Barbara Stanwyck's Anklet

<span>Los objetos tienen siempre un poder ineludible como significantes. El género fílmico negro está también dotado de una identidad propia a partir de un conjunto de imágenes, argumentos, estilos visuales y objetos por ejemplo, encendedores, persianas y, como elemento central de este trabajo, zapatos. El zapato como emblema de la muerte e icono sexual deviene fundamental en la puesta en escena del género negro. Cuando la “femme fatale” Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), por ejemplo, desciende la escalera para encontrarse con el corredor de seguros Walter Neff (Fred Mc Murray) en la película de Billy Wilder </span><em>Persuasión</em><span> (1944), la cámara enfoca sus piernas blancas y relucientes hasta alcanzar sus pies y sus tobillos, con el fin de evocar el poder fetichista del pie de una mujer a la hora de controlar a un hombre.</span

The QUEST-La Silla AGN Variability Survey

We present the characterization and initial results from the QUEST-La Silla AGN variability survey. This is an effort to obtain well sampled optical light curves in extragalactic fields with unique multi-wavelength observations. We present photometry obtained from 2010 to 2012 in the XMM-COSMOS field, which was observed over 150 nights using the QUEST camera on the ESO-Schmidt telescope. The survey uses a broadband filter, the $Q$-band, similar to the union of the $g$ and the $r$ filters, achieving an intrinsic photometric dispersion of $0.05$ mag, and a systematic error of $0.05$ mag in the zero-point. Since some detectors of the camera show significant non-linearity, we use a linear correlation to fit the zero-points as a function of the instrumental magnitudes, thus obtaining a good correction to the non-linear behavior of these detectors. We obtain good photometry to an equivalent limiting magnitude of $r\sim 20.5$. Studying the optical variability of X-ray detected sources in the XMM-COSMOS field, we find that the survey is $\sim75-80$% complete to magnitudes $r\sim20$, and $\sim67$% complete to a magnitude $r\sim21$. The determination and parameterization of the structure function (${SF}_{norm}(\tau) = A \tau^{\gamma}$) of the variable sources shows that most BL AGN are characterized by $A > 0.1$ and $\gamma > 0.025$. It is further shown that variable NL AGN and GAL sources occupying the same parameter space in $A$ and $\gamma$ are very likely to correspond to obscured or low luminosity AGN. Our samples are, however, small, and we expect to revisit these results using larger samples with longer light curves obtained as part of our ongoing survey.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Contemporary Photographic Practices on the British Fairground

The fairground is a somewhat magical and uncharted realm of illusion, deception, thrill and adventure. It offers a glimpse of the improbable and impossible, and a taste or touch of the unattainable. This article looks at the crossover of photography and the British fairground following the gradual take-up of photography in the post-war period. It briefly covers early traditions concomitant with the specialised practice of photography, then it identifies photographic practices on the fairground through distinct communities of engagement including professional and amateur photographers attracted to the spectacle of the fair, ethnographic explorers, dedicated enthusiasts, showpeople and the general public of “punters”. In each case photographs from these communities are presented as well as a selection of photographs depicting these communities of photographers in action. The article concludes with the current situation of camera phone technology, social media and digitally manipulated photographic art as a new aesthetic of the fairground

Female Subjectivity in Women's Revolutionary Novels of the 1930S.

American literary radicalism has been cast within an and rocentric discourse. Following the writers of the 1930s, literary historians have emphasized male writers and their masculinist portrayal of the working class, ignoring the leftist women writers. Recent feminist reconstructions of American literary history have also neglected these women's writings because many feminist critics have failed to include a critique of class in their work. Recovering more than forty revolutionary novels written by women during the 1930s, this study develops a methodology for reading women's political fiction. An adequate reading of the genre entails producing an underst and ing of the theoretical problems of narrating female subjectivity as the matrix of class, gender, racial and sexual differences interpolated through language. During the 1930s, a rhetoric of masculinity metaphorically engendered the class struggle. Critical pronouncements constructed the proletariat and its novel as masculine, placing the women writing revolutionary fiction in a contradictory position. In response to this rhetorical and political exclusion, sexuality became central to inscribing female subjectivity, rerouting the narrative trajectory of the proletarian novel to encode sexuality as political, and thus, transforming the genre. Yonnondio, The Girl and other novels demonstrate that for the working class female, sexuality functions as a causal means to political consciousness. If the experiences of industrial labor forge class consciousness in the classic proletarian novel, heterosexual brutality and enforced maternity fuel the rebellious heroines of women's revolutionary novels. For the female intellectual in Rope of Gold, The Unpossessed and other novels, gender and class doubly alienate her from the experience of masculine labor; however, sexuality provides a bridge into political consciousness. Thus, a dual narrative of history and desire propels women's revolutionary novels. In some cases, the two combine and open out into history, envisioning collectivity as a utopian promise. In others, the two cannot be contained because the fragments of alienated subjectivity fracture rather than coalesce the narratives.Ph.D.American literatureWomen's studiesUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161303/1/8702812.pd

Barbara Stanwyck's Anklet

Los objetos tienen siempre un poder ineludible como significantes. El g&eacute;nero f&iacute;lmico negro est&aacute; tambi&eacute;n dotado de una identidad propia a partir de un conjunto de im&aacute;genes, argumentos, estilos visuales y objetos por ejemplo, encendedores, persianas y, como elemento central de este trabajo, zapatos. El zapato como emblema de la muerte e icono sexual deviene fundamental en la puesta en escena del g&eacute;nero negro. Cuando la &ldquo;femme fatale&rdquo; Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), por ejemplo, desciende la escalera para encontrarse con el corredor de seguros Walter Neff (Fred Mc Murray) en la pel&iacute;cula de Billy Wilder Persuasi&oacute;n (1944), la c&aacute;mara enfoca sus piernas blancas y relucientes hasta alcanzar sus pies y sus tobillos, con el fin de evocar el poder fetichista del pie de una mujer a la hora de controlar a un hombre