Generating structured music for bagana using quality metrics based on Markov models.

This research is partially supported by the project Lrn2Cre8 which acknowledges the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, under FET Grant No. 610859

The Physicality of Writing in Paul Auster’s White Spaces and Winter Journal

White Spaces is a hybrid piece of poetic prose marking Paul Auster’s literary rebirth. This matrix text, which served as an immediate response to Auster’s “epiphanic moment of clarity” during a dance rehearsal in New York, is an early experimentation with the physicality of writing. Words are steps. Verbs are motions. Facing the choreographer’s incapacity to put into words the December 1978 dance rehearsal, he began — step by step, word by word — to give in to silence, linguistic randomness and wandering. Auster suddenly realized that literary creation springs from physical commands rather than intellectual ones. Thirty years later, in Winter Journal, Paul Auster took up his exploration of the impersonal and tested the second-person narrative voice of his aging self. In both White Spaces and Winter Journal, the repetition of the binary rhythm of steps, breath, heartbeat, and the emphasis on doublings and symmetry widen the scope of Auster’s organic use of language. Speaking and writing require losing oneself to an interior music, as if the words were alive, freely animated and dictated to the writer by his own body. Speech, which parallels the world seen, is propelled by its own flow. Sensory limitations and the inadequacy of language, which had led Auster to a poetic dead-end, are in turn deplored and celebrated. As suggested in Winter Journal, language registers negativity as indirectly as the body integrates trauma. Shifting from pleasure to pain, the body exhibits the wounds of the past. Repeatedly, these cyclical works focus on feeling, falling and failing. Hence the aim of this paper is to highlight Auster’s metaphysical quest and aesthetic obsessions, which put the body’s functions and failures at the core of the writing process.White Spaces est une œuvre hybride de prose poétique annonçant la renaissance littéraire de Paul Auster. Ce texte matrice, expérimentation liminaire sur le caractère physique de l’écriture, est une réponse immédiate à un « moment d’illumination épiphanique » qui frappa Auster lors d’une répétition de danse à New York. Les mots sont des pas. Les verbes mouvements. Face à l’incapacité du chorégraphe de décrire la répétition de danse de décembre 1978, il décida de s’en remettre — pas à pas, mot à mot — au silence, à l’erreur et l’errance linguistiques. Paul Auster comprit soudain que la création littéraire surgit de directives physiques plutôt qu’intellectuelles. Trente ans plus tard, dans Winter Journal, Auster reprend ses explorations de l’impersonnel et teste une voix narrative à la deuxième personne, qui est véhiculée par son corps vieillissant. Dans White Spaces et Winter Journal, la répétition du rythme binaire des pas, de la respiration, des battements de cœur, et l’accent mis sur les doubles et la symétrie accroissent l’étendue de son utilisation organique du langage. Parler et écrire nécessitent de s’abandonner à une musique intérieure, comme si les mots étaient vivants, animés librement et dictés à l’écrivain par son propre corps. La parole, qui côtoie le monde observé, est propulsée par son propre flot. Les limites sensorielles et l’inadéquation du langage, qui avaient mené Paul Auster à l’impasse poétique, sont tour à tour déplorées et célébrées. Comme Winter Journal le suggère, le langage inscrit la négativité tout aussi indirectement que le corps intègre le trauma. Du plaisir à la douleur, le corps exhibe les blessures du passé. Ces œuvres cycliques répètent la perception, la chute et l’échec. Il s’agira en conséquence d’élucider ici la quête métaphysique et les obsessions esthétiques de Paul Auster. Se révèleront, au sein du processus d’écriture, les fonctions et les failles du corps

Word formation processes in literary neologisms in English and Spanish: Contrastive analysis of examples from the Harry Potter books

