Imaginary Set Research Articles

The Dynamics of Spatiality in African Fiction

The Dynamics of Spatiality in African Fiction Benedict M. Ibitokun (bio) . . . from the standpoint of poetics, all theories of space are equally metaphoric, equally fictive. —W. J. T. Mitchell, "Spatial Form in Literature" 275 . . . pour bien des auteurs d'aujourd'hui l'espace est d'abord un parti pris dans le double sens à la fois résigné et passionné du terme.1 —Gerard Genette, "Espace et langage" 102 Without delving into the rationalizations of the poetics of space in which, to take an example at random, most of our signifiers are meaningful only when they are referred to "spatial" signified, we can say that space in any work of art is hardly a frill. Our physical world is that of real space with its extent and substance (Leclerc 211) that historical phenomena could turn into an "espace-refuge" and in its worst manifestations [End Page 409] into an "espace-vertige" (Genette 101-102) such as all blacks experienced during the Arab-Islamic and European-Christian imperialisms. There is no fiction without an imaginary setting, which is itself a projection of the physical world. But beyond the imaginary setting or space there is the "espace connoté, manifesté plutôt que désigné, parlant plutôte que parlé, qui se trahit dans la métaphore comme l'inconscient se livre dans un réve ou dans un lapsus" (Genette 103).2 As different as these three levels are, they are complementary. This essay is concerned mainly with "espace connoté." The black continent that novelists write about is space, but space continually perturbed by time in the form of the historical dialectics of slave-trade, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Novels have therefore reflected or refracted socioeconomic, political, and cultural tensions that imperialist assaults have brought to bear on Africa. Geographical balkanization, sociopolitical schism, psychic divisiveness and derailment, economic chaos, and cultural hybridization regretfully bring to our minds an erstwhile existential spatiality of connectedness, a word which Ayi Kwei Armah repeats many times in Two Thousand Seasons. My intention in this paper is to show how African novelists recreate these spatial tensions. The idea of the dynamism of spatiality might appear pleonastic because spatiality per se is dynamic, being continually stirred by temporality, its siamese sister. Thus, we can talk of "mobilized immobility" in a time-space fusion. But then, what this article seeks to show goes beyond philosophical speculations on the concept of space. I want to show how metaphoric space is equally partial and equally dynamic in novelistic creativity. In drama and poetry it is spontaneous and immediate; in fiction, which is my concern here, it is linear and as gradual as the movement of time. Because no writer writes without using "space"—even the physical spatiality of the novel or its pages is an example of space—I shall limit my choice of authors to the most representative. My theoretical approach will be based on categorizations and evaluations of the metaphoric essence of literary spatiality. The rationale for categorizations will be determined by the themes of the novels under study because, as I have said above, space is metaphor. It is a carrier of message, it serves "as an explanatory device and experiential phenomenon . . ." (Mitchell 272). I shall, therefore, talk of epiphanic spatiality, metonymic spatiality, cosmic, existential spatiality, and mystic spatiality. In my analysis, the notion of time will not be left out because what moves or is dynamic is not really space itself but time that it embodies. In other words, space is the body [End Page 410] of time; time is its soul. We do not see time; our opsis cannot inscape it; it is space, its medium, that we see. It is in space that we orchestrate the manifestations of time. O, how tragically has Africa (space) recorded those historical phenomena of slave-trade, colonialism, and neocolonialism! I. Epiphanic Spatiality There are many African novels that are built along this spatial form. It is the spatial trajectory of the biblical prodigal son and can be geometrically represented as >: the tapering point coincides with the moment of epiphany and the point at which the protagonist is staging a homecoming. This spatial aesthetic in African fiction flourishes at the eve of...

