Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

Institutions and Interpellations of the Dubject, the Doubled and Spaced Self

This essay develops the idea of the dubject as a model of remediateda subjectivity. It will discuss some theoretical and institutional contexts of the dubject, and then will consider digital manifestations of the dubject with reference to how popular digital applications interpellate the user (see Althusser 1971)—that is, how they impose specific ideological and institutional conditions and limitations on applications and on users’ possibilities for self-representation. This work is an attempt to think digital identity and agency in the context of postcoloniality, as a complement to the more prevalent approach to mediated identity in terms of postmodernity. This work thus builds my larger research project of applying postcolonialist critique to popular culture, particularly that of Canada’s majority white settler society

The translation of modern English poetry into Arabic: treating the idiosyncrasies of content and form

The new rhetoric of modern poetry which is characterized by conciseness and ambiguity has set it different from other poetic movements in English which in turn has made it the central focus of many researchers and scholars leading many of them to write about the ‘distinction’ of this type of literature. This study tackles the translation issue of modern poetry in view of the idiosyncrasies of content and form. The study investigates the issue of foregrounding following Geoffrey Leech’s (1969) linguistic deviation theory with special focus on lexical, grammatical and semantic deviations with the assumption that the idiosyncrasies in the language of modern poetry are a result of the distrust modern writers demonstrate of the ability of language to convey meanings and the lack of communication that mars the modern reality of man. Through examining various excerpts of modern poetic texts, one could infer that some translators who were sensitive to the importance of these deviations opted for retaining them often by utilizing compensatory methods. This is mainly related to the fact that it is difficult to replicate the exact same idiosyncrasies, especially in a language that belongs to a different family and does not have much in common with English. Other translators, however, were heedless of the implications of these deviations and decided to change them, or to translate them in harmony with their readings and Arabic language structure and norms. Nonetheless, the researcher claims that there is no ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ translation; there is always a better translation or a translation that is closer to the source text. Each translation offers a different ‘reading’ of a translated text that is influenced by the translator’s metaphysics of presence and by his/her spatiotemporal realities. The study concludes that these deviations are essential in augmenting the meaning potential of texts and in obviating the fallacious notion of a ‘transcendental signified’ in addition to being a fundamental aspect in the formulation of a comprehensive reading of any modern poetic text. This results in making faithfulness in translating modern works imperative since any deviation from its modes of expression will blur the map of this forceful trend in the history of poetic evolution

Resemble Assemble Reply; Or, the Use of Misfit Tropes in Student Writing

This dissertation examines rhetorical troping, specifically how students use the misfit tropes of metalepsis, catachresis, and enstrangement as lines of argument. I borrow the definition of “troping” from Richard Poirier, who argued that it evinced “the human involvement in the shaping of language, and it prevents language from imposing itself upon us with the force and indifference of a Technology.” I ask: How and why does a writer work through the complexities of invention processes, arguments, or conclusions with tropes that have been historically considered misfit or difficult? Methodologically, I read student writing in the light of Reuben Brower’s idea of “slow reading” and the frame of ordinary language as developed by philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. The tropes I consider disrupt typical academic patterns and allow space to trope off the commonplace or cliché. Troping also works as a heuristic to work through writing problems or find compelling ways to move through classical topics. My aim is not for the student work to elucidate the tropes, but the tropes to help elucidate the student work. I demonstrate that writing pedagogy needs to return to a conscious use of rhetorical tropes and how students can trope on academic and ordinary language, fulfilling their argumentative needs, and how troping is effective and necessary for conceptual clarity

Stepping Outside: The Shifting Subjectivities of Post-Romantic Poetry

This investigation traces the arc of fracturing and exteriorizing subjectivities in the post-Romantic poetries of Modernism and Postmodernism, ultimately considering the state of contemporary Postmodern subjectivity after the Language Poets. Focusing primarily on T.S. Eliot, John Ashbery, and Christian Hawkey, the thesis argues that the I/Other split associated with Romantic poetry’s idealized Othering of nature performs a major shift with the interiorizing fragmentation of the speaker(s) in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The anxiety produced by this claustrophobic, internal splitting of voices reaches critical mass in the chorus of difficult-to-trace speakers of “The Waste Land,” causing a breach of interior containment which projects the internal polyphony of voices outward. John Ashbery continues this exteriorizing polyphony, as evidenced in his ruminations on the surfaces of representation and his dispersal of subjectivity through the use of pronouns. With one foot moving forward into the post-structuralist avant-garde and another nostalgically reaching for a Romantic unity, Ashbery represents the messy progression of post-Romantic innovation. By the time of Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, the anxieties relating to the death of the contained, Romantic self have lessened with distance, but the legacy of Language poetics (which took the de-authoring, exteriorizing arc to its logical extreme) has left contemporary innovative poets with the challenge of reclaiming human subjectivity without ignoring the complications raised by generations of problematizing experimenters. By “collaborating” with dead poets and creatively “translating” foreign language texts, writers like Hawkey are seeking a “middle voice” that retrieves the human element while challenging the myth of a unified self

