Cultivating an Ethics of Attention in the Age of ChatGPT: Bearing With or Circumventing the Encounter “The Blank Page”

Reframing Tragedy

Public museums and art galleries in Canada are highly authoritative, and trusted knowledge and identity mobilising institutions, whose exhibitions are frequently a ‘blank page’ of erasure, silencing, and marginalisation, in terms of women’s histories, experiences, and contributions. Feminist exhibitions are a response to this, but few in Canada have been explored as practices of feminist community adult education. I begin to address this gap with an analysis of two feminist exhibitions: In Defiance: Indigenous Women Define Themselves, curated by Mohawk-Iroquois artist, Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde, at the Legacy Gallery, University of Victoria; and Fashion Victims: The Pleasures & Perils of Dress in the 19th Century, curated by Ryerson Professor Alison Matthews David, at the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto. Although dissimilar in form, focus, and era, these exhibitions act as powerful intentional pedagogical processes of disruption and reclamation, using images and storytelling to animate, re-write and reimagine the ‘blank pages’ of particular and particularised histories and identities. Through the centrality of women’s bodies and practices of violence, victimization, and women’s power, these exhibitions encourage the feminist oppositional imagination, dialogic looking, gender consciousness, and a visual literacy of hope and possibility. Yet, as women’s stories become audible through the very representational vehicles and institutional spaces used to silence them, challenges remain.

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

Although morphology is generally limited to static images, the histopathological features of bancroftian lymphatic disease are presented here in a way that is as dynamic as possible and closely associated with the clinical, ultrasonographic and surgical characteristics. The protean spectrum of alterations seen in the host's lymphatic vessels is discussed, and the changes caused by the live and dead worms are highlighted, as independent events. Evidence of a remodelling process, in which the lymphatic endothelial cells appear to have a key role, is provided for the first time. Despite many new pieces of information, there remain many 'blank pages' in the natural history of bancroftian filariasis.

Such is the claim of the old woman, the story teller, in Isak Dinesen's short story 'The Blank Page'. My purpose in this paper is to explore the idea of the silence which speaks, by relating Isak Dinesen to another story-teller whose silences continue to speak, the writer of the book of Job, through the mediation of a reader of biblical silences, Soren Kierkegaard. In this way, I want to examine the relationship between speech, silence and gender which has formed an important element of the feminist reading of texts, not least the reading of the bible. Feminist readers have sought to let the voices of the silenced speak, to read out the suppressed stories of women from the patriarchal language of the biblical text.2 I will argue that the nuances of textual silence are more subtle than such readings sometimes allow and their critique of the human condition more radical than the undoubtedly valid critique of the more limited if pervasive tyranny of patriarchy. It is in the dangerous dynamic of betrayal and faithfulness that speech and silence, man and woman, text and reader interact. In particular, my aim is to illuminate the role of the male reader of the biblical text by rehearsing the complex series of gendered readings which will unfold below. The old woman in Dinesen's story goes on to recount the tale of the blank page—a page where, she says, one may read 'a still deeper, merrier and more cmel tale'3 than any written by the most royal and gallant pen. She tells of a convent in Portugal where, ranged in gilt frames, hang the fading witnesses to the honour of royal brides: the central portions of the royal wedding sheets where the imaginative can find traced in the stains whatever sign they look for. But one frame is different. It contains a portion of a pure white sheet, which in 'unswerving loyalty' to the story has been

The purpose of this study is to analyze food metaphors in Children’s literature: a metaphor of punishment in Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a metaphor of pleasure in Rowling’s Harry Potter books and a metaphor of healing in Hovarth’s Everything on a Waffle. Food has been used to teach proper knowledge and lessons to children (readers) by adults (authors). Within those thoughts, children should be passive and obedient objects erasing their own voices. In fairy tales, one of the main themes is how to survive through harsh situation and severe starvation. Food and eating manners are suitable to deliver the moral messages to children. Edmund, tempted by White Witch’s Turkish Delight, doesn’t remember the polite manners when he eats, and becomes a traitor to get more Turkish Delight. His greedy desire toward Turkish Delight is punished by the hunger and the crisis to be a victim. Harry, always hungry and isolated in Dursley’s house, realizes the pleasure of food after eating and sharing fantastic sweets and food in Hogwarts. Food in Harry Potter books doesn’t connotate any morals or lessons that children might know. Primrose, who suffers from her parents’ absence, strongly believes that they are alive and come back someday. To fill the absence, she tries to fill up ‘the blank pages’ in mom’s note pad with recipes. Writing recipes can be a way of healing to fill up ‘the blank pages’ in her life.

