Fragmented Style Research Articles

LESSONS LEARNED FROM STUDENT REFLECTIONS: A HANDS-ON, INTEGRATED CURRICULUM APPROACH

At the University of Calgary, we conducted an integrated curriculum approach for students of electrical engineering in their second year. This program’s goal was to nurture deep learning in students, beyond the shallow experiences normally encountered in a traditional fragmented style of course based learning [5]. With the aim of improving learning strategies of students, they were asked to fill out surveys based on their reflections on their weekly learning during the program. Using qualitative coding, student reflections were analyzed with a framework from self-determination theory to understand the student learning and motivation throughout the program. Eleven themes emerged which were categorized within the three elements of the theoretical framework: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. The aim of this analysis is to focus on how ILS and student learning strategies can be improved in order to enhance the quality of student learning.

Nije ograničeno ni definirano, već konstruirano i internalizirano

Donald Barthelme’s short fiction is marked by a dashing concentration on everyday life, construction of meaning, and plurality of reality in addition to his playful, metafictional, and fragmentary style. Although a fertile ground for exploring sociopolitical matters, particularly in the mid and late 20th century America, the review of studies on Barthelme’s works highlights a lacuna in the application of conceivably pertinent sociological and political theories on Barthelme’s short stories. Accordingly, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) could be a congruous theory with Barthelme’s sociological concerns in his short fiction. In their treatise, Berger and Luckmann see reality as a kind of “collective fiction” that is constructed by the processes of institutionalization, socialization, and everyday social interaction, particularly through language. In this article, we read “The Balloon” and “I Bought a Little City,” which are selected thematically, in light of “society as objective reality” through the concepts of objectivation, institutionalization, and legitimation. Linking literature and sociology, we aim to pinpoint how the stories observe, unveil, and potentially critique construction of meaning and the real workings of the processes in the social construction of reality.

Disturbing Flowers: The Three-Dimentional Colours of Claud. Rapt. Pros. 2.90-132


 
 
 Claudian’s colourful images have often been studied for their decorative func- tion and as examples of late-antique fragmentary style. More recent scholarship, instead, has proposed that colouring provides coherence to the text through its symbolic meanings. This article analyses the aesthetic and symbolic significance of colourful imagery by differentiating between the three main dimensions of colour: brightness, saturation and hue. The blossoming meadow of Claud. Rapt. Pros. 2.90-132 is an ideal case study: a focus on all three colour components highlights that the formal choices and the symbolic meanings are not opposite or separate, but parallel in their fragmentary coherence, and each important for the interpretation of the text. Both the visual effects and the metaphoric charge of Claudian’s colourful flowers undermine the idyllic atmosphere of the meadow and foreshadow Proserpina’s abduction.
 
 

Thomas Carlyle’s Conception of Transcendentalism in Sartor Resartus and Its Application to Theorizing Postliberalism

Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus can be engaged and applied as a work of political philosophy. As satirical fiction, it has been ignored for its serious and normative implications. That Carlyle employs satire as a vehicle to construct and communicate philosophical conclusions should neither obscure nor detract from the practical significance of such conclusions. There is no singular and definitive interpretation of the meaning of Sartor Resartus in its totality, largely due to the question of irony surrounding its plot structure. Janice L. Haney acknowledges that there is a “problem,” which is not clearly resolvable, as to how to read Sartor Resartus’s “ironic surface,” especially since Carlyle uses multiple levels of fiction and the text has a fragmented style.1 Gerry H. Brookes argues that irony is a rhetorical device that Carlyle employs to convince the reader of the truth of transcendentalism.2 Albert J. LaValley maintains that the irony in Sartor Resartus articulates a pessimism with respect to humanity’s philosophical prospects, and thus a lack of affirmation of transcendentalism.3

REINTERPRETING THE DILEMMA OF THE FUTURIST-MODERNIST NARRATOR IN MINA LOY S "APHORISMS ON FUTURISM"

