Imaginative Construction Research Articles

Troya (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) como fenómeno turístico y gran producción en Cabo San Lucas

The cinema is a means of communication that generates the construction of imagination through an emotional impact (Domínguez López, 2015). We define enjoyment trough the theoretical perspectives of uses and gratification Lozano, (2007); (Jensen and Rosengren, 1990) and entertainment (Bryant and Zillmann, 1996); In that sense, it is pertinent to ask the following: What do people do with such media? Specifically, Wich filming conditions of a great production film genre (Bergan, 2011) like Troya (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) can do on the promotion of Cabo San Lucas? The objective of this research is to reflect from a holistic approach Bryant and Zillmann (1996); (Martin, 2003); (Goliot-Lété and Vanoye, 2005), Domínguez (2015); the following aspects: 1) The use of cinema to promote a destination; 2) Collective identification values; and 3) The traveler-spectator phenomenon regarding the characteristics of this place and its history reflected on the screen from one of the main locations in Cabo San Lucas.

Coloristic Expressive Tools in Prose by Volodymyr Drozd

The paper deals with coloristic means in the works by the well-known Ukrainian writer-Sixtier. It focuses on the functions of colors and color effects in the text, their analogues in painting, and the role of the colors in showing semantic and mood accents or expressing some implicated meanings. The researcher traces accordance of the literary means with expressive resources of painting art as they are recorded in the theory of art.
 Throughout all the periods of the writer’s creative work the prose by V. Drozd shows the author’s attention to the plastic wealth of the outside world and its coloristic potential. The search for the graphic forms of a psychological analysis, as well as the mood dominant, the background of event, the expressive color markers of semantic accents or meaningful image components of exposition, and, after all, the very painting-like modeling of the landscape or interior, stimulated new graphic experiments that renewed and deepened aesthetic impact of a literary work on a reader, due to the culture of visual perception and constructive imagination.
 The first attempts of verbal design and color rendering in V. Drozd’s works still testify to his literary apprenticeship showing excessively decorative nature, unambiguity of semantic associations, bright hues and chromatic saturation that looks rather as adopted from pictures and not taken from nature. Such artistic approach to the theme generates enormous, and at the same time ideologically typical, pathos associated with aesthetics of socialistic realism and therefore with the teaching function of art.
 The development of coloristic culture in the works of the prose writer is rooted in his attention to the rich range of hues, their emotional and expressive potential, and also in the author’s desire to show a psychological action in a more plastic and suggestive way. In order to reproduce the coloristic variety of sensory experience and underline important semantic implications the writer skillfully works on the parameters of achromatic light environment which becomes symbolized or transformed in a fantastic and hyperbolic way due to the expressive function of light markers.
 The light and color contrasts or combinations of hues may underline some essential semantic aspects of the verbal picture components within the reproduction of a landscape. The analysis of figurative and modeling means proves the artistic functionality of the verbal analogues of painting in V. Drozd’s prose, and its consistency with the aesthetic dominants of the Sixtiers.

Adiós a la lengua materna: la escritura en lengua extranjera como acto de disidencia. El caso de José María Blanco White.

Este artículo analiza la relación que José María Blanco White sostenía con el idioma inglés y su propia lengua materna, el español. Exiliado por voluntad propia en Inglaterra a partir de 1810, el autor de origen sevillano expresa en un inicio su voluntad de convertirse en un hombre de letras británico, y de abandonar para siempre la escritura literaria en castellano. Esta renuncia lingüística implica una disidencia tanto política como religiosa, así como un paso en su evolución intelectual. Aunque Blanco White alcanza un alto prestigio como autor en Inglaterra en su lengua adoptiva, nunca abandonará del todo su compleja relación con España ni su expresión en idioma español. Se discute también cómo su supuesta identidad inglesa es una construcción imaginaria del autor que, si bien busca despojarse de sus raíces, carga constantemente a cuestas con ellas.