Glavni namen te zaključne naloge je opazovati različne vrste neologizmov ter analizirati besedotvorne procese, s katerimi so zgrajeni. Raziskava se osredotoča na književne neologizme iz korpusa v angleškem ter španskem jeziku z namenon, da primerja produktivnosti procesov obeh jezikov ter ugotovi pogostost uporabe ustreznega besedotvornega procesa pri prevajanju neologizma iz enega jezika v drugega. Pregled teorije v zaključni nalogi vsebuje informacije o neologizmih ter njihovi klasifikaciji, oris angleškega ter španskega sistema besedotvorja ter njuno primerjavo, ter obravnavo produktivnosti, ki razkrije najbolj produktivne besedotvorne procese vsakega od jezikov glede na trenutne raziskave. Praktični del naloge vključuje analizo vzorca 400 neologizmov, zbranih iz korpusa desetih angleških fantazijskih romanov ter njihovih španskih prevodov. Primeri so klasificirani po vrsti neologizma, kar jih loči na formalne, semantične in skladenjske neologizme ter sposojenke, in nadalje, formalne neologizme analiziramo glede na besedotvorni proces, ki jih je ustvaril. Kontrastivna analiza primerov razkrije tudi pogostost uporabe ustreznega procesa pri prevajanju neologizmov in rezultati te analize so razloženi v nalogi. Primeri neologizmov, ki jih obravnava ta zaključna naloga, so bili ustvarjeni za specifičen primer fantazijskega literarnega dela in mogoče ne odražajo obnašanja neologizmov v drugih spektrih jezika, tako da bi za bolj splošne zaključke potrebovali nadaljnje raziskave.The main purpose of this thesis is to observe types of neologisms and analyse the word-formation processes which are used for their creation. The study focuses on literary neologisms from a corpus in English and Spanish in order to compare the productivity of their respective processes and to discover whether a corresponding process is used in translating a neologism from one language to the other. In the theoretical part of the thesis the reader finds information on neologisms and their classification, the delineation of the English and the Spanish systems of word-formation and their comparison, and furthermore, a discussion about productivity, which uncovers the most productive process of word-formation for each language as determined in the existing literature. The practical part of the thesis includes an analysis of a sample of 400 neologisms collected from the corpus of ten English fantasy novels and their Spanish translations. The examples are classified according to the type of neologism, separating semantic, formal and syntactic neologisms and loanwords, and furthermore, formal neologisms are analysed according to the word-formation process behind their creation. The contrastive analysis of examples also uncovers the frequency of corresponding processes used in the translation of neologisms, and its results are discussed in the thesis. This thesis deals with examples of neologisms from a specific literary work and may not reflect the behaviour of neologisms in other aspects of the language, so further research should be carried out to propose any general conclusions

Samuel Beckett\u27s late aesthetics of subjectivation

No other writer has explored so metaphysically the problem of human existence as Samuel Beckett, the Irish writer who first gained world renown in 1953 with the formal radicalism and existential angst of Waiting for Godot. In the bleakest forms, Beckett has denied human experience the most fundamental of all certainties – subjectivity and self-consciousness – and exposed conventional realism’s inability to convey the ungovernable flux of the world and the individual’s unfixed, subjective response. Taking Beckett’s manipulation of pronominal, spatial and temporal deixis as an entry point, this thesis captures the late works in its central dilemma of Beckettian poetics: the inability to end. For Beckett, ending, or silence, is at the same time the premise and also the vanishing point. In the literary arts the withdrawal into an inner space beyond speech, where the subject is absent, can never be completely successful: silence, ending in the absolute sense, remains an imaginary limit. Beckett strikes his vital poetic sparks off this aporia, in as much as his method of writing is characterized by attempts towards a self-conscious paradox. Consequently he aims to turn the impossibility (after a critical creative impasse after the Trilogy of novels) – and the inevitability – of a linguistic constitution of meaning back into linguistic form. A ‘solution’ to the problem is, of course, unthinkable. The literary object/subject is thus condemned to a permanent oscillation between the rooted-ness of the art form in language, and the disavowal of that rooted-ness. Instead of viewing his work as motivated by ambitions in the philosophy of language, the present thesis approaches it as an attempt to shore up a language whose progressive extinction had been the constant companion of Beckett’s life as a writer. Relating his late work to his early aesthetic views, the thesis seeks to show, on the one hand, that Beckett’s late work does not constitute a break from his early writings as they seem at first sight. Instead, they as whole witness the maturation of the writer’s aesthetics. On the other hand, drawing on a variety of performance, language and psychoanalytic theories, the thesis argues that subjectivity in late Beckett exists only as the experience of language, as the marks that the movement of language has left on the text or on us, in us, the reader, as we turn our attention towards the indecisive stirrings of language

