Reading real person fiction as digital fiction:An argument for new perspectives

‘Real person fiction’ (RPF) is a subset of fanfiction that has gone largely unnoticed by academics. A handful of articles have argued for the justification of stories about real (living) people as a legitimate and morally sound art form, but only a very few studies have begun to consider RPF as a genre with its own aesthetics and conventions. This article argues that, to understand fannish RPF, we need to incorporate tools developed by scholars of digital fiction. Almost all fanfic is now produced for and on digital platforms, and moreover, the natural fit between RPF specifically and the study of metalepsis, or self-conscious movement between ‘levels’ of reality and fiction, makes this tool and others imported from the study of digital fiction an illuminating set of lenses through which read it. Along the way, I will incorporate further narrative theory to suggest that we understand appeals to the putative subject of RPF as directed to a ‘fictionalized addressee’, that is, an addressee who is neither purely fictional nor purely nonfictional, but a construct of mediated activity that demonstrates fandom’s participation in the construction of the subcultural celebrity

For a Modest Human Exceptionalism: Simone de Beauvoir and the 'New Materialisms'

The "new materialisms' offer an important critique of 'human exceptionalism, however they tend to overstate their case by ignoring those qualities of freedom that remain distinctive to human life. The paper turns to Simone de Beauvoir to make an argument for a more modest human exceptionalism

Semantic Publishing: issues, solutions and new trends in scholarly publishing within the Semantic Web era

This work is concerned with the increasing relationships between two distinct multidisciplinary research fields, Semantic Web technologies and scholarly publishing, that in this context converge into one precise research topic: Semantic Publishing. In the spirit of the original aim of Semantic Publishing, i.e. the improvement of scientific communication by means of semantic technologies, this thesis proposes theories, formalisms and applications for opening up semantic publishing to an effective interaction between scholarly documents (e.g., journal articles) and their related semantic and formal descriptions. In fact, the main aim of this work is to increase the users' comprehension of documents and to allow document enrichment, discovery and linkage to document-related resources and contexts, such as other articles and raw scientific data. In order to achieve these goals, this thesis investigates and proposes solutions for three of the main issues that semantic publishing promises to address, namely: the need of tools for linking document text to a formal representation of its meaning, the lack of complete metadata schemas for describing documents according to the publishing vocabulary, and absence of effective user interfaces for easily acting on semantic publishing models and theories

The Body and the East: Monstrous Encounters in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville

The main aim of the present dissertation is to analyse the monstrous presences in the Travels of John Mandeville and to compare them with the tradition from which they are taken. The recurring theme that links all chapters is the correlation between the physical body and monstrosity. Indeed, the monstrous creatures that Mandeville describes in his alleged journey in the Eastern land are often characterised by a deformation of the normative body. In some cases, the deformation is due to hybridisation between human and animal features, while in other cases it depends on the mutation of human characteristics. In the end, the results of these mutations are creatures that were believed to inhabit the East since the time of the Greeks, like Cynocephali, Sciapods and Blemmies. The existence of these creatures, however, was problematic: in the medieval categorisation of the world, every creature occupied a specific place in the hierarchy of creation. These creatures, however, were not fully human, so they could not be considered equal to humans, but at the same time they were not animals. In his description of the monstrous races, Mandeville is often ambiguous and contradictory in assigning to them human features like reason and in defining their societies as fully civilised. The discussion on anthropophagy represents another interesting connection between the body and monstrosity. Anthropophagy is one of the greatest taboos in the history of humankind and the attribution of anthropophagic habits to foreign cultures is recurrent in history. However, Mandeville often interprets anthropophagy as a link to his own culture, rather than a repugnant sign of monstrosity: he openly points out some parallels between cannibalistic funerary rites and the Eucharist. In the end, his depiction of these creatures is ambiguous and contradictory, describing a reality which is not easy to categorise

Pompeii: the living city and the world that never was: a true story of dreamers, schemers, anarchists and secret agents

This thesis is concerned with two books of narrative history, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents and Pompeii: The Living City, both written by me during the 2000s, the latter co-authored with Ray Laurence. Pompeii (2005) explores life in the Colonia Veneria Pompeiana, a provincial Italian city, in the middle of the first century CE, during the period prior to the eruption of Vesuvius in 69 CE. The World That Never Was (2009) offers an account of the Anarchist movement and its complex relationship with the police and intelligence services across an international diaspora during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871. [Extracted from the introduction of the thesis in the absence of an abstract

The Theory of Criticism

Originally published in 1976. Representing years of critical reflection, The Theory of Criticism attempts to construct a poetics of "presence." Within a wide range of critical terminology, Murray Krieger has sought to create a new vision. In language that is passionate and often dramatic, he looks at the multidimensionality of the poetic world through the lens of Western poetics. His work clearly addresses itself to post–New Critical questions: how to preserve the literary object as a thing to be perceived, valued, and enjoyed and yet to account for its presence in, and interaction with, our culture as a whole, always in danger of being dissolved into man's language-making and -forming activity in general. Our awareness of the poem as object must be modified by our awareness that it is an "intentional" object. Krieger develops his balanced vision in three parts. Part 1 defines the problem and defends the very activity of theorizing both in its own terms and in terms of the critic's function throughout the history of Western criticism. By asking at the outset whether criticism is vain or valuable, Krieger already confronts the basic tension between system and world and the need to account for both. By creating a heuristic system that examines the possibility of form, the critic serves also the world of history and thought as a whole. Part 2 pursues that history from the classical encounter with mimesis in Greek thought to the Romantic and post-Romantic elevation of consciousness as a main criterion of poetic art. Defining a "humanistic aesthetic" as it has been viewed since Aristotle, the author shows how, during and after the eighteenth century, form was opened up under the impact of a Kantian and post-Kantian view, epitomized finally by Coleridge's imagination and its consequences for recent theorists. Part 3 deals with the image of the world struggling against its enclosure within a poetic context. It expands our view of metaphor as a reflection of the dual nature of poetic language, simultaneously locked into the poem and referring to history and nature outside. Our reading of the poem, Krieger concludes, must be double: we must see the poem as a linear and chronological sequence reflecting real life, and we must read it as a circular, imitative, mutually implicative mode

