Review [of Peter Rawlings\u27 \u3cem\u3eHenry James and the Abuse of the Past\u3c/em\u3e]

[...] the abuse of the past becomes in James\u27s hands an art of fiction and the framework of an autobiography (67-68). According to Rawlings, Henry James\u27s late fiction specializes in constructing, within the volatile framework of philosophies of time then current, decadent mutations of America\u27s vanishing dreamers, characters arrested . . . by the forlorn realization that \u27we shall never be again as we were!\u27 (141-42)

Generative sound art as poeitic poetry for an information society

This paper considers computer music in relation to broader society and asks what algorithmic composition can learn from the metaphysical shift which is happening in the so-called information societies. This is explored by taking the mapping problem inherent in the use of extra- musical models in generative composition and presenting a simple generative schema which prioritises sound, ex- ploiting the generative potential of digital audio. It is sug- gested that the exploration of such models has more than aesthetic relevance and that the interdisciplinary nature of digital sound art represents a microcosm of an emerging reality, thereby constituting a poietic playground for com- ing to terms with the implications and challenges of the information age

Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and Fiction

The contested field of lesbian history exists along a continuum, with undisputed evidence on one end and informed speculation on the other. Lesbian historical fiction extends the spectrum, envisioning the lives of lesbian pirates, war heroes, pioneers, bandits, and stock romantic characters, as well as the handful of protagonists examined here whose quests specifically highlight the difficulty and importance of researching the lesbian past. The genre blossomed in the 1980s, just as the Foucauldian insistence that homosexual identity did not exist before the late nineteenth century gained sway in the academy. The proliferation of lesbian historical fictions signals the growing desire for more thorough (if not completely factual) historical underpinnings of the burgeoning lesbian identities, communities, and politics set in motion in the 1970s

Narratives of Modern Architecture: learning at the intersection of cross-historical constructions

This paper presents the results of experimental course work in 2015 with secondyear students at IE School of Architecture and Design under the auspices of Culture and Theory in Architecture I. The subject of the course is History of Modern Architecture. Importantly, this is the first contact IE students have with theory and history of architecture. One of the goals was to allow students to understand that history is not a monolithic object that stands before us ready-made, but a set multiple constructions in narrative form, hence necessarily a representation: a collection of stories, instead only one history. To accomplish this goal, the students were instructed to write their own particular narrative of a significative moment (building, design, event) in modern architecture.Este artículo muestra los resultados obtenidos en la docencia del curso de Cultura y Teoria en Arquitectura I durante el año 2015 en IE School of Architecture and Design. Este curso es el primer contacto de los alumnos con la teoría y la historia de la arquitectura, y su contenido principal fue la historia de la arquitectura moderna. Uno de los objetivos del curso ha sido hacer comprender a los aumnos que la historia no es un objecto monolítico que se encuentra ahí delante de nosotros para poder observarlo, sino un conjunto de múltiples construcciones que necesariamente tiene la forma de una narración. Es por tanto una representación. Para conseguir esto, se pidió a los alumnos que escribieran su propia historia de un momento significativo (un edificio, un proyecto, un acontecimiento) de la arquitectura moderna

"Author! Author!" : Shakespeare and biography

Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t714579626~db=all Copyright Informa / Taylor & Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/17450910902764454Since 1996, not a year has passed without the publication of at least one Shakespeare biography. Yet for many years the place of the author in the practice of understanding literary works has been problematized, and even on occasions eliminated. Criticism reads the “works”, and may or may not refer to an author whose “life” contributed to their meaning. Biography seeks the author in the works, the personality that precedes the works and gives them their characteristic shape and meaning. But the form of literary biography addresses the unusual kind of “life” that puts itself into “works”, and this is particularly challenging where the “works” predominate massively over the salient facts of the “life”. This essay surveys the current terrain of Shakespeare biography, and considers the key questions raised by the medium: can we know anything of Shakespeare's “personality” from the facts of his life and the survival of his works? What is the status of the kind of speculation that inevitably plays a part in biographical reconstruction? Are biographers in the end telling us as much about themselves as they tell us about Shakespeare?Peer reviewe

Corrections to the Newton and Coulomb potentials caused by effects of spacetime foam

We use an extended quantum field theory (EQFT) hep-th/9911168 to explore possible observational effects of the spacetime. It is shown that as it was expected the spacetime foam can provide quantum bose fields with a cutoff at very small scales, if the energy of zero - point fluctuations of fields is taken into account. It is also shown that EQFT changes the behaviour of massless fields at very large scales (in the classical region). We show that as $r\gg 1/\mu$ the Coulomb and Newton forces acquire the behaviour $\sim 1/r$ (instead of $1/r^{2}$).Comment: Latex, 4 page

Parallel deaths: logic and structure in the house of Poe

Throughout this article a through reading of the short-story titled “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe is proposed, with purpose of exposing it as a fully intentional construction. The sort of intentionally here is mentioned focuses on the structural framework, the narrative: its literary design. This analysis draws the reader’s attention specifically to the layout, frame and scenering of the tale in order to reveal parallel structures expressed in a symmetry between ground and figure. The work adresses as well the author’s intrusion within the text, the problema entailed by a referential language and the purposeful transformations resulting resulting from textual appropiation.A través de este artículo se propone una lectura minuciosa del relato “The Fall of the House of Usher” de Edgar Allan Poe, con el objeto de exponerlo como una construcción completamente intencional. La intencionalidad aquí mencionada se centra en el marco estructural, en la narrativa: su diseño literario. Este análisis dirige la atención del lector específicamente al diseño, estructura y entorno con el propósito de reveler estructuras paralelas: una simetría entre la forma y el fondo; considerado, así mismo, la intrusión del autor en el texto, el problema que supone un lenguaje referencial, así como las transformaciones intencionadas resultants de la apropiación textual

The Limits of Language as the Limits of the World: Cormac McCarthy’s and David Markson’s Post-Apocalyptic Novels

The article examines the correlation between the world and the word in two novels which engage with a post-apocalyptic scenario: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Shifting the focus from the very event of catastrophe to the notion of survival through memory and storytelling, both novels problematize the strained relationship between language and reality in an increasingly diminished and dehumanized world. My aim is to investigate the limits of language as well as its capacity to withstand the chaos, loss, trauma, and death that follow the apocalypse. The issues to be considered include the influence of external experience on forms of communication, the role of central metaphors (the archive and the museum in Markson’s novel; cinders and the road in McCarthy’s) and their relation to the form of both novels, as well as the word’s (in)capacity to preserve human values and hopes. Both novels will be discussed as deconstructionist projects in which language becomes a habitat at once impossible and life-preserving: in Wittgenstein’s Mistress it plays the role of both home and prison, whereas in The Road it functions as messianic discourse which simultaneously carries, propels and extinguishes the human hope for a transcendental reality beyond the post-apocalyptic emptiness and doubt