Language evolution to revolution: the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children – the Romulus and Remus hypothesis

There is an overwhelming archeological and genetic evidence that modern speech apparatus was acquired by hominins by 600,000 years ago. On the other hand, artifacts signifying modern imagination, such as (1) composite figurative arts, (2) bone needles with an eye, (3) construction of dwellings, and (4) elaborate burials arose not earlier than 70,000 years ago. It remains unclear (1) why there was a long gap between acquisition of modern speech apparatus and modern imagination, (2) what triggered the acquisition of modern imagination 70,000 years ago, and (3) what role language might have played in this process. Our research into evolutionary origin of modern imagination has been driven by the observation of a temporal limit for the development of a particular component of imagination. Modern children not exposed to recursive language in early childhood never acquire the type of active constructive imagination called Prefrontal Synthesis (PFS). Unlike vocabulary and grammar acquisition, which can be learned throughout one’s lifetime, there is a strong critical period for the development of PFS and individuals not exposed to recursive language in early childhood can never acquire PFS as adults. Their language will always lack understanding of spatial prepositions and recursion that depend on the PFS ability. In a similar manner, early hominins would not have been able to learn recursive language as adults and, therefore, would not be able to teach recursive language to their children. Thus, the existence of a strong critical period for PFS acquisition creates an evolutionary barrier for behavioral modernity. An evolutionary mathematical model suggests that a synergistic confluence of three events (1) a genetic mutation that extended the critical period by slowing down the prefrontal cortex development simultaneously in two or more children, (2) invention of recursive elements of language, such as spatial prepositions, by these children and (3) their dialogic communications using these recursive elements, resulted in concurrent conversion of a non-recursive communication system of their parents to recursive language and acquisition of PFS around 70,000 years ago.

Review: Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure, by Peter H. Christensen

Peter H. Christensen Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017, 204 pp., 77 color and 66 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300225648 Indispensable—if ubiquitous and seemingly ordinary—components of everyday life, infrastructures shape how space and time are organized across multiple scales. As sizable interventions on the land, they require a sustained investment of substantial human, economic, and material resources. Consequently, infrastructures engender productive avenues of inquiry, and in recent decades, following the imaginative work of historians of technology and geographers, architectural and urban historians have begun demonstrating a keen interest in this subject. With his astute site and period selection, Peter H. Christensen introduces a valuable international geopolitical dimension to this literature. Germany and the Ottoman Railways presents the world of complex interactions and unexpected synergies that occurred between a waning, yet still sovereign, Ottoman Empire and the robustly industrial neophyte German state as it entered the colonial race long dominated by Britain and France. This was neither internal colonization to achieve territorial cohesion nor imperial colonialism for resource extraction and labor exploitation, but, in its ambiguity, Christensen suggests, the railway project opened up a vast gray zone for tactical interventions by actors from both countries, despite the obvious asymmetries between them. Examining railway construction from inception to completion, Christensen traces changing loyalties, opportunistic moves, and the ebbs and flows of enthusiasm, funds, and resources. The volume consists of two parts. In the first, chapters titled “Politics,” “Geography,” “Topography,” and “Archaeology” examine constructions of knowledge and imagination, moving from the abstract macroscale of geopolitics to the microscale of archaeological remains in specific sites. Next, chapters titled “Construction,” “ Hochbau ” (meaning aboveground structures), “Monuments,” and “Urbanism” explore the generation of physical form at successively larger scales. By the late nineteenth century, reform-minded Ottoman officials had recognized how railroads could …

The dialectic of climate extremes between reality and fiction

تتناول هذه الدراسة موضوعة الجدلية القائمة حول ظاهرة التطرف المناخي كحقيقة واقعية شغلت العلماء والمختصين القائمين عليه في هذا المجال، خاصة في السنوات الاخيرة وكيف تم تناوله وفق البناء الواقعي والبناء الخيالي في الوسيط السينمائي على الشاشة. تناولت الباحثة في هذه الدراسة اثنان من المباحث هي : المبحث الاول: التطرف المناخي والطقوس الانسانية والدرامية المبحث الثاني: البناء الواقعي والبناء الخيالي في الوسيط السينماتوغرافي. وقد استندت الدراسة على تحليل الفيلم السينمائي (جيوستورم) الذي يركز على قضية العواصف الطبيعية العالمية والظواهر المناخية الخطيرة التي تهدد الارض نتيجة الاهمال والعبث بالموارد الاستهلاكية الحية على نحو خاص دون الالتفات الى المخاطر الناجمة عن ذلك، فضلا عن تسليطه الضوء حول الاستغلال السياسي للسيطرة على أنظمة التحكم المناخي في إطار درامي خيالي مستند الى الواقع.

