Medium Of Representation Research Articles

The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality

This essay describes a trend in contemporary Third World writing characterized by a “realist impulse.” The realist impulse is a transition in representational mode, style, and/or medium that entails a new textual engagement with the contemporary world, evident in gestures such as stories set in the present rather than the past, the trimming of modernist, metaphorical, and metafictional language for a more stripped-down and less ostensibly self-conscious aesthetics, and/or the claiming of a new political urgency in both nonfiction and fictional writing alike. This impulse is evident in a range of new literary and cultural productions since around 2000 in India and across the Third World and marks the contemporary moment by registering the inadequacy of earlier literary trends in deliberate ways. This essay seeks to illuminate the contours of the realist impulse through readings of two contemporary novelists: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) and Chetan Bhagat (India). Despite coming from different countries and political positions, both authors break open existing paradigms in postcolonial literature and represent a new imagining of the potential relationship between center and periphery outside those paradigms.

The Graphic Novel – a Representation Medium of the Contemporary Society

The Graphic Novel obtained its cultural legitimization after a period of more than two Centuries when the Comic Strip had been unfairly considered as entertainment culture, vulgar and childish type of reading, or an environment for the propagation of illiteracy, violence and vices, with demoralizing and anti-educative effects. All these are implied within the meaning of the very term that made the Comic Strip famous: comics. Starting with the second half of the Twentieth Century many artists have written graphic novels where they have argued with complex socio-political problems, such as war and peace, democracy and totalitarianism, the concern for the environment, racism and intolerance, unemployment, the role of the individual in the society, depicting protests and social movements. In this article we render how the Graphic Novel, as a medium for the representation of the contemporary society, has contributed to the classification of the Comic Strip as the 9th Art. We shall analyse genres and topics addressed by artists, aiming at increasing the quality of discourse and narrative image in parallel with the cultural awareness of the public. We will also follow the process for the cultural legitimization of the Comic Strip from a criticised and censored reading to a respected one, with intellectual value, resulting in the inclusion of Comics in art galleries, museums and festivals mainly intended for adult audience.

TOWARDS EXPERIENTIAL REPRESENTATION IN ARCHITECTURE

Planning and predicting the experiences that buildings will produce is an essential part of architectural design. The importance of representation lies in its ability to communicate experiences before a building is materialized. This article will treat the topic of representation of architecture works without putting aside our direct experience with edifices. By understanding the perceptual, associative and interactive phenomena that arise from the human encounter with buildings, it becomes possible to comprehend the representation of these phenomena through pictorial means. The first objective of this theoretical article is to define the inherent and unavoidable factors that are present in the creation and interpretation of all architectural representations, regardless of the technical means used. Any representation conveys two processes: the representation of experience (a creative process), and the experience of representation (an interpretive process). Furthermore, there exist two layers in any representation: the what (the architectural object) and the how (the representational medium). The second objective is to suggest alternatives to visual realism, in order to create representations that embody the particular phenomena that an architectural work will be able to produce. On the one hand, representations that pretend to copy reality produce in the observers detailed visual experiences; on the other hand, certain representations reflect the experiences themselves after they have been produced; they represent buildings as they are transformed by experience. This article focuses on those representations that are not only the reflection of an object, but also the reflection of our way of experiencing it.

Displaced Modernism: Shklovsky's Zoo, or Letters Not About Love and the Borders of Literature

From its first publication in 1923, Viktor Shklovsky's book Zoo, or Letters Not about Love has been discussed as a text that takes up a borderline position between literature and literary theory. The fact that the book was written and first published in Berlin ensured its place in studies of émigré literature concerned with geographic borders. In light of this twofold understanding of border as a boundary between genres and a category of literary cartographies, this article offers a rethinking of the notion of border in Shklovsky's early poetics. It suggests that the subject's geographic displacement (e.g., exile) provides a vantage point from which a reevaluation of established genres and discourses of textual production becomes possible. The experience of exile allows Shklovsky to challenge such categories as fiction (in literary and historical narratives) and nonfiction (both theory and autobiography). This becomes possible because in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love language is no longer presented as a medium of representation but rather as a means of re-creating the writer's unstable literary and ideological position in postrevolutionary Russia and abroad. During his exile, which disrupted his contribution to the development of “the science of literature” undertaken by the formalist clique in Moscow and Petrograd, Shklovsky used writing as a way of constructing the Soviet writer's experience of émigré life. To further investigate the link between language and exile, the article draws parallels between Shklovsky's writings on the subject and Jacques Derrida's theories of writing, which link the inherent instability of language to its essential foreignness.

