The ternary distinction of sound cinema

This thesis addresses the problematic categorization of film music in terms of a reductive diegetic/nondiegetic distinction (‘the binary’) and presents an alternative analytical framework. Following the law of parsimony, we reconstruct this original binary distinction in order to establish a new tripartite schema that accounts for the many otherwise ambiguous categories of sound that had occupied an unknown or indeterminate region of the binary zones. Drawing on the works of Bordwell, Kassabian, and Neumeyer in particular, the thesis seeks to put an end to the theoretical indeterminacy that haunts the binary distinction by introducing a new and inclusive ternary schema of sound cinema

Imagineering the community: The vagrant spaces of the malls, enclave estates, the filmic and the televisual

The idea of \u27community\u27 is an all pervasive and persuasive notion within society. But it is an elastic concept used by diverse groups and institutions to rally people to a cause or to reassure the public in times of (perceived) calamity. Of late the various forms of the media and certain elements of society have been focussing their attention on the \u27breakdown of community\u27 values citing the (perceived) rise in crime, the (supposed) fragmentation of the family and the (hypothetical) loss of respect for authority and authority figures as contributing to an ailing communal sensibility. However, as Anderson (1983) has argued in his discussion on the rise of nationalism the \u27community\u27 is always an imagined entity. This study investigates this concept of the imagined community and looks at how this notion is manifested (and sold to the public) in the \u27real\u27 sites of the contemporary shopping malls and the ever more visible master planned communities. These sites present nostalgic impulses of a community which is in harmony with itself, specifically drawing upon the concert of no idealised \u27village\u27 ethos which speaks of a more simple life enhanced by an intimate relationship to a restorative \u27natural\u27 world. The study also seeks to discoverer how communities are represented in the \u27imagined\u27 worlds of the pictorial, filmic and televisual texts. It is suggested that these sites/sights also offer versions of a lifestyle which, in essence, sells a concept of a commendable community suggested by the mall owners/operators and the enclave estate entrepreneurs. To assist in this investigation the Disneyesque concept of \u27imagineering\u27 will he remotivated and will he linked to what McCannell (1976) called \u27touristic consciousness’. The former suggests that community is found in the conjoining of the perceptual and the conceptual - the real and imagined - or what Soja calls the first and second spaces. The Iatter informs how the sites/sights for community are seen and read. Soja suggest that community is found in the third spaces or what Lefebvre calls the ‘lived’ space. However, it will be argued that there is a fourth space of \u27livable\u27 community that is inherently present in the sites/sights under discussion. This fourthspace is what can be called the vagrant space because it is both present as a fleeting spatiality and absented by the conjoining of first and second spaces. It also acts as a Foucauldian heterotopic space which when present in its absence informs notions of a participatory, coherent community, something which is seen as lacking in the \u27lived\u27 community. Thus the vagrant space suggests an \u27otherness\u27 and \u27difference\u27 within the homogeneous sameness and familiarity of the community of the third space

The Spatial Dimension of Narrative Understanding. Exploring Plot Types in the Narratives of Alessandro Baricco, Andrea Camilleri and Italo Calvino

The thesis explores the hypothesis that some plots might rely on spatiality as an organising principle that impacts on the narrative structure and, consequently, on the strategies adopted by readers to understand them. In order to lay the grounding for a spatially-oriented approach to narrative understanding, this study pursues both a theoretical line of inquiry and an applied line of inquiry in literary criticism. A cognitive stance on the nature of thought as non-propositional (Johnson-Laird 1983) and of the mind as embodied (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Varela et al. 1993) provides the theoretical point of departure for the subsequent identification of a range of principles and frameworks that can be implemented to support a spatially-oriented interpretation according to the specificities of narratives. The three case studies provided by Alessandro Baricco’s City, Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano crime series, and Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore illustrate how a spatially-oriented perspective can add new interpretive angles and an unprecedented insight into the ways narratives achieve a coherent structure. At the same time, the case studies serve to extrapolate a set of features that constitute the preliminary criteria for assessing whether it would be fruitful to apply a spatially-oriented approach to a specific narrative. Baricco’s, Camilleri’s and Calvino’s works represent three plot types in which spatiality impinges in three different ways on the narrative, which, as I will show, can be epitomised by the image schemata of map, trajectory, and fractal. Far from simply referring to objects which plot is compared to, these images indicate procedural techniques and strategies of sense-making that a certain type of narrative is designed to prompt in the reader through textual cues. The study, in fact, builds on and advances a notion of plot to be analysed as a process rather than a given structure, something that readers understand as they read, and not retrospectively only

Exploring Sparse Spatial Relation in Graph Inference for Text-Based VQA

Text-based visual question answering (TextVQA) faces the significant challenge of avoiding redundant relational inference. To be specific, a large number of detected objects and optical character recognition (OCR) tokens result in rich visual relationships. Existing works take all visual relationships into account for answer prediction. However, there are three observations: (1) a single subject in the images can be easily detected as multiple objects with distinct bounding boxes (considered repetitive objects). The associations between these repetitive objects are superfluous for answer reasoning; (2) two spatially distant OCR tokens detected in the image frequently have weak semantic dependencies for answer reasoning; and (3) the co-existence of nearby objects and tokens may be indicative of important visual cues for predicting answers. Rather than utilizing all of them for answer prediction, we make an effort to identify the most important connections or eliminate redundant ones. We propose a sparse spatial graph network (SSGN) that introduces a spatially aware relation pruning technique to this task. As spatial factors for relation measurement, we employ spatial distance, geometric dimension, overlap area, and DIoU for spatially aware pruning. We consider three visual relationships for graph learning: object-object, OCR-OCR tokens, and object-OCR token relationships. SSGN is a progressive graph learning architecture that verifies the pivotal relations in the correlated object-token sparse graph, and then in the respective object-based sparse graph and token-based sparse graph. Experiment results on TextVQA and ST-VQA datasets demonstrate that SSGN achieves promising performances. And some visualization results further demonstrate the interpretability of our method.Comment: Accepted by TIP 202