‘Only one way in and one way out’: Staging Utopian Spaces

This polyphonic paper draws together methods, content and impressions from a workshop on utopian spatial practice. It provides a critical reflection on the utopian possibilities inherent in small scale performances of spatial re-organization which re-structure existing patterns of behaviour. Over the course of this workshop, held as part of the ‘Utopian Acts’ conference, the mundane space of a university seminar room was briefly transformed. Participants were asked to read extracts from three works of feminist utopian science fiction (sf): Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia’, Marge Piercy’s ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ and Sally Miller Gearhart’s ‘The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women’. They then worked in groups to rearrange the furniture into an echo of the utopian space of the text. By inhabiting these temporary stagings of utopian space the participants disrupted existing patterns of behaviour and opened up a site for alternatives. This process of imaginative construction is extended into this paper which crosses the fields of architecture, utopian studies, drawing and performance. A series of narrative architectural drawings by the author are presented alongside commentary from the workshop participants to reflect on multiple voices and modes of interpretation which shaped these overlapping utopian acts of constructionn. This act of remaking space is considered in terms of space as social practice to ask how the re-staging of a single room can open up alternative possibilities for wider socio-spatial action. It draws on Dolan’s conception of utopian performatives to ask whether the non-hierarchical engagement of participants in an act of construction offers a utopian mode of practice. From this, it asks whether the re-staging of spaces drawn from utopian sf can be considered an ‘act of imagination’ as called for in Ruth Levitas’ ‘Utopia as Method’. Through drawings, descriptions, critical theory and transcribed conversation this paper reflects on an attempt to establish a fragment of utopian space, establishing an alternative way of being, however small and fleeting.

Kant on the epistemic role of the imagination

In recent years, more and more people have become attracted by the idea that the imagination should play a central role in explaining our knowledge of what is possible and necessary and what would be the case if things were different from how they actually are. The biggest challenge for this account is to explain how the imagination can be restricted in such a way that it can play this epistemic role, for there are certainly also unrestricted uses of the imagination in which it fails to yield the requisite knowledge. In this paper, I inquire how Kant’s account of the imagination could inspire the contemporary debate at this point. I first give an overview about Kant’s account of the imagination and its different roles for our cognition of the real world. I then show that some recent attempts to separate the epistemically valuable uses of the imagination from the epistemically worthless ones bear some striking similarities to Kant’s ideas about how the imagination helps us to get insight into metaphysical possibility. By discussing what Kant says about the method of a priori imaginative construction in the case of concepts such as that of matter and that of disembodied minds, I also point to those aspects of his view which make his views really distinct from all contemporary accounts, but which he himself thought bear the greatest potential of making the imagination a source of modal knowledge.

Orientalist reveries: The imaginary creative constructions of the Moroccan space and place by the figures of the non-Muslim male traveller and female tourist − from travel literature to photography and contemporary fashion imagery

Abstract In this body of research and original photographic work to which it responds, I examine the position and connotation of Morocco as a site for artistic inspiration in travel literature, photography and fashion photography in the context of three main themes relating to its imaginary constructions: Orientalism; the western male traveller in contradistinction to the female tourist; and the figure of the cultured flâneur. These themes became associated with European industrialization and imperialism towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the research draws links between this particular period of culture and its values, and our present day, romantic fascination with Morocco, and the revival of such themes and their popular reincarnation in contemporary fashion editorials. The article investigates the role that photography has played in the development of twenty-first century Orientalism and its manifestation in visual fashion storytelling, and the interplay between artist-subject-location: how does the western traveller/photographer view both himself and others in the process of picturing the Maghreb and what are the kinds of relationships and tensions that develop between the traveller/photographer and the North African sites that he observes? The research focuses on the long association between travel and sexual adventure and explores the literary and visual narratives involving the figures of the contemporary traveller and tourist in the North African space and place, and how adventurer and location feed off one another. By examining the appropriation of such figures and motifs from art and literature into contemporary photography of travel and fashion photography, the article aims to consider the visual representation and specific propositions of locations such as Tangier, Marrakesh, Assilah and the Moroccan Sahara as chaotic, dangerous and alien, and understand the complex, post-Orientalist rendition of the North African space and visual culture within the context of fashion photography. More specifically this article poses the following questions: why does our western culture want or need to revisit condescending Orientalist fantasies and an imperialist mode of representation? And in what way are the tropes of Orientalist representation tied to the fantasies, desires and anxieties that the fashion industry and its consumer engage with? The article takes Morocco’s strong ties with western cultural figures as its starting point, and in times of intense political and social unrest in the Arab world – the continuing fascination with and promotion of this Muslim country as a sensual tourist destination by fashion editorial and ad campaign shoots. The article considers two photography monographs by western male travellers/photographers shooting photographic bodies of work in a foreign Islamic country: Paul Bowles’ How Could I Send a Picture into the Desert (Bowles and Bischoff 1994) and Harry Gruyaert’s Morocco (1990), in addition to several case studies from literature (Peter Mayne, Elias Canetti); photography (Irving Penn, Daido Moriyama); and contemporary fashion editorial work (William Klein, Jack Pierson, Azim Haidaryan, Inez Van Lamsweerde/Vinoodh Matadin, Mario Testino, Hans Feurer, Steven Meisel and Daniel Riera). It aims to establish links between the visual representation of travel and the context of gender, fashion, identity and sexuality and the psychological dimension of tourism.