The British poet and artist Mina Loy holds an exceptional place in the art and literature of the avant-garde and enlightens the dawn of the Modernist era in the early twentieth century. Loy’s poetry is innovative with its unusual and idiosyncratic fragmentary style and shifting narrative voices, while her artworks are unique, maintaining an eclectic approach associated with the canonical artistic movements of her age, such as Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Her creative visual and literary output problematizes the conventions of that time by both opposing and reconciling with them. Loy’s manifesto-poem, “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914), intertextually connects the significations in each aphorism with one another and with her other textual and artistic works. The text creates the chains of signification to reveal the dialogical rhetoric as well as the evolutionary nature of the narrative voice manoeuvring between Futurism and Modernism in relation both to herself and the implied readers. Loy’s persona argues for destroying the traditional language forms and proclaims a new form, which is representative of Futurist poetry, by subverting the retrospective ones and constructing new ones. Within this framework, Loy’s untitled 1951 New York painting seems to represent the destruction of the traditional art forms to celebrate the concepts of dynamism and deformation, which evokes the features of Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist aesthetics. In this experimental poem, the arguments of Loy’s fictive persona, through shifting between Futurism and Modernism, create complex intertextuality between the aphorisms and the narrator’s shifting voices. The arguments of the narrative voice illuminate the narrator’s Futurist-Modernist project by inviting both herself and the readers to attain the individual consciousness and liberation through a metamorphic journey from being a Futurist to a Modernist.

From discretion to standardization: Digitalization of the police organization

In this article, we aim to examine whether intelligence-led policing in police practice reinforces the control model of the police organization. We argue that digitalization of police working life resurrects several of Taylor’s management principles, such as greater division of labor, specialization, standardization and focus on measurable and efficient processes. Drawing on empirical research via two cross-sectional surveys, focus group and individual in-depth interviews with 40 Norwegian police officers, we analyze the extent to which this is conditioned by how work processes are organized and how knowledge practices are operationalized and standardized. We show perceptions of standardization that break up policing processes and lead to greater control over which tasks the front line performs and how these should be carried out. As a result, traditional police discretion becomes more standardized, constrained and de-contextualized. This is reinforced by the implementation of intelligence-led policing to manage knowledge within the police organization, which may eventually lead to a more top-down, bureaucratic and fragmented style of policing. Thus police professionalism becomes understood as being greater standardization and organizational control. An unintended consequence is a shift towards digitalized neo-Taylorism in policing, with implications for de-skilling of the police. The results demonstrate a managerialist view of the police organization, in which top-down steering and use of technology ultimately lead to a narrowing of police discretion and a more invisible high-policing style of police that may increase militarization of the police organization.

Genetic Templates and Coded Worlds: David Hontiveros’ Seroks Iteration 1: Mirror Man as World-Driven Dystopia

In 2012, David Hontiveros revisited and expanded the world of his Carlos Palanca Memorial Award-winning short story, “Kaming Mga Seroks”, in Seroks Iteration 1: Mirror Man, which is set in a dystopic future where cloning is a booming industry, and genetic templates are pirated to create seroks or clones of clones. Mirror Man employs a fragmented style of storytelling that crafts a long-form narrative that is neither plot nor character-driven but world-driven. Through a mix of interviews, messages, recordings, and more, Mirror Man delves deeper into the world’s history and current events than it does into the lives of its recurring characters. In this way, the world of Seroks is not so much a backdrop against which the story takes place but the story’s main draw as it utilizes its dystopic setting to critique Philippine society, thus prompting the reader to reconsider the trajectory of the Philippines and reimagine its future.

Perspectival truth: Michael Haneke’s «The castle» and the fragmentation of the real

With his 1997 TV adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Das Schlos (The Castle), the Austrian director Michael Haneke explores what he calls «Kafka’s fragmentary, ambiguous perception of reality». Defying TV audience expectations, The Castle develops a specific strategy contrasting with the rapid and overwhelming deluge of information transmission that Haneke points out to be the standard for «electronic media». But more specifically, The Castle’s fragmented style appears to put into question a metaphysical construal of ‘Truth’ and ‘Values’ as self-sufficient dimensions existing, unaffected, behind the sensible world of appearances. This must not lead to a relativistic stance. Rather, such a style brings to light the essential perspectival structure of our experience, calling for an approach to reality that forestalls the dichotomies of true vs. false, essence vs. appearance, or fact vs. interpretation.

