7,333 research outputs found

    Personal relevance in story reading: a research review

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    Although personal relevance is key to sustaining an audience’s interest in any given narrative, it has received little systematic attention in scholarship to date. Across centuries and media, adaptations have been used extensively to bring temporally or geographically distant narratives “closer” to the recipient under the assumption that their impact will increase. In this review article, we review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be impactful than others, which types of impact (e.g. aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power may become excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience

    Replicating Paintings

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    In this paper, I discuss cases of replication in the visual arts, with particular focus on paintings. In the first part, I focus on painted copies, that is, manual reproductions of paintings created by artists. Painted copies are sometimes used for the purpose of aesthetic education on the original. I explore the relation between the creation of painted copies and their use as aesthetic surrogates of the original artwork and draw a positive conclusion on the aesthetic benefits of replica production by artists. A skeptical conclusion follows regarding the use of such replicas as surrogates for the original painting. The second part of the paper concerns mechanically produced replicas, such as photographs and 3-D prints. On the basis of some of the claims made in the first part, I set conditions that mechanically produced replicas need to meet in order to function as aesthetic surrogates of an original. I argue that perfect aesthetic surrogates are either already available or at least possible. I conclude by considering two possible objections

    Replicating Venus: art, anatomy, wax models and automata

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    This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Open Library of Humanities via the DOI in this record.The modern history of machines that mimic humans — automata, artist’s dummies, mannequins, mechanical dolls, poupées, robots, androids, bionic men and women — is long and varied. Since the birth of the Enlightenment, these adaptable machines have been a testing ground for that perennial question: what does it mean to be human? Eighteenth-century varieties reflected the rise of materialism and conceptions of the body as machine; nineteenth-century automata provided writers and artists with a way of negotiating conflicts between individual desires and social constraints; other automata embodied an industrializing machine age and its new technologies; fin-de-siècle androids manifested a modern privileging of logic and system over individual volition or free will; still others were formed out of eugenicist dreams of human perfection. Of course, there are many other possibilities here, for automata have had as many uses as they have had forms. For all their variety though, they invariably appear at the intersection of science and the arts: from René Descartes’s seventeenth-century musings on clockwork humans and ‘beast-machines’ to the eighteenth-century materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s deliberations on Vaucanson’s famous artificial duck; from the master of macabre Edgar Allan Poe’s writing about Kempelen’s celebrated chess-playing ‘Turk’ to the American inventor Thomas Edison’s nursery rhyme uttering dolls; and from the Maschinenmensch of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the suburban gynoid of The Stepford Wives. These automata have also inspired influential theoretical work, from Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) to Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), as well as a considerable body of literary and cultural history. [...

    Poetic sensibilities, humanities, and wonder: Toward an e/affective sociology of sport

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    In the academy that we often call the “sociology of sport,” rarely do we allow for the existence of poets or even of poetic sensibilities. This may seem to be a strange comment, given that NASSS particularly, and the sociology of sport more generally, are seen as stemming from a proud and mostly-honored tradition of the “social sciences.” In this case, the emphasis is on “sciences”—as opposed to more humanities-oriented discussions of the social.2 I plan, initially, to provide a contextualization of how I see we have come to where we are at, so please bear with me through my rehistoricizing, or story-making, of the sociology of sport—for, in my worldview, it is all story-making

    Why are there no great women artists (in the new advanced art syllabus)?

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    This paper critically evaluates the appropriateness of the History of art component of the new 2008-2010 Matriculation and Secondary examination (MATSEC) Advanced and Intermediate Art syllabi. The syllabi propose a traditional ‘canon’ of eighty works of art for students to study, including some of the most wellknown painters and sculptors in the history of Western art. However, it simultaneously excludes several groups: in particular, women, non-Western and living artists. Modern and contemporary Maltese art are also omitted, while the artistic media represented in the list are very restricted. The paper argues that these exclusions are deceptive precisely because their omission from the list is ‘hidden’ behind a veil of inclusiveness (the list covers a very long period: from Palaeolithic cave-paintings to the twentieth century). Hence, students are led to think that this survey is the ‘story of art’, when it actually offers a very partial account of artistic expression. The concluding propositions offer directions that future re-evaluations of the MATSEC Art syllabi might take.peer-reviewe

    ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty

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    I argued in 2000 that the French artist ORLAN may have moved away from her Reincarnation performances toward her Self-Hybridizations because she thought that in the latter she would be more transparently obvious in meaning and less frequently misunderstood. I may have overstated the ability of audiences to comprehend, however. In this essay I argue that the virtual beauty that ORLAN unfolds in her ongoing series Self-Hybridizations is not a real or actual beauty but rather a fake beauty, causally disembodied, based on the effects she intends to create from an imaginative use of combined hybrid imagery. Subverting the familiar philosophical notions of aesthetic distance and aesthetic appreciation, hers is not a monstrous beauty (as some feminist art theorists contend) but rather a fake beauty that still has aesthetic features worth assessing. I suggest the possibility of generational differences in understandings of the term 'feminist', i.e., shifts in meaning from early feminist theory of the 1970s to ever-evolving, twenty-first century notions of the term, all of which add to the confusion. As I negotiate this terrain, I hope to steer both critics and viewers more directly to the words of the artist herself, "I have tried to make my Self-Hybridations as 'human' as possible, like mutant beings, but I still did not think that the confusion could be possible.
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