1,140 research outputs found
Children documenting language and culture: Games and toys in Ikakumo
We have all played some form of football at some point in our lives, but what is your favourite game and what toys did you use to play with? Do you know the games ames, lago, ayo, ekpe, okuto, cashew, locker, abas, ludo, tyre, ring or whot? Have you ever raced a bamboo car down the road?
In this exhibition, you see photos of games and toys taken by children in Ikakumo and videos of parents reminiscing about the games they used to play when they were small. You also see photos of the village where the children live and of the animals that people keep, photos of how the children help at home, and photos of what goes on in the village.
You can also find out how such photos and videos shot by the children help linguists with documenting a language and a culture, and how a linguist might put an exhibition and the materials to go with it into an archive
Exhibitionary Forms in Ireland: James Joyceâs Exhibits of Irish Modernity
The Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the beginning of a bond between capitalism,
consumer culture, the emergent advertising and the imperial ideology of England
that would consolidate its hold not only economically but semiotically well into the
early twentieth century. Within the new âscopicâ sense of the Empire promoted by the International Exhibitions in the British context, the specificity of Ireland as internal
colony and emancipating nation is worth considering.
The 1907 Dublin International Exhibition, in spite of its success, failed to elicit a
strong interest on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals, at a peak time in the history of
cultural nationalism championed by the Celtic Revival movement, with the two notable
exceptions of novelist Bram Stoker and, to a lesser degree, of playwright John Millington
Synge. The first part of the essay considers the cultural implications of the expositions
in Ireland and the 1907 Dublin Exhibition in the light of the defining trope of the core-periphery
relationship. The second and main part of this study focuses on what appears
to be one of the most interesting and articulate textualizations of the âexhibitionary
complexâ in Irish â and English â literary culture, which should rather be ascribed, it
is my contention, to the work of James Joyce, notably in Dubliners and Ulysses. This
applies to the distinctively Irish minor expository form of the (Orientalist) bazaar (the
Araby and Mirus bazaars, respectively in Dubliners and Ulysses), the phantasmagoria of
commodity culture, the ubiquity and the spectacle of the imported colonial commodities
as an instance of cultural imperialism, the consumption of Orientalist images as an
escapist rather than imperialist fantasy, the nexus between the ephemeral expository
space and erotic degradation, the museum (âLestrygoniansâ), the press and advertising
(âAeolusâ), the monumentary apparatus of the city (âWandering Rocksâ), the Victorian
seaside resort indirectly evoked as a sexualized space of leisure (âNausicaaâ), the pageant
of colonial Irelandâs efforts of technical and scientific progress satirised in âIthacaâ, and,
finally, the very idea of the modern city as exhibition
«these heavy sands are language»: the beach as a cultural signifier from Dover Beach to On Chesil Beach
Il saggio si concentra su alcune caratteristiche del topos della spiaggia come spazio
geografico liminare, problematico e instabile, nel suo connotarsi come costrutto
culturale nella riflessione estetica della letteratura inglese. Partendo da
âDover Beachâ di Matthew Arnold, uno dei piĂč celebri testi poetici Vittoriani, in
cui la spiaggia e la costa sono lo scenario di una fantasia di conflitto, espressione
di unâinquietudine sociale e di unâangoscia morale suscitate dalla paventata deriva
di una civiltĂ , si analizza la complessitĂ semantica della spiaggia come spazio
ove si inscena una rottura del precario equilibrio tra individuo e il mondo cui
appartiene, o la presa dâatto di un impossibile controllo sul reale in alcuni testi
narrativi del tardo Ottocento â il racconto âThe Beach of FalesĂĄâ di R. L Stevenson
â e Modernisti â âSolid Objectsâ di Virginia Woolf, il terzo capitolo di Ulysses di
Joyce, âProteusâ. Nella parte finale si considera la ripresa intertestuale del testo
arnoldiano nel romanzo On Chesil Beach di Ian McEwan, che ripropone lâimmagine
della spiaggia come luogo simbolico della rivelazione della fragilitĂ dellâidentitĂ
e dello smarrimento dellâio
«Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements
The article considers two main aspects of literary estrangement in neo-Victorian fiction, starting from a very brief introduction to Shklovskyâs concept in the context of English literature. The first part refers to the structural use of defamiliarization and foregrounding of narrative strategies innovated by John Fowlesâ seminal 1969 The French Lieutenantâs Woman. Fowles âmade strangeâ the Victorian novel reinventing its form, promoting a renovation of realism and a reconsideration of the great themes of Victorian fiction through an inventive use of narrative distance and of the narratorial voice.
The second part of the article focusses on the ârestorationâ of the object mentioned by Shklovsky in considering a specific material and cultural object - the fossil- connoted by an epistemic tension which was investigated by Foucault and Mitchell. The fossil is thus analysed as a catalyst of estrangement in some neo-Victorian novels of the last fifty years, among which Fowlesâ masterpiece, Graham Swiftâs Ever After (1992) and Tracy Chevalierâs Remarkable Creatures (2009)
The fictive and the funerary: macabre and black humour in the contemporary Irish novel
Death and the macabre have always been deeply entrenched in Irish culture: one of its most celebrated sons, Bram Stoker, has granted Ireland a central place in the Gothic literary tradition.
The wake and the funeral have a prominent place into the Irish obsession with death and all its paraphernalia. In their book about Irish funerary tradition, Nina Witoszek and Patrick Sheeran state how those traditions are a mark of identity and might be seen as politically charged since the history of Ireland is one of a country divided by opposing loyalties and religious affiliations.
Poetry has been regarded as one of the most effective vehicles for the transmission of death traditions in the rich Irish culture, and the modern and contemporary Irish poetry is a remarkable depository of death imagery. By recalling the distinction by Vivian Mercier, who identifies 'macabre' and 'grotesque' as two types of humour typical of the Irish comic tradition (along with the fantastic), the essay discusses the cultural and anthropological matrix of the Irish macabre through examples from contemporary Irish literature, focusing in particular on novels by Patrick McCabe and John Banville
Weak measurement of quantum dot spin qubits
The theory of weak quantum measurements is developed for quantum dot spin
qubits. Building on recent experiments, we propose a control cycle to prepare,
manipulate, weakly measure, and perform quantum state tomography. This is
accomplished using a combination of the physics of electron spin resonance,
spin blockade, and Coulomb blockade, resulting in a charge transport process.
We investigate the influence of the surrounding nuclear spin environment, and
find a regime where this environment significantly simplifies the dynamics of
the weak measurement process, making this theoretical proposal realistic with
existing experimental technology. We further consider spin-echo refocusing to
combat dephasing, as well as discuss a realization of "quantum undemolition",
whereby the effects of quantum state disturbance are undone.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure
Borel reductions of profinite actions of SL(n,Z)
Greg Hjorth and Simon Thomas proved that the classification problem for
torsion-free abelian groups of finite rank \emph{strictly increases} in
complexity with the rank. Subsequently, Thomas proved that the complexity of
the classification problems for -local torsion-free abelian groups of fixed
rank are \emph{pairwise incomparable} as varies. We prove that if
and are distinct primes, then the complexity of the
classification problem for -local torsion-free abelian groups of rank is
again incomparable with that for -local torsion-free abelian groups of rank
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