Xi Xi’s Playful Image-texts: Ekphrasis, Parergon, and the Concept of Toy

What does the ludic have to do with Xi Xi’s writings and creative concerns? This essay addresses the question by examining Xi Xi’s “little prose pieces,” or xiaopin sanwen, which take the format of the intermedial image-text and exist as a third category of her writing besides fiction and poetry. I explore how Xi Xi’s image-texts offer new articulations of play by discussing these questions: how are these image-texts constructed in game-like ways? What modes of play do they engage with? And what playful experience do they offer to readers and viewers? The author first considers the image-text’s intermediality in Xi Xi’s earlier works, including Scrapbook, Picture/Storybook, and Jigsaw Puzzles. Xi Xi relates to two key concepts in art history to augment the ludic dimension of her works: ekphrasis, generally denoting writing that represents and expounds images and artworks, and the parergon, understood as “supplement” to the artwork and as visual framing. The image-text in these earlier works functions as a toy. Second, the essay addresses Xi Xi’s engagement with material playthings in her recent image-texts that are explicitly about toys, such as The Teddy Bear Chronicles and My Toys. Here, the concept of toy intersects with premodern Chinese leisure (xianqing) culture. Tracing the evolution of Xi Xi’s relation to the ludic over time, the essay argues that Xi Xi’s image-texts are a site of ludic aesthetics that highlights two modes of play: the youxi mode encompasses the notion of literature as a game with particular techniques and rules and ludicity as a dynamic and liminal experience; the wanshang mode posits play as leisure and the cultivation of style and taste, as well as a space of temporary withdrawal from the world of obligations. Both ludic modes affirm play as an aesthetic experience, appreciated for its intrinsic value. Literary play, as found in Xi Xi’s image-texts, therefore produces aesthetically sophisticated and significant works that engage readers on multiple levels of creative reading and seeing

Making classical Chinese literature contemporary: Translation 'between centre and absence'

The translation of classical Chinese literature not only is a sinological concern for premodern specialists but offers much food for thought on translation in the Chinese context broadly speaking. Translating classical Chinese into modern Chinese – a standardised language based on spoken Mandarin – inevitably involves translating across significant linguistic and historical differences, although both are considered Sinitic languages. The twentieth-century turn to focus more on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and its English translations should not obscure the fact that classical Chinese literature has been highly visible in pre-twentieth-century East Asia and Southeast Asia and formed a paradigm of literature-in-circulation. Reflections on intralingual translation and the distance between classical and modern Chinese lead to an examination of the Chinese commentarial tradition in relation to translation. The comparative reading of multiple translations is not only ‘important for the study of classical Chinese texts’ but also enriches our understanding of the original text as ‘potentially plural’

Earth science: Redox state of early magmas

International audienceA study of cerium in zircon minerals has allowed an assessment of the redox conditions that prevailed when Earth's earliest magmas formed. The results suggest that the mantle became oxidized sooner than had been though

Cybercities: Mediated Public Open Spaces - A Matter of Interaction and Interfaces.

In the near past, sources of information about public open spaces were: people, the place itself and historical archives. Accordingly, the information could be obtained by interviewing the visitors, by reading some poorly equipped signs on monuments or by research in libraries. Today, a new source appeared: The place itself covers its own information by the mean of the growing of the ICT (Information Communication Technologies). In addition, the information can be personalised in a way each people can access it individually. Ten years ago, a left-over newspaper on a park bench was a compact piece of information. Today, the newspaper resides on a smartphone in our pockets. In the future, the park bench will still be there, but dramatically changed to an IoT (Internet of things) object, bringing information to the people. Therefore, there is the need to re-think the park bench as an interface. A simple, fundamental point is: the quality of the interface rules the quality of the information. With a special focus on the latter, this chapter discusses how the classical model of the city is enhanced with the senseable city concept and how digital information influences, adopts, transforms and re-configures different objects in urban areas

Coupled biogeochemical cycles : eutrophication and hypoxia in temperate estuaries and coastal marine ecosystems

Author Posting. © Ecological Society of America, 2011. This article is posted here by permission of Ecological Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 9 (2011): 18–26, doi:10.1890/100008.Nutrient fluxes to coastal areas have risen in recent decades, leading to widespread hypoxia and other ecological damage, particularly from nitrogen (N). Several factors make N more limiting in estuaries and coastal waters than in lakes: desorption (release) of phosphorus (P) bound to clay as salinity increases, lack of planktonic N fixation in most coastal ecosystems, and flux of relatively P-rich, N-poor waters from coastal oceans into estuaries. During eutrophication, biogeochemical feedbacks further increase the supply of N and P, but decrease availability of silica – conditions that can favor the formation and persistence of harmful algal blooms. Given sufficient N inputs, estuaries and coastal marine ecosystems can be driven to P limitation. This switch contributes to greater far-field N pollution; that is, the N moves further and contributes to eutrophication at greater distances. The physical oceanography (extent of stratification, residence time, and so forth) of coastal systems determines their sensitivity to hypoxia, and recent changes in physics have made some ecosystems more sensitive to hypoxia. Coastal hypoxia contributes to ocean acidification, which harms calcifying organisms such as mollusks and some crustaceans.Funding was supplied in part by NOAA through the Coastal Hypoxia Research Program, by the NSF through the Biocomplexity Coupled Biogeochemical Cycles competition, and by DR Atkinson through an endowment given to Cornell University

High Methanol Oxidation Activity of Well-Dispersed Pt Nanoparticles on Carbon Nanotubes Using Nitrogen Doping

Pt nanoparticles (NPs) with the average size of 3.14 nm well dispersed on N-doped carbon nanotubes (CNTs) without any pretreatment have been demonstrated. Structural properties show the characteristic N bonding within CNTs, which provide the good support for uniform distribution of Pt NPs. In electrochemical characteristics, N-doped CNTs covered with Pt NPs show superior current density due to the fact that the so-called N incorporation could give rise to the formation of preferential sites within CNTs accompanied by the low interfacial energy for immobilizing Pt NPs. Therefore, the substantially enhanced methanol oxidation activity performed by N-incorporation technique is highly promising in energy-generation applications