Горизонты памяти: воспоминания детства как опыт образного постижения времени в философии Вальтера Беньями­на

The article outlines Walter Benjamin’s philosophical theory of time, which formed the ba­sis of his conception of history. It is a famous alternative to a number of existing models. Benjamin’s approach to understanding time is characterized by a unique methodology. It is based on artistic images and not on abstract categories and linear patterns of a philosophi­cal and historical discourse. On the one hand, such images allow Benjamin to capture the characteristic properties of a concrete time, which are often difficult for historical sci­ence to grasp, and on the other hand, they make a strong impression on the reader because they require an emotional involvement in the text. The book “Berlin childhood around 1900”, often attributed to the genre of a poetic prose, is a visual representation of Ben­jamin’s philosophical ideas. The fragmentary style of narration and its metaphorical nature are intended to demonstrate a different way of experiencing the present moment – when the signs of the future clearly appear in the fragments of the past. The fusion of all three temporal modes in an instant he calls “Jetztzeit” (just now), which is difficult to articulate in the language of rational metaphysics, is embodied in the allegories of “Berlin child­hood”. Selected fragments of this work are analyzed in the present paper. They capture each of the three time dimensions in the current “now” mode: the fragment “The otter” symbolizes the past, “Loggias” symbolizes the future and “The sock” symbolizes the present. Childhood memories, which do not usually appear in philosophical reflec­tions, serve as a source of the birth of images: on the one hand, they supply sensual mate­rial from personal experience, on the other hand, they suggest a synthesizing principle, be­cause a child is more sensitive to the unity of fiction and reality. Benjamin’s “memorial letter”, seen from this angle, turns out to be a strategy to think poetically about the world, time, and history.

After All

Through a close reading of Freud’s last major work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), this article considers the socio-political and literary stakes of a central element of Freud’s oeuvre, which reaches its fullest elaboration in the Moses text: belatedness. Belatedness, or deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), which structures the movement of repression and return in the individual psychology of Freud’s earlier work, is aggravated and intensified in this late modernist text. Now, it is an entire people (the Jews) and (Judeo-Christian) civilization founded upon the temporal predicament of trauma, latency, and the return of the repressed. What is most innovative about Moses—its fragmentary style, its rewriting of biblical origins, its daring conjectures and methods of recording history—gestures back, after all, to the singular problem that both Freudian psychoanalysis and modernism are destined to repeat: the constitutive belatedness of all experience.

Punk routine and academic discipline

This is a personal account of being an anarchist punk rock kid in academia, a meditation on the entanglement of punk rock arts and activism with organisation studies. To illustrate this entanglement, I present some of my experiences with hardcore punk rock and anarchist organisation and trace how I believe this background in a radical counterculture formed and conditioned my work within organisation studies and how my academic training has influenced my activism as a punk musician. The article employs Donna Haraway’s concept of partial perspective to reflect on how I have not only learned to see and understand organisation through my lasting engagement with punk and anarchist culture outside the walls of academia, but also learned to see and use art as a medium for change. The article conceptualises punk’s fidelity to the otherwise, the ever-present conviction that life, society and, indeed, the world could be otherwise. In my experience, this fidelity has translated into an anarchist scientific knowledge interest, and when employed in the service of organisation studies, it has enabled me to see, think and study organisation from an anarchist position. To be true to the spirit and aesthetic sensibilities of punk, the article is written in an impatient, erratic and fragmented style.