Developing a Model of Distributed Sensemaking: A Case Study of Military Analysis

In this paper, we examine the role of representational artefacts in sensemaking. Embodied within representational media, such as maps, charts and lists, are a number of affordances, which can furnish sensemakers with the ability to perform tasks that may be difficult to do inside the head. Presented here is a study of sensemaking in action. We conducted a study of military intelligence analysts carrying out a training exercise, the analysis of which focuses on the use of external task-specific representations. We present a discussion of the findings of our study in the form of a model of distributed sensemaking. Our model concentrates on the interaction of information and various representational artefacts, leading to the generation of insights and a situation picture. We also introduce a number of levels of description for examining the properties and affordances offered by representational artefacts and their role in the sensemaking process.

0.009856 m3: Between the Book, the Model, and the Built in the Vedute Collection of Three-Dimensional Manuscripts

Housed within the library of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is the Vedute Collection. Founded in 1991 with the purpose of building a collection of three-dimensional objects that make visible and tangible the concept of space, the collection is made by those active within various spatial disciplines such as artists, architects, and designers. To be included in the collection, there is an imposed constraint: each contribution must have a fixed format, in closed form, of 44 × 32 × 7 centimeters. These objects form a library and are referred to as “three-dimensional manuscripts.” This essay positions the collection as an alternative space of information for spatial practice, which operates between the book and the model, as a medium and interpretation of representation and built space. The dimensions of the fixed format are derived from the book, yet the contents do not consist of written pages. Their three-dimensionality offers connections to the architectural model, yet they are named manuscripts. The points of intersection between these media and the Vedute Collection will be examined in reference to qualities and characteristics such as objecthood, scale, containment, exteriority, and interiority. Further, the essay discusses the nature of the collection, the library, and the series in spatial documentation, and these spaces as territories for spatial practice, between demarcations of discipline.

アルベルティの建築理論におけるpicturaの建築設計上の表現媒体としての側面について

This paper interprets the aspect meaning the representational medium in architectural planning of the pictura in Alberti's architectural theory. This interpretation was made on the basis of our interpretation of the lineamentum and by analyzing the use of the pictura among the theories of his. The result is as the following; the aspect means, essentially, the two-dimensional representational medium that represents a body as the signum (figure) on a certain picture-plane, as it were, the drawing, more exactly, the plan. But in this case, the main is as it were, the set of ground plan, elevation, and section, in a word, the ground plan-elevation-section rather than the solid-figure plan of interior, exterior, background, landscape, etc..

Zur Poetik des Essays

The essay is here seen as a genre of the in-between. Commonly not conceived as a proper academic genre, its methods seemingly not as decent as the academic discourse, the essay justifies itself precisely by questioning the dubious order of the latter, as Adorno outlined. The essay seems to be understood adequately if characterized by its rhetoric or its language rather than defined by generic terms. Being both object-oriented and subject-oriented, in accepting no end of the topic, in beginning somewhere in medias res, etc., the essay might be a medium of representation of life itself.

Evolution of tonal organization in music mirrors symbolic representation of perceptual reality. Part-1: Prehistoric.