Possibility Versus Possible Worlds

It is a common idea in philosophy that some false propositions such as (C) that Charlottesville is the largest city in Virginia, have the property of being possibly true. It is not a clear idea but an important one which has inspired considerable effort at clarification. One suggestion is that there exist (really, not just possibly) “possible worlds” in which C or some suitable facsimile is true. One further attempt at clarification on offer is that there exists (again, really) a maximal consistent set of propositions containing C. It is argued here that these attempts at clarification are profoundly erroneous. There exist actual powers of imaginative construction which would yield a scenario sufficiently detailed to be recognized by competent reviewers as one in which C is true. (The depiction might be in film or narrative and would avoid analytic falsehoods.) This is a frail clarification, vulnerable to questions, but is the best possible direction for a clear idea of the possibility of the proposition. The notion of possible worlds is associated with very valuable work in mathematical logic. It can only improve our appreciation of this excellent work to separate it from cloudy metaphysics.

Collapsing the Cartographies of Gender and Nationality: Howe’s Transatlantic Explorations in The Hermaphrodite and From the Oak to the Olive

Like many nineteenth-century American writers, Julia Ward Howe found that the expanding culture of transatlantic travel offered her the liberty to explore, study, and work. In this article, the author examines Howe’s novel, The Hermaphrodite, which is set in England, Germany, and Rome, in conjunction with her chapter on Rome in her travel book From the Oak to the Olive. Reading these texts through the lens of cultural geography and transatlantic studies, the author suggests that our understanding of The Hermaphrodite should be broadened to see the novel as a type of travel narrative in which the intersex protagonist Laurence journeys across a picturesque Europe, identifying at times as male, female, and nonbinary within different spaces. In both The Hermaphrodite and From Oak to Olive, Howe seeks to write literary narratives of the transatlantic world, and though one is fiction and one is autobiographical, they are both imaginative constructions of the relationships between space, gender, and national identity.

Reconfiguración social: entre la migración y la percepción inseguridad en Lima, Perú/ Social Reconfiguration: Between Migration and Insecurity Perception in Lima, Peru

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar cómo la matriz de la percepción de inseguridad se ha desplazado de la criminalidad efectiva a la migración venezolana. Para ello, a través del empleo de técnicas cualitativas, exploramos y comparamos las actuales percepciones de inseguridad de los vecinos de dos barrios de Lima Metropolitana (Perú): el Barrio Chamo (San Juan de Lurigancho) y el sector 1 (San Isidro). Realizamos un bosquejo sobre las construcciones imaginarias de los espacios seguros, de los atacantes y de la construcción del “nosotros” como comunidad frente a la migración como el supuesto problema que encabezaría la inseguridad ciudadana. Los resultados de la comparación muestran que la migración ha devenido sinécdoque de una ciudad que, en pleno proceso de reensamblaje social, ha encontrado en el migrante venezolano al chivo expiatorio de su crisis social.
 Abstract
 The aim of this article is to investigate how the matrix of the perception of insecurity has changed from effective criminality to immigration of Venezuelans. Thus, we explore and compare, with qualitative techniques, the actual perception of insecurity among the inhabitants of two neighborhoods in Lima (Peru): Barrio Chamo (San Juan de Luringancho) and sector 1 (San Isidro). The article proposes an outline on the imaginary construction of the safe spaces, the attackers and the construction of the 'we' as a community facing migration as the implied problem leading insecurity. The results of the comparison between the two areas show that migration has become synecdoche of a city that, amidst a process of social reassembly, has found in the Venezuelan migrant the scape goat of its social crisis.