Studies in the contemporary Spanish-American short story

Bibliography: page 123-124Includes indexThis work deals with selected Latin-American writers of short stories and, in the case of each author, with only one or a limited number of texts. No attempt has been made to write a history of the contemporary short story in Latin America or even to deal with a canon of representative authors. Each of the texts studied has been chosen because it is indicative of a facet of the short story that parallels the so-called Latin American new novel.Introduction -- The �criture of literary texts -- Toward a characterization of �criture in the stories of Borges --Rulfo's "Luvina" and structuring figures of diction --Garc�a M�rquez and the �criture of complicity: "La prodigiosa tarde de Baltazar" -- The double inscription of the Narrataire in "Los funerales de la Mam� Grande" -- The �criture of rupture and subversion of language in Cort�zar's Historias de cronopios y famas -- Cort�zar's "Las armas secretas" and structurally anomalous narratives -- The �criture of social protest in Mario Benedetti's "El cambiazo" -- Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Vista del amanecer en el tr�pico and the generic ambiguity of narrativeDigitized at the University of Missouri--Columbia MU Libraries Digitization Lab in 2012. Digitized at 600 dpi with Zeutschel, OS 15000 scanner. Access copy, available in MOspace, is 400 dpi, grayscale

Poetic neologism in english from the renaissance to modernism

This study analyses word coinages from across 400 years of English poetry. It identifies the powerful poetic effects achieved through the practice, shared by a diverse group of poets who frequently influenced one another. The study reveals four intrinsic attributes of coined words that are associated with those effects

Politics of popular creativity and popular knowledge: on the case of adbusters and Harry Potter fans

My research looks at and investigates popular creativity and the politics involved in two different cases. I situate popular creativity and the politics involved in the context of cultural studies. My first case looks at advertisements that are placed under attack, or busted. I investigate the different politics of defamiliarization between two specific busted ads. The politics of defamiliarization create moving images based on the Freudian uncanny and Brechtian Verfremdung. My second case involves Harry Potter fans and fan fiction writing. Specifically, I investigate the politics of closure or stereotyping involved in a copyright dispute over the publication of the so-called Harry Potter Lexicon. Methodologically speaking, I am `on the case\u27. In being `on the case\u27, politics happen too, which concern the production of knowledge over equality. I situate equality in the context of Jacques Rancière\u27s understanding of it, alongside his understanding of people, politics, and what he refers to as police. In building my research cases, I offer a form of popular knowledge

Mapping the Urban Database Documentary: Authorial Agency in Utopias of Kaleidoscopic Perception and Sensory Estrangement

This dissertation theorizes the genre of the urban database documentary, a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems to uncover new perspectives on the lived experience of place. While particularly prominent in recent decades, I argue that the genre of the urban database documentary arises at the turn of the 20th century in response to the rise of the metropolis and the widespread adoption of new media technologies such as photography, cinema, and radio. This was a time when the modern city engendered significant disorientation in its inhabitants, dramatically expanding horizontally and vertically. The rampant pace of technological development at this time also spawned feelings of dehumanization and the loss of connection to embodied experience. The urban database documentary emerges as a symptomatic response to the period's new cultural conditions, meeting a collective need to create order from vast quantities of information and re-frame perception of daily experience. The design of structural systems became a creative method for simultaneously addressing these vast new quantities of information, while attending to the particularities of individual experience. For media artists, building a database into the aesthetic design of a work itself offers an avenue for creatively documenting the radical multiplicity of urbanized environments, preserving attention to the sensory experience of details while aspiring to a legible whole. Crucially, I argue that the design of these systems is a vital form of authorial agency. By reading these artists' work in relation to contemporary practice, I aim to make transparent the underlying, non-technical ambitions that fuel this distinctive mode of media art practice