This paper reveals the way in which musical pitch works as a peculiar form of cognition that reflects upon the organization of the surrounding world as perceived by majority of music users within a socio-cultural formation. The evidence from music theory, ethnography, archeology, organology, anthropology, psychoacoustics, and evolutionary biology is plotted against experimental evidence. Much of the methodology for this investigation comes from studies conducted within the territory of the former USSR. To date, this methodology has remained solely confined to Russian speaking scholars. A brief overview of pitch-set theory demonstrates the need to distinguish between vertical and horizontal harmony, laying out the framework for virtual music space that operates according to the perceptual laws of tonal gravity. Brought to life by bifurcation of music and speech, tonal gravity passed through eleven discrete stages of development until the onset of tonality in the seventeenth century. Each stage presents its own method of integration of separate musical tones into an auditory-cognitive unity. The theory of “melodic intonation” is set forth as a counterpart to harmonic theory of chords. Notions of tonality, modality, key, diatonicity, chromaticism, alteration, and modulation are defined in terms of their perception, and categorized according to the way in which they have developed historically. Tonal organization in music, and perspective organization in fine arts are explained as products of the same underlying mental process. Music seems to act as a unique medium of symbolic representation of reality through the concept of pitch. Tonal organization of pitch reflects the culture of thinking, adopted as a standard within a community of music users. Tonal organization might be a naturally formed system of optimizing individual perception of reality within a social group and its immediate environment, setting conventional standards of intellectual and emotional intelligence.

Capturing Japan: Australian Photography of the Postwar Military Occupation

Official Australian photography of the military occupation of postwar Japan provides a significant modern case study of photography as a medium of neo-colonial and Orientalist representation. Asserting its dominance of the combined British Commonwealth Occupation Force supporting the Americans, the Australian military revelled in the role of occupier of a wartime enemy who was still widely loathed. Sometimes compared with the British Raj in Imperial India, the Occupation became a historically familiar exercise of the white man’s power and privilege over the conquered and colonised Asiatic. It was marked by the rituals and practices of tourism, including the taking of photographic images. Photography was the main medium by which the event was recorded and circulated to the public back in Australia. Keen to convey images of a force enjoying the privileges of victory while in firm control of a still distrusted people, official photographers affiliated with the Australian military sought to capture a picturesque, feminised and ‘traditional’ Japan. This was a Japan that the war had made obsolete and which the Occupation was intended to modernise. The photographic appropriation of Japan reveals the ambiguity of the Occupation project, and the shallowness of Orientalist representation more generally.

Religious culture and health promotion: care, practice, object

Religious culture and health promotion: care, practice, object

Louie, Louis: The Fictional, Stage, and Auteur Personas of Louis C.K. in Louie

This paper examines stand-up comedy in light of the persona studies idea of the proliferation of the public self to consider the ways comedians are represented and self-presented. Stand-up comedy as a performance mode deploys a literal version of Goffman’s front-stage and back-stage personas, raising questions about who comedians “really” are. Where the simultaneous observation of the on- and off-stage personas of comedy performers was previously only afforded in representational fiction, the diversification of what constitutes on-stage space for comedians has provided opportunities for comedians to perform versions of their back-stage selves in a broader variety of public, front-stage spaces. In the case of American comedian Louis C.K., his television series, Louie, has proven to be a liminal entity that operates in the spirit of presentational media, while produced, constructed, and distributed as representational media. This paper uses Louie to examine the front-stage and back-stage personas of personal, confessional comedians like C.K. who present aspects of their private lives in their public work. In addition, I look at how C.K. asserts his public persona as a self-presentational meta-presence within the representational depiction of his fictionalised self on television. The result is a step toward understanding the nature of self-performance in the front- and back-stage personas of stand-up comedians and how representational media with a distinct authorial voice can act in the spirit of presentational media.

Undead martyrs and decay: when photography fails its promise of eternal memory

In this essay, the author presents the artwork Faces (2009) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige as a case study of the War Generation Artists’ alternative representations of martyrs, or counter-monuments, in Lebanon. Alam demonstrates how Faces intentionally engages with the question of representation to deconstruct the original signification of the posters of martyrs it appropriates using a mise en abyme trope. The author argues that in Faces, the ruination of the medium of representation (photography) reflects the ruination of the subject of representation (the commemoration of the martyrs). Alam concludes by classifying this artwork as Faux-Ephemeral-Art.

