From the Experimental to Experimentalism. Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar in Paris (1963-1973)

This thesis analyses a shift in the history of experimental writing during which literary experimentation stopped being circumscribed by the historical avant-gardes and adopted a more democratic, ludic and inclusive approach to the textual experience: what I will term an experimentalism. In order to illuminate this shift I will explore works written in Paris by Julio Cortázar and Italo Calvino between 1963 and 1973, including Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) [Hopscotch (1966)], 62: Modelo para armar (1968) [62: A Model Kit (1972)] and Libro de Manuel (1973) [A Manual for Manuel (1978)], and Calvino’s Le cosmicomiche (1965) [Cosmicomics (1968)], Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969) [The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1976)] and Le città invisibili (1972) [Invisible Cities (1974)]. I will also pay special attention to their collaboration, La fosse de Babel (1972), as it combines their experimentalisms and is pivotal to the shift I theorise. I will read this development of the experimental as a product of a history that begins with Émile Zola’s Le Roman Experimental (1880), through which the novel became a laboratory for social experiment, changing with the emergence of the historical avant-gardes between the 1910s and 1930s, as the experiment focused on language in order to challenge tradition and the establishment. I will offer a revision of Umberto Eco’s reading on this shift while challenging his ideas on the open work. This will allow me to undertake a comparative study of Cortázar’s and Calvino’s experimental writings in Paris, where other new avant-garde groups such as the nouveau roman writers were publishing innovative novels and members of the Oulipo were exploring the potentiality of literary constraints. I will, however, contend that the events of May ’68 triggered a point of no return for their experimental practices. Influenced by the Cuban revolution, Cortázar developed his revolutionary poetics further, while Calvino continued to play with combinatorial inventiveness, vouchsafing his membership in the Oulipo in 1973. Such a comparison will provide a contextual understanding to these authors’ experimentalisms at the same time that will venture a re-examination of its political and critical meanings

Corrosion assessment and enhanced biocompatibility analysis of biodegradable magnesium-based alloys

Magnesium alloys have raised immense interest to many researchers because of its evolution as a new third generation material. Due to their biocompatibility, density, and mechanical properties, magnesium alloys are frequently reported as prospective biodegradable implant materials. Moreover, magnesium based alloys experience a natural phenomena to biodegrade in aqueous solutions due to its corrosive activity, which is excellent for orthopedic and cardiovascular applications. However, major concerns with such alloys are fast and non-uniform corrosion degradation. Controlling the degradation rate in the physiological environment determines the success of an implant. In this investigation, three grades of magnesium alloys: AZ31B, AZ91E and ZK60A were studied for their corrosion resistance and biocompatibility. Scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy and contact angle meter are used to study surface morphology, chemistry, roughness and wettability, respectively. Additionally, the cytotoxicity of the leached metal ions was evaluated by a tetrazolium based bio-assay, MTS

Counter strike 1.6 calls to play: a multimodal analysis of the game couver

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, Florianópolis, 2010Vídeo jogos, considerados um fenômeno de entretenimento de massa contemporâneo, vem sendo estudados e utilizados nas mais diversas áreas. Na Educação, cada vez mais docentes se aderem a esta prática como um meio de interação com as tecnologias de informação (Aarseth, 1997, Lemke, 2002) e os utilizam como uma ferramenta potencial para promover pensamento crítico (Frasca, 2001). No Brasil, o uso de vídeo jogos na Educação é ainda uma prática nova e restrita. Contudo, o rico conteúdo semiótico destes jogos e a familiaridade generalizada dos estudantes com este meio fazem com que sejam incluídos entre as fontes de material para o multiletramento (Unsworth, 2007, 2001; Christie, 2005; Gee, 2005; Jenkins & Squire, 2003). Esta situação levanta questões referentes às representações semióticas dos vídeo jogos, como assim também, à criação de aplicativos adequados ao multiletramento. Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo compreender e interpretar a representação multimodal do discurso de guerra como entretenimento, na capa do jogo de tiro Counter Strike 1.6. O estudo, baseado principalmente nos trabalhos de Kress e van Leeuwen (1996), Unsworth (2001; 2006) e Machin e van Leeuwen (2009), revela que: 1) o propósito ou função da capa sugere ter influenciado nas escolhas feitas para a composição da mesma. Nela se dá ênfase à representação glamurizada do soldado da força antiterrorista e são abstraídas possíveis representações explicitas de guerra; 2) as funções Representacional, Interativa e Composicional (GDV) articulam-se através dos modos de representação e realizam o trabalho conjunto de tentar fundir, visualmente falando, as fronteiras entre a representação da guerra na realidade da vida e na realidade do jogo; 3) efeitos de áudio e som contextualizam o jogo em um determinado gênero como assim também, a espacialização dos ambientes criados em mapas locais; 4) o tipo de letra escolhido para facilitar a compreensão de textos enquanto se joga sob pressão de tempo, pode espelhar uma mudança nos hábitos de leitura na era da computação. Concluo o presente trabalho refletindo sobre o uso de vídeo jogos, mesmo quando o tema for controvertido, e, sugiro possíveis atividades que incluam vídeo jogos como material para uma abordagem critica ao letramento multimodal