Experiential Learning, Spatial Visualization and Metacognition: An Exercise with the “Blank Page” Technique for Learning Anatomy

Recent studies about multimodality in the novel and so-called liberature and fiction making use of visual devices all agree in considering Tristram Shandy as one of the main precursors of experimental writing. This article focuses on the use of black and blank pages in contemporary fiction. Four novels are discussed in which the authors have resorted to blank and blank pages: B.S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal , Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves , Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Pape r, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

Many first year students of anatomy and physiology courses demonstrate an inability to self-regulate their learning. To help students increase their awareness of their own learning in a first year undergraduate anatomy course, we piloted an exercise that incorporated the processes of (1) active learning: drawing and plasticine modeling and (2) metacognition: planning, monitoring, reaction, and reflection. The activity was termed "blank page" because all learning cues were removed and students had to create models and diagrams from reflection and recall. Two hundred and eighty-two students responded to a questionnaire reporting qualitative feedback on the exercise. Based on student responses, the "blank page" activity was a positive learning experience and confirmed a need to teach metacognitive skills. From this pilot study, we established that drawing or plasticine modeling is an excellent vehicle for demonstration of the metacognitive processes that enable self-regulation: a known predictor of academic success.

This chapter examines Edmond Jabès, who chose to write hisoeuvrein French despite his Jewish-Arabic origins and his being conversant in both Hebrew and Arabic. French was never a true ‘mother tongue’ to him but rather ‘a foreign one’. This poetical choice was also instrumental to his creation of a cosmos that is very clearly defined byla page blanche, or the ‘blank page’. His writing develops this idea, both literally and metaphorically. A blank sheet is the only thing a writer has to work with at the start of every writing act, therefore it represents a kind of material opposition that all writers must overcome. It represents in this context an existential nothingness that precedes and simultaneously escapes both human and divine creation. In Jabès’s writings, a blank page has two connotations at once: a condition for writing and nothingness. This ambivalent condition results in the paradoxical assumption that his ‘mother tongue is a foreign language’, because it cannot offer the same spiritual intimacy as another language, say, the Holy Language, and because the writer’s ‘mother tongue’ — and, by extension, human language — is always impure and infiltrated by foreignness.

In 1981, Susan Gubar wrote a landmark essay of the feminist second wave entitled ‘“The Blank Page” and the Issues of Female Creativity’. In that essay Gubar developed a sustained analogy between the language of reading and the language of desire, based on a detailed reading of ‘The Blank Page’ (1955), a story written by the Danish female writer, Isak Dinesen. Various aspects of Dinesen’s story interested Gubar: the direct relationship between the body and the story; its use of blood as a vehicle for inscription; the “framing” of the female characters as objets d’art; and the possibility that ‘the woman artist who experiences herself as killed into art may also experience herself as bleeding into print’. What is dispiriting about Gubar’s reading of this story, however, is its predominantly negative tone. Women are wounded spaces, she observes: ‘Mired in our own stories of destruction […] artistic creation often feels like a violation […] a reaction to rending,’ during the experience of which ‘women’s paint and ink are produced through a painful wounding’, too. That said, she identifies within Dinesen’s story a potential for resistance under the terms of which ‘the blank sheet may mean any number of alternative scripts for women’.

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This article is devoted to the cause of semantic ambiguity of Chinese gender terminology by the example of the most controversial concepts, such as "feminism", "gender", "feminist literature", "women's literature", "women's writing". The author pays attention to the socio-historical context, perception of Western feminist theories and actualization of traditional Chinese Philosophic Doctrines, as well as the unique phenomenon of "figurative terminology" creation. In this research, the author used cultural-historical and typological methods, as well as the method of semantic and contextual analysis. The development of a feminist (and later gender) trend in Chinese literary criticism began in the early 1980s. This process took place under the influence of three factors: 1) communist ideology and "state feminism"; 2) the spread of Western theories of feminism; 3) traditional Chinese concepts of gender relations. Chinese researchers were borrowing terms by translating them from English or other European languages. However, the process of semantic adaptation of new concepts was quite complex and had its own features. In particular, Chinese scholars sought to avoid a radical opposition of "the masculine and feminine principles" in the semantics of new terms. Instead they were trying to implement the Chinese philosophical concept of complementing the categories of Yin and Yang, which reflects the "situational worldview" of the Chinese people. One of the special phenomena of Chinese gender literary criticism is the development of "figurative concepts." Such concepts are vivid images of Western literature and literary criticism, which are gaining new meaning in the Chinese cultural environment. In particular, the concept of "The Blank Page", suggested by S. Gubar to denote female identity in a patriarchal society, is associated by Chinese scholars with the activity of Tang Empress Wu Zetian and her "Wordless Tomb Stele". The author concluded that the process of the gender terminology development in Chinese literary criticism is not complete, it balances between the new Western and traditional Chinese concepts of gender relations.