relevance of evolutionary psychology to literary studies might be traced back to a considerably earlier date than 2010. Joseph Carroll first published on the subject as far back as 1995, and by 2002 Steven Pinker could claim that âwithin the academy, a growing number of mavericks are looking to Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to re-establish human nature as the center of any understanding of the artsâ. Nevertheless, The New York Timesâs announcement may be taken as a measure of an increasingly visible trend in both popular and academic thinking.
We argue in this chapter that this trend is motivated specifically by nostalgia, or the longing for a past which seems forever lost. A second aspect of this nostalgia will also be discussed to do with the way that we argue that this supposedly ânewâ area of research repeats exactly a long history of prior claims of many eminent childrenâs literature critics with respect to ideas of childhood, language and childrenâs literature and media. Despite the repeated, insistent claims of several of the Literary Darwinists, including, for instance, Joseph Carroll, one of the founders of this way of thinking, that they are working in heroic opposition to a dominant, obscurantist and anti-science âliterary theoryâ, we argue here that in fact there is a high degree of convergence between the claims made about childhood, language and childrenâs literature in Literary Darwinism and much childrenâs literature criticism. We therefore see Literary Darwinism and (childrenâs) literature studies as not being in any sense about an opposition or separation between science and literary or humanist studies, but about a convergence underpinned and driven by the same nostalgia for a singular, stable, uniform and universal past, leading to a singular, stable, uniform and universal present.
Finally, we suggest that it is not just in these two fields in which this nostalgia operates, but that this can currently be seen in sub-streams within many disciplines â in both in arts, sciences and humanities -- as a founding, powerfully political, driver
The Faculty Notebook, September 2016
The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost
David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and 'The Novel of Globalization': biopower and the Secret History of the Novel
David Mitchell's debut novel Ghostwritten (1999) not only depicts a globalized world; its peculiar formal organization also embodies the mode of relatedness that characterizes globalization. This article shows that the invisible, decentralized power that defines globalization can be understood as what Michel Foucault called biopower. As a novel of globalization, Mitchell's novel lays bare the hidden historical and theoretical affinities between the novel genre on the one hand and biopower on the other
The invention of facts: Benthamâs ethics and the education of public taste
This article uses Jeremy Benthamâs comments on taste and ethics to analyse the efforts of âPhilosophical Radicalâ members of the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6, including Benthamâs executor and editor John Bowring, to apply utilitarianism to questions of public taste. The application of utilitarian thinking to questions of public taste by Members of Parliament was an unlikely occurrence, but it raised problems of ethics, governance and public pedagogy that persist to this day. Bentham had sketched out a utilitarian approach to public taste in his writing on âRules Respecting the Method of Transplanting Lawsâ, where the correspondence between individuals and tastes is presented as a set of contingent statements within a signifying system. However, the problem of describing taste as a set of contingent statements is that it challenges the âinterest begotten prejudiceâ that may be expressed in judgments of sympathy or antipathy. My analysis of the problems attending Benthamâs wish to set âprejudice apartâ in discussions of taste, is undertaken with specific reference to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacanâs emphasis on the importance of what he termed âthe utilitarian conversionâ in ethics. Lacanâs praise for Bentham and the âTheory of Fictionsâ demonstrates a limited insight into the importance of Benthamâs ethics, while misunderstanding some of its most important features. I argue that Benthamâs treatment of fact, rather than fiction, gives us a more precise route to the place of the unconscious in Benthamâs thought, as well as a better understanding of a utilitarian consciousness of taste
Towards an Ethic of Reciprocity: The Messy Business of Co-creating Research with Voices from the Archive
Do contemporary practices of attribution go far enough in acknowledging the contribution that others make to our work, particularly when they speak from the archive? The autobiographical fiction Faces in the Water (1961) from acclaimed author Janet Frame (1924-2004) draws on her experiences of residing in various New Zealand mental hospitals between 1945 and 1953. It is a rare and comprehensive account of the patient experience of these institutions that provided a critical lens for my doctoral research. Perhaps more importantly, through this text Frame taught me how difficult histories should be written, about the ambiguities we must accept and the value adjustments to be made in order to make sense of confounding inhumanity. Nowhere within my dissertation is the depth of this contribution acknowledged; a position developed out of respect for her familyâs active opposition to the âpatronisingâ and âpathologising discourseâ that continues to haunt contemporary receptions of Frameâs work. Within this paper I employ autoethnography to make explicit the process of working through a question that haunted me well beyond the completion of my doctoral research: whether contemporary practices of citation and acknowledgement are sufficient to value research contributions from beyond the grave. I will examine whether Frameâs contribution is commensurate with contemporary qualifications for co-authorship and the burdens of academic practice that act to suppress these conversations
Resonances of the Unknown
Purpose â The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevance of second-order cybernetics for a theory of architectural design and related discourse.
Design/methodology/approach â First, the relation of architectural design to the concept of âpoiesisâ is clarified. Subsequently, selected findings of Gotthard GĂŒnther are revisited and related to an architectural poetics. The last part of the paper consists of revisiting ideas mentioned previously, however, on the level of a discourse that has incorporated the ideas and offers a poetic way of understanding them
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