On the Fluidity of Honey and Fugitivity of Sound in Trauma, Ecstasy, and Black Radical Tradition

From Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective to Derridean postructuralist view, to an intersectional force traversing somatic, social, political, and cultural, sound, in its non-linear epistemology, breaks barriers between forms and escapes any structured definitions. Like the insidious stickiness of honey, sound’s viscosity invaginates, spreads onto the interior, and, by triggering memories and the somatic, threatens the very totality of our identities. At that rupturing moment, we are not the ones subjecting sound to be known as an object; instead, in its fugitive protest and agency, sound flips the roles of the knower and the known and establishes new possibilities of relating to it, of understanding ourselves, and of listening to the world around us. Using the theoretical framework of Fred Moten’s formative volume, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, the current thesis explores the sound works of two contemporary artists, Christine Sun Kim and Camille Norment, which unsettle the historicity and the ideology of normativity and oppression in sound. By placing these works in close dialogue with Moten’s complex critical analysis, I look for the interinanimation of the drives behind the Black radical tradition in music and literature mid-twentieth century and the artistic exploration of sound in the last seven years. Furthermore, I follow In the Break’s provocative engagements between Western philosophy (Marx, Freud, and Derrida) and Black radical thought (Fanon, Spillers, Menakem, and Delany) to uncover the operative functioning of both in destigmatizing the ways we understand and relate to sound

Above the Still Lake: Lyrical Sensibilities in Visual Art -Thinking through photographic practice: Pathos, Eastern Asian aesthetics and the language of emotion

Drawing from Western and East Asian philosophical traditions, this thesis aims to compare different concepts of ‘Pathos’ as present in Chinese, Japanese and European traditions of art, and in particular photography. The overarching methodology is that of translation between different languages and cultural contexts, and the verbal and visual. Using methods from comparative literature and including case studies from East Asian and European poetry, film and artistic practice, the research looks at the tradition of the representation of ‘Landscape’ from Eastern and Western perspectives. This is a practice-led PhD and I explore these concepts associated with Pathos and landscape through the media of photography, moving image, object making and book-making. I draw parallels between my photographic practice and traditional Chinese landscape painting with respect to the framing, tonality, and non-specificity of place. My investigation of lighting, printing techniques and surfaces are methods for researching the space of the photograph. This thesis pivots on three related concepts; the Greek concept of Pathos, one of the three rhetorical appeals; Yi jing, an ancient Chinese artistic concept; and Mono no aware, an eighteenth-century Japanese aesthetic principle. The project begins by looking into a specific period of historical artistic changes in China and Japan during the Pictorialism movement, including a re-examination of the visual representations of photographic work of Chinese and Japanese periodicals from 1910 through to 1937. This research is inspired by an awareness of and an interest in the lack of scholarship on Eastern and Western notions of aesthetics as they apply to the accounts of photography during Republican China. This examination of Chinese photography is then framed through a reappraisal of Japanese aesthetics

Demetrius Johnson and the Weep of the World: A Novel

Demetrius Johnson and the Weep of the World is a middle-grade, dark fantasy novel for readers eight to thirteen years old. The novel uses dark fantasy elements as allegory to render grief’s lived experience. The novel’s protagonist is Demetrius, a ten-year-old who has lost his mother to cancer and is struggling to cope. Demetrius’s grief emerges as the novel’s primary journey, beginning six months after Mama’s death as Demetrius and his father move to rural Virginia to live with family. Upon arrival at his grandmother’s house, Demetrius meets the novel’s antagonist—a promise-peddling inventor named Meraux the Magic Man, who claims that Dee’s mother is not gone but lost and that he has just the gadgets to find her. Using steampunk-horror details, Meraux is grief personified, imagining grief as a force that spontaneously exerts itself upon the bereaved. Demetrius takes Meraux’s bargain and is hurtled into his ashen wasteland, the World In Between, where Dee discovers the lie and magical thinking embedded in Meraux’s promise. Building upon the work of scholar Marta Bladek and writer Joan Didion, I render grief as a fantasy setting on macro and micro levels. First, grief’s spatiality is rendered as the larger invented fantasy world of the novel, the World In Between, a place where bereaved people are stuck in time, space, and grief. Secondly, the novel’s scenes are constructed as individual landscapes representing different emotional affects and atmospheres of grief. In these spaces, Demetrius discovers a multicultural band of trapped bereaved people fighting to survive. The residents of Mourning Star warn Demetrius that Meraux doesn’t just feed off grief, but that Meraux is building the Grief Eater, a machine to weep the waking world, and Demetrius is the perfect fuel. Demetrius must join the bereaved’s ranks to stop Meraux, destroy the machine, and find a way home. Through this journey, the novel develops a kaleidoscope of non-Eurocentric mourning beliefs through the characters of Ellie, Raida, Aharon, and Nii. This exploration develops a theme of grief as a unifying force, wherein the bereaved through shared experience can heal via community