Scripture: Tool of Patriarchy or Resource for Transformation?

If feminism is a major resource for the transformation of humanity and history in the direction of wholeness and hope, it is also a serious challenge to organized religion and e specially to Christianity because it calls into question the traditional theology of God and of human beings. But beneath these theological questions lies an even more fundamental issue, namely the question of biblical revelation. Th equestion, in its starkest terms, is whether or not the Bible teaches the maleness of God and the inferiority of women. In other words, is patriarchy divinely revealed and therefore divinely sanctioned? It would seem that, if it is, there is no future for self-affirming women in Christianity because the Bible is regarded by Christians as somehow a bearer of divine revelation. Some women, of course, have accepted and interiorized what seems to be the biblical verdict on their status, namely that male headship in family and church is divinely mandated, that women\u27 s subordination is of divine institution, and that God is ultimately, if not actually male, at least the warrant for regarding the male as the normative human being. In biblical fundamentalist communities there is virtually no alternative to accepting these conclusions and their practical implications

The story of Oh: the aesthetics and rhetoric of a common vowel sound

Studies in Musical Theatre is the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated to musical theatre. It was launched in 2007 and is now in its seventh volume. It has an extensive international readership and is edited by Dominic Symonds and George Burrows. This article investigates the use of the ‘word’ ‘Oh’ in a variety of different performance idioms. Despite its lack of ‘meaning’, the sound is used in both conversation and poetic discourse, and I discuss how it operates communicatively and expressively through contextual resonances, aesthetic manipulation and rhetorical signification. The article first considers the aesthetically modernist work of Cathy Berberian in Bussotti’s La Passion Selon Sade; then it considers the rhetorically inflected use of ‘Oh’ to construct social resonance in popular song;finally, it discusses two important uses of the sound ‘Oh’ which bookend the Broadway musical Oklahoma!, serving to consolidate the allegorical and musico-dramatic narrative of the show

The story of Oh: the aesthetics and rhetoric of a common vowel sound

Studies in Musical Theatre is the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated to musical theatre. It was launched in 2007 and is now in its seventh volume. It has an extensive international readership and is edited by Dominic Symonds and George Burrows. This article investigates the use of the ‘word’ ‘Oh’ in a variety of different performance idioms. Despite its lack of ‘meaning’, the sound is used in both conversation and poetic discourse, and I discuss how it operates communicatively and expressively through contextual resonances, aesthetic manipulation and rhetorical signification. The article first considers the aesthetically modernist work of Cathy Berberian in Bussotti’s La Passion Selon Sade; then it considers the rhetorically inflected use of ‘Oh’ to construct social resonance in popular song;finally, it discusses two important uses of the sound ‘Oh’ which bookend the Broadway musical Oklahoma!, serving to consolidate the allegorical and musico-dramatic narrative of the show

Computer Mediated Communication and the Connection between Virtual Utopias and Actual Realities

People have generally been very ambivalent about the potential future roles of new technologies (and the internet specifically) and their possible effects on human society. Indeed, there has been a tendency for polarization between attitudes or perceptions of naive enthusiasm and cynical resistance towards the use of computers and computer networks, and for such related concepts as ‘the information superhighway’ and ‘cyberspace’. The projection of such ambivalent perceptions into naively utopian (or even ironically dystopian) images and narratives might be seen as the latest and uniquely global permutation of a basic function of human culture - that is, to imagine ‘a better future’ or represent ‘an ideal past’. This paper will consider the extent to which the kinds of virtual utopias made possible by computer-mediated communications are\ud ‘connected’ to the actual individual and social realities of human participants. In other words, how important might it be to recognise a distinction between the use of virtual utopias (and utopian representations in any culture) as merely escapist, self-indulgent fantasy on one hand, and\ud as a useful, transformative media for reinventing the human condition on the other? Whether we live in a Panoptic or democratic Net ten years from now depends, in no small measure, on what you and I know and do now. Howard Rheingold, Afterword to The Virtual Community (1994, p. 310

The Birth of Pictoriality in Computer Media

The aim of the paper is to follow some milestones of the story of computer media as far as the notion of pictoriality is concerned. I am going to describe in the most general way how it happens that two quite separate technologies as computer machine and pictorial representation met and since then became almost inseparable

When language breaks into pieces: A conflict between communication through isolated signals and language

Here we study a communication model where signals associate to stimuli. The model assumes that signals follow Zipf’s law and the exponent of the law depends on a balance between maximizing the information transfer and saving cost the cost of communication. We study the effect of tuning that balance on the structure of signal-stimulus associations. The model starts from two recent results. First, the exponent grows as the weight of information transfer increases. Second, a rudimentary form of language is obtained when the network of signal-stimulus associations is almost connected. Here we show the existence of a sudden destruction of language once a critical balance is crossed. The model shows that maximizing the information transfer through isolated signals and language are in conflict. The model proposes a strong reason for not finding large exponents in complex communication systems: language is in danger. Besides, the findings suggests that human words may need to be ambiguous to keep language alive. Interestingly, the model predicts that large exponents should be associated to decreased synaptic density. It is not surprising that the largest exponents correspond to schizophrenic patients since, according to the spirit of Feinberg’s hypothesis, decreased synaptic density leads to schizophrenia. Our findings suggests that the exponent of Zipf’s law is intimately related to language and that it could be used to detect anomalous structure and organization of the brain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version