Boundaries Around Group Interaction: A Meta-Analytic Integration of the Effects of Group Size

Abstract We report a meta-analytic integration that summarizes American research by psychologists on the effects of group size on the permeability of group boundaries. Results indicate that the tendency for larger groups to have less permeable boundaries is highly significant but of small magnitude. This impermeability generally increases as a function of the relative size of the larger group and decreases as a function of the interpersonal distance between members of the group. However, the tendency to skirt around the boundary of a larger group was significantly greater when real behavior in real group settings was measured as compared with when paper-and-pencil measures were obtained in imaginary group settings. Moreover, impermeability was greater for real groups when group members stood closer together, whereas it was greater for imaginary groups when they stood farther apart.

A Method for Selection of Cement Recipes To Control Fluid Invasion After Cementing

Summary A method to scale down well parameters to laboratory conditions for more realistic testing of cement recipes to be used to control wellbore invasion/migration of formation fluids after cementing is introduced. The scale-down procedure proposed here addresses a worst-case scenario. It assumes that the offending gas zone (source of the invading gas) has enough permeability, thickness, and gas volume to invade fully and to pressure-charge the cemented annulus (cement column), if conditions allow. The method is demonstrated in conjunction with the use of a certain laboratory gas-flow apparatus. This general scale-down procedure can be used with other test equipment. An imaginary set of well conditions is used to illustrate the mechanics of the use of the technique. Tests run with the procedure and the computer-monitored gas-migration test cell are described. A preliminary set of criteria for selecting a cement recipe for a given well is presented. A field case illustrates the use of the procedure.

Errors in Exposure Measures

Errors in exposure measures reduce the power in statistical tests in health effect studies, and also bias the estimate of the magnitude of the effect of exposure on health. Several types of error in commonly used exposure measures are described. To study how these errors in exposure measures may obscure exposure-response relationships, an imaginary data set was generated, with (indoor) exposure to nitrogen dioxide and fine particles in relation to pulmonary function as an example. With this data set, the effect of different types of errors in the exposure measures were simulated. The simulation indicated that a serious under- or overestimation of the magnitude of the health effect can occur due to errors in the exposure measures. The bias was more pronounced for errors in strong than in weak determinants of the health effects.

Dirac optical-model analysis of polarized protons elastic scattering from12C,16,18O,20Ne and24,26Mg at 800 MeV

Proton elastic-scattering cross-sections and analysing powers at 800 MeV have been used to derive, within the Dirac formalism, optical-model parameters for six elements from12C to26Mg. The best set of Dirac optical parameters has been obtained by searching on all nine parameters which showed a large negative real scalar potential, a large positive real vector potential and a large negative imaginary vector potential. These calculations have been found to be consistent with an imaginary scalar potential set to zero (V s i =0). Considerable improvements were obtained by using the Dirac formalism compared to the traditional Schrodinger one with a similar number of parameters.