Anthropology Inside Out

Fieldworkers’ notebooks are full of sensations and observations in which the subjectivity of the ethnographer seeps through. Not really science. Much closer to life. Yet in classical anthropology they are invisible to the reader. In this book the focus is reversed, turning Anthropology Inside Out as it explores the vibrant backstage life of field notes. What happens when we put them centre stage? Aimed at both curious novice and experienced practitioner, the chapters read as a catalogue of experimental practices teetering on the edge of the tradition: intuitively observational drawings; notes pervaded with paranoia; collective notetaking; crisis-ridden personal confessions; layers of notes in photographs and archives; old flip-flops that trigger memories in mind and body. This exploration of what field notes are, can do and could be, concludes with a constellation of shimmering notes on notes from Michael Taussig, a meta-commentary on anthropologists’ fetishistic relationship with the most personal of professional tools.Publishe

Cultural Circulation

Der Band basiert auf den Vorträgen, die ExpertInnen aus Nordamerika und Europa bei einem internationalen Kolloquium 2010 an der ÖAW über die historischen, kulturellen und literarischen Beziehungen zwischen Kanada und dem amerikanischen Süden gehalten haben. Die Beiträge zu dem breiten und bisher noch nicht systematisch untersuchten Themenkomplex gruppieren sich um vier Schwerpunkte. Sie erhellen demographische Phänomene (und ihre künstlerische Verarbeitung) wie die Vertreibung der Acadiens im 18. Jahrhundert und ihre Ansiedlung in Louisiana (Cajuns) und die Flucht afroamerikanischer Sklaven nach Kanada im 19. Jahrhundert. Besonders aber werden die intertextuellen Beziehungen zwischen AutorInnen aus den Südstaaten der USA (etwa William Faulkner oder Eudora Welty) und von ihnen inspirierten kanadischen SchriftstellerInnen im 20. Jahrhundert (Alice Munro, Jack Hodgins, Margaret Atwood u. a.) untersucht. Der so geführte intensive Dialog zwischen den beiden Kulturräumen wird aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln und mit unterschiedlichen Methoden betrachtet und dabei kultur- und literarhistorisches Neuland betreten. Dies gilt auch für die Erörterung von parallelen gattungsspezifischen Entwicklungen in den beiden Gesellschaften. Neben den über zwanzig wissenschaftlichen Aufsätzen kommt auch das ludische Element in phantasievoll-kreativen Dialogen im Buch zu seinem Recht

You Unseen Cathedrals: A Study of the Conceptual Conditions of Negativity

This dissertation addresses a gap in contemporary negativity studies by examining twentieth-century texts that engage with negativity beyond the subject. Starting with the premise that the concepts of negativity and subjectivity are intertwined, I argue that the predominant tendency in scholarship has been to conceptualize subjectivity as a circular structure that incorporates negativity as its dynamic foundation. However, when negativity is defined in subordination to the subjective circle, its radical features are diminished, resulting in “weak negativity.” In Chapter 1, I exemplify my arguments using the works of Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, and Judith Butler. In contrast to weak negativity, radical negativity is a slippery concept that can only be treated obliquely to avoid its incorporation into subjectivity. In the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Roger Caillois, Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, and Manolo Millares, I identify an alternative set of concepts and approaches for tracing a partial definition of radical negativity. In Chapter 2, I show how Adorno employs various techniques in pursuit of non-identity, a correlate of radical negativity, and arrives at the notion of mimesis as a means for conceptualizing radical negativity materially embedded in art. In Chapter 3, I analyze Caillois’s work on mimesis in insects, identifying the notions of worklessness and the outside, as well as the device of the double death, to further outline the conceptual conditions of radical negativity. Foucault’s and Blanchot’s works help steer the discussion of mimesis, along with worklessness, the outside, and double death, back to art and aesthetics grounded in radical negativity. To conclude, I propose that the paintings of Spanish Informalist Manolo Millares can be seen as examples of art that embodies radical negativity without subordinating it to the voracious circularity of the subject

Les interdits de la représentation dans les œuvres de Paul Auster et de Jérome Rothenberg