Espacio, tiempo e identidad en el cine de Christopher Nolan: una aproximación filosófica a las claves narrativas de su puesta en escena

El cine de Christopher Nolan destaca, entre otros aspectos, por una puesta en escena en la que los espacios de representación (decorados y escenarios naturales), el tiempo cinematográfico (tiempo narrativo y tiempo de la historia) y la identidad de los personajes se presentan al espectador de forma sincrónica y fragmentada, como las piezas de un puzle sobre una mesa. Este artículo pretende establecer una conexión entre esa fórmula narrativa, que rompe la clásica estructura cronológica y lineal, y la consolidación tras el 11S de una filosofía de “amor por el fragmento” (Rella, 1998: 38), basada en las distintas derivas del idealismo hegeliano, que desafía la creencia en una razón absoluta y unitaria, en particular en temas relacionados con el tiempo, el individuo y la memoria. Se trata de una reflexión de carácter filosófico antes que narrativo dirigida a situar y comprender el cine de Nolan en las coordenadas de pensamiento propias de su época. Porque sus películas no aspiran a ofrecer respuestas a las grandes cuestiones, sino a formular nuevas preguntas.

From Fragments to Drafts

The paper aims to give a historical overview of the pre-codification of Hungarian administrative procedural rules. Therefore, the main stages and the main actors of an era that started with rules of fragmentary style and law books with ambiguous or a simple descriptive character regarding Hungarian administrative procedures are presented in the paper. The first part is devoted to a detailed examination of the origins of administrative law and administrative science until the end of the nineteenth century in Hungary. The second part of the paper provides an analysis of the Simplification Act, and the period of the first schemes for classification of administrative procedures (1901–1957) in Hungary. From this period, we should underline the appearance of the scientific school led by Zoltán Magyary and the preparations of the Administrative Procedural Code by József Valló.

The Politics of Subjectivity in Vangelis Raptopoulos’s Urban Stories

ABSTRACTIn this article I offer a critical analysis of the spatial cultures of modern Athens through the urban portraits presented in three fictive stories by Vangelis Raptopoulos—“At the Bottom of the Sea” (Sto Vytho), “One-Way Street” (Monodromos), and “Long-Distance Call” (Yperastiko)—from his 1995 collection “In Pieces” (Kommatakia). I argue that by constructing first-person fictive narratives, written in confessional prose, Raptopoulos problematizes the notion of subjectivity in its varying relationships to modern urban and spatial cultures. My main focus is on the practice of subjective recitations of urban space in view of the narrator’s experiences of imaginative and physical spatial appropriation. I argue that these experiences and the fragmentary style, through which they are conveyed in the stories, are an incisive critique of the official planning practices of urban public space and prescribed practices of spatial mobility. By drawing on the critical-philosophical and critical-historical literature, with particular reference to Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, this article contributes to the broader critique of the politics of subjectivity in modern Europe.

Modernist Technique and Rural Life: Tage Aurell as a Prose Artist

Tage Aurell’s breakthrough as an author came in the early 1940s, about a decade after his debut. His narrative technique is very distinctive, and some of his short stories are minor classics, but he is not among the best–known Swedish authors of the twentieth century. While Aurell travelled and studied in Europe in the 1920s, during the age of high modernism, he then settled in the village of Mangskog in Western Sweden. From this rural vantage point he wrote most of his laconic and profoundly local stories. My aim in this article is to show how the laconism and fragmentary style of Aurell’s texts entails the creation of new artistic forms. Examples of his narrative technique are gathered from ‘Pingstbrud’ (‘The Whitsun Bride’), ‘Grindstolpe’ (‘Gatepost’) and ‘Gamla landsvägen’ (‘The Old Highway’). In ‘Pingstbrud’, Aurell depicts in sparse scenes a rural community and how it reacts to the illness and death of a young woman. In ‘Grindstolpe’, two very different kinds of stories are intertwined in an unusual way. ‘Gamla landsvägen’ is Aurell’s most experimental text, a montage. I show the resemblance with Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem ‘Lundi Rue Christine’, and propose that Aurell looks at his rural village through the lens of modernism. Although the village people he describes seem hardly influenced by modernity, his textual composition is modernist. In these and other short stories Aurell renewed 1940s Swedish prose in a remarkable way.

