Hermeneutics and Nature

This paper contributes to the on-going research into the ways in which the humanities transformed the natural sciences in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. By investigating the relationship between hermeneutics -- as developed by Herder -- and natural history, it shows how the methods used for the study of literary and artistic works played a crucial role in the emergence of key natural-scientific fields, including geography and ecology

Social Class

Discussion of class structure in fifth-century Athens, historical constitution of theater audiences, and the changes in the comic representation of class antagonism from Aristophanes to Menander

Videogame consumption: The apophatic dimension

This article applies psychological-sociological accounts of the ‘apophatic’, a form of negative thinking, to examples of gaming practices to conceptualise a new theory of videogame consumption. It challenges the prevailing notion that the games consumer is always a ‘cataphatic’ thinker – that is, an activistic, rational-pleasure seeker – and looks to the ‘sorrows’ of gaming to find evidence of its more undesirable nature. The term ‘apophatic’ is characterised as an attempt to de-value the rational value purportedly placed on gaming practices. ‘Griefing’ other players is a good example of this apophatic ethic, where players derive value from the subversion of serious play through the disruption and destruction of other players’ game worlds. The struggle with ‘failure’ is another. As such, the article concludes with a reflection on the almost unsayable nature of videogame consumption, and suggests that consumer value may be derived from its more negative, spiritual-like aspects

The Influence of Manga on the Graphic Novel

This material has been published in The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, Stephen E. Tabachnick. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University PressProviding a range of cogent examples, this chapter describes the influences of the Manga genre of comics strip on the Graphic Novel genre, over the last 35 years, considering the functions of domestication, foreignisation and transmedia on readers, markets and forms

An extremal problem for the nonoverlapping domains

Sharp estimates of product of inner radii for pairwise disjoint domains are obtained. In particular, we solve an extremal problem in the case of arbitrary finite number of free poles on the system points on the rays