The structuration of comparative discourse and the imagination of knowledge spaces: Portugal, the ‘South of Europe’, and the ‘South below’

ABSTRACTThe present article addresses the issue of structuration of the field of Comparative Education in Portugal. The narrative is constructed at two levels, one of a more descriptive nature, the other more interpretative. In the first part of the text, the construction of a comparative imagination is addressed on the basis of four main points in time: the impact of overseas echoes in education reforms (seventeenth to nineteenth century), the importance of the pedagogical experiences acquired in overseas missions (nineteenth to twentieth century), internationalisation of the educational question in the African colonies (late nineteenth century, mid twentieth century) and finally, the impact of international bodies on the modernisation of the Portuguese education system (50s, mid-70s). In the second part of the text, the emergence of the field of Comparative Education is discussed as a scientific research area, and as an autonomous formative component. Several disciplinarization dynamics and their institutional application points are identified, pointing to the importance of European Union funded projects for the integration of research groups in international comparative study networks. Towards the end of the text, several standard approaches that structure comparative discourse and the practices of Portuguese researchers are pinpointed.

Age of Visual Culture, Construction of Hyperreal World and Sympathetic Imagination

미디어 플랫폼이 전환되면서 주류 문화양식으로 영상콘텐츠가 대두되자 사람들의 사유 방식도 문자문화에서 영상문화로 변화되었다. 구비문화적 속성을 가진 영상콘텐츠sms 의식의 퇴행이 아닌 물리적 현실과 환상적 사유가 결합되는 새로운 하이퍼리얼 세계를 구축해 내는 방향으로 나아가고 있다. 오늘날 드라마와 웹툰은 현실과 가상이 중첩된 하이퍼리얼 세상을 구축하고 있었고, 드라마는 현실 세계를 벗어난 가상 세계를 계속해서 창조해 내고 있었다. 이러한 이질적 문화 경험에도 사람들이 드라마에 열광하고, 허구적 표상을 실재보다 더 실재 같다고 여기는 것은 공감적 상상력 때문이다. 하이퍼리얼의 세상을 공감적 상상력을 토대로 표현해 내는 드라마와 웹툰은 인간이 삶에 대한 애착과 관계를 재구성해 내고 있었다. 하이퍼리얼의 세계를 보여주는 드라마와 웹툰에서는 사실을 분석하기보다는 공감을 통해 타인과의 관계를 변화시키고 있었다.As the media platform was transformed, the content of the mainstream culture style was transformed from the character culture to the visual culture. The visual content should be shown to be able to enjoy new amusement by combining scientific and logical digital technology with cultural characteristics. It is necessary to move toward the establishment of a new hyperreal world in which visual content with cultural attributes is not a regression of consciousness but a combination of physical reality and fantasy. Dramas and Webtoon alone have limitations in referring to video content. Through subsequent research, it is necessary to present the direction in which video content including movies, plays, musicals, and web dramas should go forward. Nevertheless, I think that this study is meaningful in that it has revealed what kind of world God and human existence form in drama and webtoon which are popular in the masses.

Imagining the Ister/Danube in Ancient Thought and Practice: River, the Scordisci, and Creation of Roman Imperialistic Space

The paper considers cultural and imaginative construction of the Ister/Danube, and its implications in the creation of the limes area of the provinces of Moesia and (part of) Pannonia. It discusses how the Danube was used as an element in construing the Scordisci as a Roman enemy and (pseudo)ethnic tribe, what was the meaning of this connection, and did such conceptualization have real repercussions in the area of waterscape associated with the ‘tribe’. It is proposed that the Danube emerged as a hydrographical frontier thanks to its specific longue durée symbolic meaning of liminality embedded in the imperialistic agency in the course of creating provincial/frontier/imperial space. The basic point is that the ancient imagological tradition had an important effect on the construction of Roman imperial space thanks to the intellectual and political elites' capacities to shape powerscapes by projecting their own conceptualizations of the world into the webs of relations under their influence.

Classical Humanism vs. Romanticism: two ways of imagining pre-modern torture at the castle of Pöggstall (Austria)

Pöggstall castle in Lower Austria has long been renowned to a national public for its ostensibly “authentic” medieval torture chamber located in an upper floor room of the 13th century keep. As recent investigations disclosed, the whole arrangement was not installed before the early 19th century when the Austrian Emperor Francis I owned the estate. The re-assessment of the interior betrays a “romantic” idea of pre-modern torture and punishment that imagined the “dark” Middle Ages as a “counter-draft” to “enlightened” practices of justice and criminal law. Whereas the allegedly “original” torture chamber is in fact an imaginative construction of historicism and romanticism, an inventory of the castle from 1548 lists, among other devices of torture and punishment, a curious item that might theoretically have served the same function. The object is referred to as a prison or a lock called an “iron cow” or “brazen bull”, a term that evokes associations with the legendary antique motive of the bull of Phalaris. The article seeks to examine the object in the light of the literary and iconographic tradition of the “brazen bull” and argues that – whether the Pöggstall bull was really intended to be used as a torture instrument or not – it proves, in any case, that the owners were well-acquainted with “humanistic” traditions of torture in antiquity.