Restorative justice : a Marxist analysis

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 468-504)

American Opera, Jazz, and Historical Consciousness, 1924-1994

From the 1970s through the early 1990s numerous critics commented on an apparent “rebirth” of American opera. Subsequent scholarship has increasingly sanctioned a consensus view holding up Philip Glass and John Adams as the central figures in this opera resurgence. Although I do not dispute the importance of (post-)minimalism in these decades, my gambit in this dissertation is to reframe the idea of a late twentieth-century operatic renaissance by tracing a long relationship between jazz and the concept of American opera. The jazz genealogy of American opera that I develop in this study is intended not only to draw attention to a body of work that has been largely ignored but also to unfold antinomies of postmodern historical consciousness that were manifest in the operatic resurgence more generally. Although my inquiry extends as far back as the 1920s, this dissertation by no means presents a continuous history of opera from 1924 to 1994, as the subtitle might imply. The weight is squarely placed on the 1970s through the early 1990s. Chapter 1 explores racial dimensions of the concept of “modernity” through a study of Harlem Renaissance composer H. Lawrence Freeman’s never-performed “jazz opera” American Romance (1924-1929). Chapter 2 chronicles the Harlem Opera Society’s abandonment of its former European repertory and subsequent reinvention as the Afro-American Singing Theater/Jazz Opera Ensemble during the late 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 3 tracks the transformation of jazz in the 1980s into an increasingly historicist—or possibly posthistoricist—music through a series of works that I call “jazz-historical operas.” Chapter 4 works through a tension between “actuality” and allegory in Robert Ashley’s television opera trilogy (1978-1994) about American history. The name of Duke Ellington winds through the four chapters as a kind of red thread. “Ellington” functions as a multivalent trope, alternatively signifying hypermodern America, the black cultural tradition, composition, and improvisational “actuality.” In a brief epilogue I identify another figure whose name has somewhat more furtively shadowed my study: Richard Wagner. I suggest that the idea of an “Ellington-Wagner matrix” in American opera both symbolizes a tradition of cultural hybridity and identifies a problematic concerning history and sonic materiality (roughly, the distinction between “event” and “representation”) expounded in the preceding chapters. In some ways, my analysis of the deeply ambiguous status of historicity and modernity in twentieth century American culture will prove consonant with many previous discussions of the topic. But I hope that in certain fundamental respects my study may also be understood as a novel, even interventionist foray into historical theory. Race has scarcely been an overlooked topic in critical inquiry and cultural theory of the last three decades, but it is hard to ignore the Eurocentric—or Euro-American—thrust of much of the canonical discourse on postmodernity and historicity, some of which was surveyed above. My attempts to interpret transformations in historical consciousness through shifting relationships between two culturally and racially supercharged signifiers—“jazz” and “opera”—might be taken as a challenge to this tendency

Die Adresse des Mediums

Von Medien sprechen wir alle: Kommunikationsmedien oder Massenmedien, Wahrnehmungs- und Speichermedien, Analog- und Digitalmedien, technische Medien oder Medien der Überlieferung. Wie aber lassen sie sich beschreiben? Elektronische Medien lösen räumlich bestimmbare Adressen im Informationsraum des 'global village' auf. Gleichzeitig entsteht jedoch eine neue elektronische Adressenordnung. Die Adresse des Mediums diskutiert Medien als Effekte und Bedingungen von Adressierbarkeit in kulturwissenschaftlicher, historischer und kulturvergleichender Hinsicht

Between facts and faith. The judicial practices of the conseillers in the Parlement de Toulouse (1550-1700)

This dissertation studies the professional practices of a college of royal judges in a French sovereign court, from the beginning of the Wars of Religion to the end of the seventeenth century. The Parlement de Toulouse was a court of final appeal that had jurisdiction over a large swath of Southern France, and that the kings used as a bureaucratic outpost to assert their authority over what had remained a rather unruly border-region. Through an analysis of the genealogy of ideas regarding kingship, justice, and the body social, an account of the material and temporal constraints of judicial activity, and a close examination of dozens of lawsuits involving all classes of men and women from the Languedoc region, this research transforms the extensive archive produced by this early-modern French court into a broad-ranging historical analysis that is at once cultural, intellectual, social, and political. The analysis of the court’s records, focused on the magistrates’ professional practices—how they investigated, interrogated, tortured, and sentenced litigants while at the same time translating social and political conflicts into legal statements of fact, demonstrates that the mutually constitutive relationship between ideals of justice and everyday judicial practices, was at the core of a judicial epistemology which, situated between facts and faith, calls for a revision of our understanding of the political role of those courts, and beyond, of our understanding of early-modern political culture