CHILDHOOD AS THE SOURCE OF A WRITER’S INSPIRATION. IGOR KLEKH

The article examines the role of autobiographical retrospections and reminiscences in Igor Klekh’s stories Diglossia [Diglossiya], A Partial Man, or Notes of a 40-year-old [Chastichniy chelovek, ili Zapiski sorokaletnego], The Judgement Day [Svetoprestavlenie], and The 1999 Chronicles [Khroniki 1999 goda]. The writer’s Soviet childhood represents an artistic technique, a unique way to perceive and organize the narration. It is possible to say that it is from a child’s perception of the world that Klekh draws his literary inspiration, and that it is nostalgia that determines his stylistic experimentation. Speaking of Klekh’s leitmotifs and poetic imagery, such as the material metaphor of memory, documentary letter, reshuffled reminiscences, etc., the author points out that it is this specifically perceived and artistically digested phenomenon of the Soviet childhood that defines Klekh’s fragmented narrative style.

Coleridge and ‘the general taste for unconnected writing’

This article explores various literary, social and political implications of Coleridge’s admiration of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English prose style in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, at which time he detected ‘a passion for the unconnected’ in contemporary writing. In The Friend, Coleridge conceived syntactical connection as a hallmark of good method and rigorous thinking—qualities he believed to be in short supply in the political imagination around 1810. During the Napoleonic Wars, he hoped the structure as well as the content of his periodical would encourage unity and rejuvenate public taste by protecting it from the insidious effects of a fragmentary style which he perceived to be French in origin. He extended this aspiration to Wordsworth’s Cintra pamphlet. The emphasis which Edmund Burke placed on the relationship between syntax and the social contract in his denunciation of Richard Price provided a model for Coleridge’s interest in joined-up thinking as a sign of a healthy Constitution and also contributed to his misgivings about the style of Addison’s Spectator. For Coleridge, it was the syntactical order underlying long or complex sentences—as found in The Friend and Cintra in the former instance and Thomas Browne in the latter—which best announced a socio-political, religious or poetic vision capable of looking beyond itself. The same conviction informed Coleridge’s defence of exuberance in his Shakespeare criticism, which safeguarded his own digressive practice whilst consolidating his faith in a prose style loyal first to the rectitude of its own ambitions rather than to the universal requirement to be obvious.

Counter-Archives of Trauma in Cristina García's Monkey Hunting

n her third novel Monkey Hunting (2003), Cristina Garcia collects lost or ignored traumas and cultural memories from China, Cuba, the U.S. and Viet-nam to suggest the ways in which archives need to be further explored as well as the limitations of archival knowledge. While her other works seek to resolve characters’ sufferings, Garcia allows trauma in Monkey Hunting to remain unresolved and even unrepresented, increasing the fragmented style for which she is already well known. By reading closely the archival tropes, chronoscopes, and aporia of the novel, readers come to see how Garcia breathes subtle life into ghostly remainders of history. By creating an epistemology of memory to access and understand Garcia’s larger literary project, this article suggests that Monkey Hunting should be read as a counter-archive, one that embraces the unknowable while simultaneously investigating cultural memory. Literary counter-archives offer alternatives to master narratives, collective memory, and nostalgia, creat-ing new forms of knowing that remain grounded in the historic time-spaces of previous lived experiences. By reading Monkey Hunting through an archival lens and as a counter-archive, readers may also illuminate their own fraught relationships with history, culture, and trauma.

Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics by Kate Polak

Reviewed by: Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics by Kate Polak Martha Kuhlman (bio) Kate Polak. Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics. Ohio State University Press, 2017. 238 pp, $134.95, $29.95. Comics studies has expanded so rapidly in recent years that scholars are continually seeking new subfields to which they might lay claim, each inventing their own specific terminology to advance the critical discussion. With Ethics in the Gutter, Kate Polak offers her own contribution to this growing list of terms: historio-metagraphics. To situate her specific area of interest, some brief background about the development of comics studies can set the stage. In her introduction, she highlights the division between various forms of non-fiction graphic narrative—autographics (autobiographical comics), graphic memoir, biographical comics, comics journalism, documentary comics, historical comics—and fictional narratives that may engage with many of the same concerns, but do not garner as much attention as the canonical Maus by Art Spiegelman or Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. On the other hand, non-fiction graphic narratives must be conveyed through the subjective mark-making of the artist, and therefore are already necessarily creative constructs. Thus, the category of non-fiction inevitably bleeds into fiction and invention as well without losing credibility. As Hillary Chute points out, "Graphic narrative suggests [End Page 390] that historical accuracy is not the opposite of creative invention; the problematics of what we consider fact and fiction are made apparent by the role of drawing."1 Polak approaches this divide from the other direction by placing her emphasis on the potential of fictional graphic narratives to pose urgent ethical questions, which, in her opinion, have been unfairly overlooked in comparison to "the well-researched genre of autographics" (2). Following Linda Hutcheon's influential term "historiographic metafiction" from her foundational work on postmodernism, Polak invents "historio-metagraphics" to designate graphic narratives that are fictional but nonetheless powerful in the way that they can reveal how history is represented. In foregrounding the mechanisms of narration through temporal shifts, page layout, and the use of the gutter, Polak argues that "[the] reader's awareness of the graphic narrative as something produced is embedded in the form" (11). Unlike autographics, the author and the artist frequently have no personal connection to the historical trauma that is narrated, and it is this level of mediation and distance that Polak finds useful insofar as it prompts self-reflection in the reader. She chooses five narratives as case studies from widely diverse cultural contexts to apply her critical lens: J. P. Stassen's Deogratias (concerning the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide), Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen, Jason Aaron's and R. M. Guera's Scalped (which reflects upon the situation of Native Americans and the shootings at the Pine Ridge Reservation, although it is called the "Prairie Rose Reservation" in the story), Jeremy Love's Bayou (which bears similarity to the Emmett Till murder), and lastly an issue of Hellblazer by Mike Carey and Marcelo Frusin that addresses the massacre of Tasmanian Aborigines. Her intention is not to suggest that these instances of trauma are equivalent, but rather to tease apart the various levels of ethical engagement between the implied author and the reader in each example. Formally speaking, she is interested in the way that each author manipulates focalization and point of view in order to destabilize the ethical position of the reader. It's an ambitious project, and she delivers some surprising and nuanced readings of texts from very different historical and cultural perspectives. Although each reading has its merits, the strongest chapter is probably her opening analysis of Stassen's Deogratias. Polak argues that Stassen frustrates the Western reader's preference for a sympathetic protagonist and a redemptive ending by choosing a Hutu perpetrator as the main character. She further notes that readers objected to the graphic novel first and foremost because it is difficult to relate to Deogratias, a character who ultimately rapes and kills two of his Tutsi classmates. Secondly, the confused chronology and fragmented style of narration posed a problem for many readers, especially since the novel lacked a consistent...

Figures of the Visual: Japanese Modernism, Technology, Vitalism

This essay focuses on perception and the senses in Japanese literary modernism and specifically in the so-called new sensationist (shinkankakuha) writers, especially Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) and Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947). The critical debates that unfolded around their modernist journal Bungei jidai (Literary Age) (1924–27) were preoccupied with attempts to explain and philosophically anchor notions of sensation and perception. This did not mean an overwhelming concern with the body and its senses: on the contrary, in these texts perception emerges as somehow purified and reduced to vision, that most decorporealized of the senses. Indeed, the fragmented style, the distorted temporalities, and the deinteriorized subjects of Kawabata and Yokomitsu owe a lot to the visual, and especially to the technologized visuality of film. Paradoxically, however, this fractured cinematic aesthetics was grafted onto older visions of wholeness, some of them ideologically vulnerable. Cutting through literary studies, film, and intellectual history, domains normally kept apart, the essay traces those motifs in Kawabata and Yokomitsu that speak not of modernist rupture but of a deeper continuity with the powerful vitalist ideas from the turn of the century, such as the urge to dissolve subject-object dichotomies into an “Eastern monism” or a mystical life force and the animistic figuring of technology. New sensationism emerges as a discursive field shot through with tensions and nonsynchronicities. A supposedly avant-garde engagement with urban exteriority from its very beginnings contained an ambiguous spiritualism.