Fotografías de arquitectura y arquitectura de fotografías a comienzos del siglo XX

<p>A partir del siglo XX la relación de la fotografía y la arquitectura ha cobrado un nuevo sentido; dos disciplinas independientes comienzan a actuar conjuntamente para posteriormente fusionarse en una sola. Por un lado, se considera a la arquitectura como medio compositivo, donde la fotografía es quien trasciende mientras que la primera se comporta como objeto fotográfico. Por otro lado, se considera a la fotografía como herramienta esencial en la construcción del imaginario colectivo para la promoción de la arquitectura.<br />La fotografía colaboró en la consolidación de algunos de los maestros de la arquitectura moderna, en los que el trabajo conjunto de arquitecto y fotógrafo produjo destacados fenómenos mediáticos de gran éxito internacional. Dentro de ellos resalta la figura del arquitecto Le Corbusier como fotógrafo durante su primera etapa, como también<br />del fotógrafo Julius Shulman trabajando junto al programa Case Study Houses.</p>

Memorias e imaginarios de formación de los hijos en la narrativa chilena reciente

The following paper explores the recent Chilean narrative which recalls childhood during the dictatorship, the so-called “literatura de los hijos” (literature of sons and daughters), establishing an aesthetic and discoursive link between shared memory and the development imaginaries of those who were children during the dictatorial past and that are writers in the post-dictatorial present. The affective continuity of a conflict, between a present state of memory and a past of childhood learning, still incomplete or with potential for understanding, explains the perspective chosen of sons and daughters of the narrators in some of the fictional works by Nona Fernandez (1971), Alvaro Bisama (1975), and Alejandro Zambra (1975). In the three imaginary constructions explored in the following pages, the aim of these authors is described, in terms of their intention to articulate, within fiction, childhood imaginaries that establish and explain their current social, intellectual, and affective positions.

Rethinking ideology: Greimas’s semiotics, neomarxism, and cultural anthropology

Abstract Ideology is commonly seen today from two points of view, which, although opposed, support each other. For some, ideology no longer has a place in postmodern society; for others it is still an opium, a pathology that must be cured. A different stand-point is defended here, based on the conception of ideology in Greimas’s semiotics. Underlying any human action directed towards values, ideology, over and above its role as a representation of evil (as embodied in totalitarianism), is an inevitable and transversal phenomenon which cannot be confined to the political sphere. This idea is presented first via Geertz’s cultural anthropology. The anthropologist proposes a non-evaluative and non-combative approach to ideology. As if anticipating the neo-Marxist (Althusser’s) conception, discarding the view of ideology as an inverted image of reality, he sees it as a construct of imagination and of figurative discourse. For him, ideology is a symbolic system whose analysis requires a theory of meaning (linguistics, rhetoric, semiotics). Greimasian semiotics offers precisely what Geertz contemplated: a non-evaluative, purely descriptive conception of ideology and of the methodological tools for its analysis. The article stresses the differences between the structural approach and the dominant socio-political theories, and finally compares the principles of ideological analysis of discourse as assumed respectively by (neo)Marxist criticism and by semiotics.

Revisiting the “Ozone Hole” Metaphor: From Observational Window to Global Environmental Threat

ABSTRACTIn 1985, just over 30 years ago, the “ozone hole” made its appearance in the press as a truly global environmental threat. As one of the most important environmental issues of the twentieth century, the “ozone hole” is also a remarkable metaphorical, visual, and imaginary construction. This essay examines the historical trajectory of the famous “ozone hole” from its birth within the astronomical community at the beginning of the twentieth century to its contemporary framing as a global environmental threat. The article provides evidence why metaphors constitute a valuable object of historically informed studies of scientific practice, and shows in particular how metaphorical landscapes shift over time, mapping at the same time larger social and political developments. The essay ends by showing how scientific images and metaphorical framings interact and how they shape scientific and popular discourse on nature, as well as our understanding of the global environment.