Television and serial fictions

Written in 1974, Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form was to become for many academics, and particularly for academics who approached popular culture from the perspective of the humanities, one of the foundational texts of the study of television, the first and even the only book on reading lists, the book which introduced the concept of ‘flow’ as a way of identifying ‘the defining characteristic of broadcasting’. While, almost forty years later, many of its formulations have worn thin with over-use, Williams's observation on the centrality of televisual dramatic fiction to modern experience still has the force of defamiliarisation: it is still surprising to consider, as if for the first time, how much of our time is spent with, how many of our references are drawn from, or how much the structure of contemporary feeling is shaped by television dramatic fiction in its various forms. ‘It seems probable’, says Williams, that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or a weekend, by the majority of viewers, than would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. It is not uncommon for the majority of viewers to see, regularly, as much as two or three hours of drama, of various kinds, every day. The implications of this have scarcely begun to be considered. It is clearly one of the unique characteristics of advanced industrial societies that drama as an experience is now an intrinsic part of everyday life, at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than any precedent as to see a fundamental qualitative change. Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern. Or, to put it categorically, most people spend more time watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food

Back to Nature: Marie Antionette and the Cottagecore Fantasy

This essay is an examination of the legacy of Marie Antionette\u27s Chemise a la Reine. At the end of the 18th century, a portrait of the queen in this dress caused scandal and outrage. Despite, or perhaps because of this, the Chemise a la Reine became a staple in the wardrobe of the Western woman. Today, this style continues to be popular. This is particularly notable in the Cottagecore aesthetic movement. Much like Marie Antionette\u27s use of this style, Cottagecore fashion carries deep ties to an escapist pastoral fantasy. However, more important is the continued legacy of Neoclassicism and the glorification of whiteness, cultural appropriation and the romanticization of colonialism, and the TransAtlantic slave trade and modern exploitative labor. Indeed, these issues are not incidental but intrinsic to both the Chemise a la Reine in the days of Marie Antionette and the Cottagecore peasant dress today. In this essay, I examine each of these issues in depth with a particular interest in how meaning of dress interacts both with production techniques and with movement in time

BIOBEHAVIORAL PREDICTORS OF EXECUTIVE FUNCTION DECLINE IN MID- AND LATE LIFE ADULTS

Using data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Longitudinal Study of Health and Well-Being, this study examined high frequency heart rate variability as a longitudinal predictor of cognitive change in key executive function domains: inhibition, shifting, and updating. This study further explored the interactions between HF HRV and important health factors (inflammation, stress, sleep, and mood and anxiety) in predicting executive function decline. The results of this investigation demonstrated that while high frequency heart rate variability and inhibition decline were correlated, HF HRV was not a significant predictor of decline in any executive function. However, results did show an interaction effect between HF HRV and depression in predicting inhibition and shifting declines in mid-life adults. Further, main effects of sleep quality and anxiety on inhibition and shifting declines were identified. Implications of these findings as well as limitations and future research directions are discussed

Authors and auteurs: the uses of theory

No abstract available

The Modernist Novel in its Contemporaneity

Through the writings of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen, this chapter considers the temporality of the now, the modernist novel in its contemporaneity, to show how the ambient environment of daily life takes shape in, and shapes, the modernist novel

Cognitive Impacts of Age Based Stereotype Threat in Older Adults

The present study examined the effects of age-based stereotype threat (ABST) exposure on cognitive performance in older adults. Forty-nine community volunteers age 65 and older were stratified by age and gender and then randomly assigned to either an ABST group or a Control group. The ABST group read a paragraph describing the expected negative effects of age on cognition and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in older adults. Participants in the Control group read a neutral paragraph of similar length and difficulty. It was hypothesized that individuals in the ABST group would perform worse on neuropsychological testing than individuals in the Control group. Specifically, it was hypothesized that participants in the ABST group would score lower on combined neuropsychological measures of memory, attention, executive function, and processing speed which are commonly used to assess cognitive function in older adults in neuropsychological settings. Results suggest that no significant difference exists between participants in the ABST versus the control group on objective cognitive performance in any of the predicted domains. Implications of these findings as well as limitations and future research directions are discussed

Postmodern and Poststructuralist Approaches to Virginia Woolf

“In or about December 1985, Virginia Woolf criticism changed” (Caughie 1991, 1). Thus begins my book, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991), which demonstrates how postmodern and poststructuralist theories can change, and have changed, the way we read Woolf—that is, the kinds of questions that motivate our readings, the objectives that guide our analyses, and the contexts in which we place her works. 1985 was the year Toril Moi published Sexual/Textual Politics and first articulated the opposition between French feminist theory and Anglo-American feminist criticism, establishing “feminist postmodernism” as a new methodology that disrupted the cultural consensus among feminist critics of the 1970s. In her introduction, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, Moi interrogates the “theoretical assumptions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics” that made so many American feminist critics resistant to Woolf’s modernist style. Relying on a “realist aesthetic,” these critics, Moi argues, assess Woolf’s writing and politics in terms of whether “the right content [is] represented in the correct realist form” (Moi 1985, 3-4, 7). (The relationship between form and content, as we will see, is one of the first casualties of a poststructuralist critical reading.) In contrast, Moi locates Woolf’s politics “precisely in her textual practice” (16), focusing on the politics of language rather than on the politics expressed by Woolf’s language. Although Moi’s rigid division between the French and the Anglo-Americans may lead to reductive readings, in which all American feminists are represented by Elaine Showalter, Moi was the first to articulate the difference French theory makes for feminist literary criticism. What this change in thinking means for reading Woolf is the subject of this chapter

Passing

This chapter is the first from the text, Passing and Pedagogy by Dr. Pamela Caughie. Caughie\u27s discussion of passing illuminates a recent phenomenon in academic writing and popular culture that revolves around identities and the ways in which they are deployed, both in the arts and in lived experience. Through a wide variety of texts--novels, memoirs, film, drama, theory, museum exhibits, legal cases--she demonstrates the dynamics of passing, presenting it not as the assumption of a fraudulent identity but as the recognition that the assumption of any identity, including for the purposes of teaching, is a form of passing