Les événements d Auschwitz, d Hiroshima et du 11 septembre 2001 ravivent un questionnement ancien sur le pouvoir du langage, ainsi que sur la responsabilité et les modes du témoignage. Tenter de dépasser les interdits de la représentation dans ce contexte historique relève d un acte de résistance envers tous les préceptes linguistiques, éthiques, épistémologiques ou politiques. Écrivains juifs-américains séculiers et polymorphes, Paul Auster et Jerome Rothenberg redéfinissent le réel grâce à l imagination, à la mutation du medium et au dérèglement des sens dans leurs textes défigurés. S inscrivant dans la rupture d après 1945, ils recherchent une voie détournée, un langage premier et organique dépassant l inadéquation du signe et l impulsion iconoclaste. S inspirant d un héritage juif diasporique et mystique, des avant-gardes européennes et américaines, du transcendantalisme, du rituel archaïque ou encore du poststructuralisme, ils contribuent au renversement des images mythiques issues de la spéculation sémiotique. Le trauma ne peut être dit, mais se crie, la présence s écrit dans la répétition et dans la rencontre de l infini, le cœur de l œuvre se dévoile dans l excentration et l excentricité de la lettre pétrifiée. Dire l indicible, c est se taire et écouter la mort qui sommeille dans l ombre du verbe, dans le silence d une musique naissante ; c est rêver éveillé, se remémorer les pulsions et les cauchemars enfouis ; c est accueillir une non-langue conjuguée à contretemps dans une grammaire du désastre. Traduire une parole qui ne dit rien et qui ne peut être comprise, telle est la contradiction qui informe ces écrits en souffrance.Auschwitz, Hiroshima and September 11, 2001 revive the ancient issues of the power of language and of the responsibility and modes of testimony. Trying to overcome the taboos and restrictions of representation in this historical context is a matter of resistance against all linguistic, ethical, epistemological and political precepts. Paul Auster and Jerome Rothenberg are multi-faceted secular Jewish-American writers who redefine the real thanks to the imagination, thanks to medium mutation and the derangement of the senses in their disfigured texts. Coming within the scope of the post-1945 breakdown, they seek a roundabout means, a primal and organic language overcoming the discrepancy of signs and the iconoclast impulse. Drawing from a diasporic and mystical Jewish heritage, from the European and American avant-gardes, from transcendentalism, from archaic ritual and postructuralism, they contribute to bringing down the mythical images shaped by semiotic speculation. Trauma cannot be said, but the wound is voiced in a scream. Presence writes itself in the repetition and the discovery of infinity. Depth is unveiled by a whirligig of nameless sticks and stones. Speaking the unspeakable means keeping quiet and listening to the death that sleeps in the shadow of the word, in the silence of a new song. It means daydreaming, recollecting repressed drives and nightmares; cradling a no-tongue conjugated in a grammar of the disaster. Translating a word that says nothing, that cannot be understood, such is the contradiction which informs these pending works of pain.NANTERRE-PARIS10-Bib. élec. (920509901) / SudocSudocFranceF

La poética de la experiencia sensible en la obra de Denise Levertov

El objetivo fundamental de esta tesis es realizar una interpretación global de la obra poética de Denise Levertov, que modifique algunos de los patrones de análisis aplicados a su obra tradicionalmente. En 1993, Albert Gelpi, crítico y amigo de la poeta, resumía en el libro titulado Denise Levertov: Selected Cristicism, los casi cincuenta años de análisis crítico centrado en la obra levertoviana, en cuatro tendencias temáticas claramente definidas: la poética, la política, el género y la religión. Esta excesiva atomización de la obra poética de Levertov en comportamientos estancos resulta deficiente a la hora de abordar su poesía desde nuevos enfoques más globalizados. Por tanto, la misión principal de este trabajo reside en revisar la obra poética de Levertov desde una nueva perspectiva, basada en la importancia que la percepción y los procesos fisiológicos adquieren para la autora como motor de creación lírica. Para ello, se ha seleccionado un amplio corpus poético de más de setenta poemas. Éstos debían atender a dos requisitos fundamentales en cuanto al contenido. Primero, ser lo suficientemente representativos por su orientación temática, de forma que el enfoque principal llevado a cabo por la crítica no quedase silenciado. Segundo, poseer una carga perceptiva que permitiese profundizar en cuestiones relevantes para la poética levertoviana. En cuanto a la forma, se ha descartado el análisis de poemas largos por razones de espacio, aunque contituyan ejemplos excelentes en cuanto a su valor poético y a su carga perceptiva. La tesis consta de cuatro ejes de análisis que vertebran la investigación. Primero, se aborda el estudio de la cosmogonía poética que conforma la obra de Denise Levertov. En segundo lugar, se analizan los distintos procesos gnoseológicos del ser humano presentes en su poesía, siempre entendidos como mecanismos orgánicos. En tercer lugar, se utiliza un sistema consistente de análisis poéticos, que comprenda los distintos enfoques críticos previos, basados en la clasificación temática. En cuarto lugar, un último eje de análisis estudia los procesos poéticos que transmutan la percepción real en la percepción del poem