Digital picaresque studies and the Academia Picaresca

This dissertation contributes to the Digital Humanities in general and to the study of the picaresque novel in particular. Its immediate goal is to coordinate and enhance the dialogue of scholars and readers of the picaresque. In order to accomplish this objective, I created an extensive digital bibliography and textual archive whose search capacity and structure were designed to host and foster dialogue among critics and lay readers alike. The bibliography and archive are presented in the form of a Zotero Group Library. Zotero is a free, downloadable software application that allows for the crowd-sourcing and collaborative annotation of primary and secondary references and texts by scholarly communities. The group library I have developed and begun to annotate (and which contains over 1900 works to date) represents a living medium of exchange and will always maintain its essential status as a collective work in progress. The dissertation’s objective is to cultivate order within the field, such that all who use the library will have a progressively better reading and research experience and thus feel empowered to make their own contributions to the ongoing dialogue. The technological infrastructure provided by this project will contribute to our shared endeavor as students, readers, and scholars of the picaresque. The dissertation’s Introduction discusses digital technology within a specialized scholarly community and attempts to demonstrate how digital tools can be successfully employed in traditional literary research and criticism. It is followed by two appendices: the first, a “user’s manual” for the library (its “Readme” file); the second, an automatically generated bibliography of the library’s current contents. This document is accompanied by two supplemental files, both of which represent exports of the Zotero library—one RDF (with notes but without files) and one CSV (with notes, in UTF-8 without BOM)

The political avant-garde: Oppositional documentary in Britain since 1990

This thesis explores radical left-wing documentary produced in Britain since 1990. Despite constituting a lively and diverse part of contemporary British film culture, oppositional documentary has been overlooked by film and media scholars for much of the last twenty-five years. Indeed, the last book-length study of radical British filmmaking was Margaret Dickinson’s Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90 (1999). The lack of subsequent research on the topic suggests that a politicised documentary film culture in Britain is now all but non-existent. Yet, on the contrary, the thesis reveals oppositional documentary to be a thriving aspect of alternative British culture, albeit one that has undergone significant changes as it has adapted to the major technological, socio-economic and political developments that have taken place since 1990.As well as recovering this history, this thesis also suggests some reasons for its neglect in the first place. Asserting an admittedly problematic yet necessary distinction between the aesthetic and the political avant-garde, I claim oppositional documentary as a manifestation of the latter: an explicitly partisan and committed kind of filmmaking in which the need for aesthetic innovation is subordinate to the communication of political ideas. The legacy of a trend dominant in political film theory since the 1970s, I argue that the values and priorities of the aesthetic avant-garde have become the benchmark of political film practice such that the very existence of the political avant-garde has been effaced altogether. Exploring both the video-activist and feature-length efforts of oppositional documentary filmmakers over the last two decades, this thesis re-claims the political avant-garde as an important part of contemporary radical filmmaking in Britain

Roberto Arlt : translation and the construction of genre

[From the introduction]:Roberto Arlt is generally considered by critics the forerunner of the Latin American "boom". Arlt's innovative style reflects a fascination with the popular and a trenchant social realism fused with fantasy; his oeuvre is considered to have paved the way for later Latin American magic realism. Though distinguished names such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar praised his work, still, Arlt has long been considered by lesser figures a marginal voice, a tragicomic commentator on life, anautodidact and journalist, a writer who could not even spell. Only fairly recently has his place in the Argentine canon been granted; elsewhere, Arltian scholars and critics regard Arlt's work as an incisive portrait of its epoch, a much deserved milestone that secured the author a literary place that his contemporaries tried to deny him

Representation of the political in selected writings of Julio Cortázar

This thesis analyses the evolution of the representation of distinct political elements through Julio Cortázar’s writings, mainly with reference to the novels and the so-called collage books. I also allude to some short stories and refer to many of Cortázar’s nonliterary texts. Through this chosen corpus, I trace a thematic thread showing that politics was present in Cortázar’s fiction from his very first writings, and not – as he himself tended to claim – only following his conversion to socialism after a lifechanging trip to revolutionary Cuba. My analysis aims to show that in opposition to what many critics have argued, this crucial point in his life did not divide the writer into an irreconcilable before and after – the apolitical versus the political –, but rather, it simply shifted the emphasis of the representation of the political, which already existed in Cortázar’s writings. In order to trace this process, I carry out my analysis in chronological order, not of the publication of the works, but of the actual time when they were written. Therefore, in the first chapter, I look at some of the books written between 1948 and 1951, namely, Divertimento (1949), El examen (1950) and Diario de Andrés Fava (1951), focusing mainly on El examen; I then extend the analysis to Los premios (1960), written when Cortázar was already living in Paris. Chapter two focuses on Rayuela (1963) and the action/inaction dilemma as reflected in the novel’s protagonist. The third chapter considers a period of conflict for Cortázar, as he tries to come up with a way in which to write literature for the political revolution of Latin America, without compromising his belief in artistic freedom. To elucidate this phase, I analyse 62/modelo para armar (1968) on the one hand, and the collage books, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967) and Último Round (1969), on the other. My fourth and final chapter examines Libro de Manuel (1973), Cortázar’s explicit attempt to converge literature, politics and history, and assesses the results of this effort to merge art and politics, allegedly without making aesthetic concessions. Although there have been works analysing the political dimension of specific texts (particularly of his short stories), no study to date has analysed the evolution of the political element throughout Cortázar’s writings, from the first unpublished novels to his later more experimental works. The originality of my thesis lies in the tracing of this progression through an extensive analysis of these works. My examination is also original insofar as it refers to unpublished material – a selection of Cortázar’s manuscripts from Princeton University Library – to the most recent posthumous publications – such as Papeles inesperados (2009) – and to a series of personal interviews with Argentinian writers associated with Cortázar. This research therefore hopes to bring unique insight that will further the overall understanding of this major and influential writer of the twentieth century