Fantasy Fiction and Related Genres

Fantasy Fiction and Related Genres Dieter Petzold (bio) I Among the problems that have come into view since academic teachers and learned societies laid their hands on fantasy fiction (ff), once the domain of fanclubs and arcane magazines, the question of definition is one of the most intriguing. If ff is not simply anything that will sell as ff, what is it? In what sense can it be said to be a genre? If it is a genre, what is its history? To date, there have been more than a dozen book-length attempts in English and a few in other languages to answer these questions, plus a number of periodical essays dealing with the same problem.1 What strikes the observer most about these investigations is their scope of disagreement. If one author asserts that as a genre, "fantasy" has existed only since the 1960s (Pesch 23), another claims that it flowered between 1880 and 1957 (Irwin x), and yet another categorically denies fantasy the status [End Page 11] of a genre (Hume 21). Terms such as "imaginative," "speculative," "fantastic," and "fantasy" are used in widely different and sometimes conflicting ways; there is disagreement about what books are typical examples of ff and about the relation of ff to other genres such as science fiction (sf), fairy tales, Gothic stories, and so on. In this situation, it may seem presumptuous to make yet another attempt at resolving the problems that so many competent people have already tried to solve. However, unless we prefer to push the question aside (ignominious desertion before the enemy, in my view), we need not fewer but more ideas and proposals to be examined and tested as to their plausibility and usefulness. The following remarks are to be understood as suggestions of that kind, no more than a sketch much in need of fleshing out, but I hope useful in that it might provide impulses for further research. II Part of the problem lies in the ambiguity of the word "fantasy." The Oxford English Dictionary lists no less than seven separate meanings, plus a large number of subdivisions. The definition "a genre of literary compositions" appears only in the 1972 supplement, the earliest instance mentioned being the title of the 1949 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It would certainly be illusory to expect that a general agreement could be reached, but at least we need to be aware that writers may mean different things when they talk about "fantasy." In spite of the definition quoted, and of well-known books such as Manlove's Modern Fantasy and Prickett's Victorian Fantasy, I should like to plead for the use of either "fantasy literature" or "fantasy fiction" (the two, for all practical purposes, can be regarded as synonymous) as the term denoting a concrete body of texts (that is, a genre), reserving the term "fantasy" for meanings such as "sub-creative art" (Tolkien, "Fairy-Stories" 55), "an impulse native to literature" (Hume 21), or "a natural human activity" (Tolkien, "Fairy-Stories" 56). We need to realize also that some writers use "fantastic" simply as the adjective derived from or corresponding to "fantasy," whereas others, mainly under the influence of French criticism, use the word in a much more restricted sense, applying it exclusively to Gothic fiction and related genres of the uncanny.2 Confusion could be avoided either by retaining [End Page 12] the French fantastique when this restricted sense is meant (as Hume does) or by taking up a suggestion made by Clayton (as I shall do in this essay) who, for reasons to be discussed later, introduces the nonce-word "fantasmatic" (62). Another lesson to be learned from existing attempts at definition is that ff cannot be defined exclusively in terms of subject matter, form, or function. Though all these aspects are certainly important for an understanding of the genre, they are secondary insofar as they do not provide categories that can be used in a rigorously systematic way. Any list of "typical traits" will be in danger of appearing arbitrary. Is it totally imaginary settings that separate ff from other genres? Then how can it be distinguished from sf or fairy tales...

Hollywood and the Image of the Oriental, 1910 - 1950 — Part I

HOLLYWOOD AND THE IMAGE OF THE ORIENTAL, 1910 - 1950 - PART I By Richard A. Oehl ing One rather dispassionate, almost scholarly study of the Japanese problem, published in 1914, contained a bibliography of over fifty books and ninety articles on the subject of Orientals, many of which were themselves anything but dispassionate.! All were written during the previous ten years. Americans, particularly CaI ifornians, were obsessed with two questions, both relating solely to those Japanese who were or would be emigrating to the United States: (1) economic competition and (2) even more serious, the possibility of interracial marriages. San Francisco epitomized and dramatized the issues and the passions—schooling, landowning , marriage. CaI ifornians barely had had time to congratulate themselves on the exclusion of the Chinese in the 1880s when the Japanese problem loomed upon the horizon as a threat to the Occidental character of American society. The Japanese posed not only the threat of racial mongrel ization, but they came to the United States with "vices" not attributed to the Chinese, namely, great adaptability to Western ways, aggressiveness in economic competition, a desire to integrate into American society as soon as possible. Hostility to the Japanese had arisen dramatically in 1900. Japanese immigration had been proceeding at a fairly low and uniform rate for about a decade before this, with 1,000 people a year entering the United States, through California. However, with the annexation of Hawaii, after the Spanish-American War, some 12,000 arrived in 1900 alone. The result was an immediate protest on the part of many Califorians. In March 1900, the Mayor of San Francisco, on the basis of what he knew to be an obvious false rumor, decided to quarantine the Chinese and Japanese Richard A. Oehllng -is Dean ofa Administration at Assumption College In Woncesten , Massachusetts. Several yeans ago he authoned another series ofa articles faon film è Hlstony on the Image ofa Germans In Hollywood fallms. 33 sections of the city upon the pretext of an alleged bubonic plague. In the same year, the labor movement began to put pressure on the Governor of California, Henry Gage, and he stressed the Japanese problem in his message to the Legislature on January 8, 1901. In the 1901 meeting of the Chinese Exclusion League and at the 1904 Convention of the American Federation of Labor, resolutions were passed asking Congress to exclude further Japanese immigration. By 1905, the San Francisco Chronicle, which was violently anti-Oriental, was urging Congress to pass a resolution excluding the Japanese from immigration. The Chronicle, however, observed: "The Chinese are faithful laborers and do not buy land." In other words, the Chinese were no longer a threat as they had been excluded from immigration some years before; the Japanese had now replaced the Chinese as a major threat to Occidental society on the western coast. To review some of the captions of articles which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in the years after 1905, reveals a good ''deal about the attitude of this influential newspaper toward the Japanese question: "Crime and poverty go hand in hand with Asiatic Labor" "Brown men are an evil in the public schools" "Japanese are a menace to American women" "Brown Asiatics steal brains of whites" The Chronicle concluded, "Every one of these immigrants, so far as his service is desired, is a Japanese spy."2 Obvious amidst the clamor was the absence of popular concern with the Japanese who stayed behind, with Japan itself as a nation. Statesmen occasionally wrote of the strategic problems posed for the United States by the rise of Japan to great power status, but the American public seemed to be largely indifferent to these aspects. Perhaps it was because they were so much more involved emotionally in the threat at home to the purity of the race. If that is true, American films may offer some supporting evidence, and provide a useful though not infallible guide to the public mood. The earliest years of motion picture production (until 1908) had seen the production of dozens of films with real and imaginary settings in Japan and China, mostly or entirely dealing with the Orientals in their native environment. Some...

Comment: The Economics of Nonmonetary Variables

In the history of science researchers have often borrowed theories, analogies, or metaphors from other fields, usually the better-developed ones; in economic terms, they invested their human capital by acquiring new and presumably more-advanced intellectual tools. The most conspicuous borrowing in nineteenth-century social science was the unfortunately imaginary set of the developmental sequences of societies, worked out by anthropology and sociology on the basis of findings from biological evolution. It is less often that scientists in a relatively developed field become restive with its constraints and invade another with the aspiration that their more powerful technical and theoretical tools will solve problems with which the less-developed field has not adequately coped. (This is a challenge I have sometimes hurled at physicists who believe that the findings of sociology are simple-minded.) Over the past two decades, physicists tried this successfully in their contributions to molecular biology, and now economists have been expanding their world by attempting to analyze problems usually brooded over by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. In this case, interestingly enough, they will encounter colleagues in these fields who have themselves been moving toward economic or quasieconomic analysis of the same phenomena, though to be sure they have not attempted many social analyses of purely market processes. Especially in social psychology and sociology, a small group of theorists have for nearly two decades been working out exchange and allocational problems with the aid of economic ideas. They have been hampered by their lack of mastery over the tools of economics, their failure to use economics explicitly, and their unwillingness-thus shouldering a burden economists of the past did not wish to carry-to do much theorizing without the facts. In my own case, I have

Sartre's Room

Jean-Paul Sartre may be said to have begun his career in reaction to the literary and philosophical belief, identified with Proust, that the human mind can control and encompass its surroundings through a subjective process. The consequences of shutting oneself off and acting out an artificial drama in a private arena preoccupy Sartre again and again. It is not coincidental that he should call his second fictional publication La Chambre. I This brilliant short story reveals a room, not lined in cork, but furnished with the trappings of another sort of madness. While its comment upon the Proustian solipsism is irrevocably negative, the precise form of sequestration described has its heroic dimensions. Sartre may believe in engagement, but, perhaps paradoxically, a certain admiration is inspired for the imaginary setting where the desperate paranoiac (in contrast with the complacent believer in the primacy and consistency of the mind) makes his effort-hopeless though it may be-to restore an authentic relation between consciousness and the object. A short article written at this same period by Sartre on Husserl's notion of intentionality clearly states the theme. The traditional fallacy common to rationalism and idealism is a belief in the mind as a consistent, all-containing concept. By Husserl's famous sentence, which Sartre will continue to repeat in later works- toute conscience est conscience de quelque chose -we are made aware of the equilibrium and tension between external things and the