Conceptualisation: Interactions between Language, Mind, and World. An Introduction to Theory and History of Concepts

This is a study of the process of conceptualisation as the interactions between language, mind, and world. Concepts are interesting phenomena for reserach in various disciplines, since concepts challenge all three aspects of the semiotic triangle, the mental faculty, the representational medium, and the world, which is represented by the concepts. Studying these aspects of the proces of conceptualization, the work serves as an introduction to the theory and history of concepts.

Learning words from pictures: 15- and 17-month-old infants appreciate the referential and symbolic links among words, pictures, and objects

This experiment was designed to clarify the referential status of infants’ newly learned words. We introduced 15- and 17-month-olds to a novel noun, presented in conjunction with pictures of two whisks that differed in color (one purple, one orange). We asked whether infants would extend this newly learned noun to other members of the same kind (other whisks), one differing only in color (a picture of a silver whisk) and another differing in both color and representational medium (a real three-dimensional silver whisk). Fifteen- and 17-month-olds’ interpretation of the novel noun was not tethered tightly to the perceptual features with which the word had previously been paired. Instead, their interpretation was sufficiently abstract to include a new member of the same object category, although it differed in color and representational medium (a real silver whisk). Thus, by 15 months, infants appreciate the referential status of words and extend their meaning flexibly from pictures to objects.

Generation in Literary History: Three Constellations of Generationality, Genealogy, and Memory

“Generation” is a twofold term. Understood as generational identity (generationality) the history of “generation” can be traced back to its foundational moment during the First World War. In its second meaning, as genealogy, the idea of generation is age-old. While sociological and historical research tends to focus on generationality, literary and cultural studies have recently reinvigorated the study of generation as genealogy. Both concepts are deeply enmeshed with literature and other representational media. Such entanglements point well beyond our field’s traditional practice of using the notion of generation as a means of writing literary history (from the “first-generation Romantics” to the “angry young men”). What is at stake, rather, is the development of comprehensive and conceptually rigorous approaches to the many-layered interrelationships between generation, memory, and literature. “Generation” deserves to be put on the agenda of a “new” literary history. This article therefore proposes an integrative literary- and memory-studies perspective on generation, combining classic and more recent theories of generation with historical case studies. It reconstructs three discursive constellations around “generation” that have shaped the past century (the First World War and the “lost generation,” the Holocaust and the “generation of postmemory,” and the nexus between immigration and generation) with a focus on the question of how literature and literary studies have intervened in these discourses. It does so in order to show the rich, and still largely untapped, potential of studying generationality and genealogy as part of literary history.

The ‘Yidishe Paganini’: Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu, the Music of Yiddish Theatre and the Character of the Shtetl Fiddler

ABSTRACTThis article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.

Genesis, Retold: In Search of an Atlas of the Anthropocene

Abstract While, within the last decades, the atlas has lost its dominance as a medium of spatial representation to digital media, it has recently attracted a significant aesthetic interest. Artists and writers have created books that are explicitly or implicitly linked to the atlas, delving into its history, its epistemological preconditions, and its representational capacity. In this essay, I suggest a connection between this attraction to a supposedly outdated medium and the representational challenges raised by the model of the Anthropocene. A first example offers Sebastião Salgado's Genesis (2013), a monumental collection of photographs that promises a journey “to the beginnings of our planet,” confronting the viewer with the dimension of geological time into which human agency has expanded. Due to the indexicality of photography, the Genesis-project has to approach deep time by movements within space, and thus it is not coincidental that the book that is credited as one of the most powerful representations of the Anthropocene resembles an atlas. In this resemblance, however, it also reproduces the abstract and generalized space of cartography. The atlas allows, as I try to demonstrate by a short view into its history, the representation of large dimensions through a negotiation of relations between part and whole, but in order to do so, it increases the distance between the observer and the observed. As an alternative model, I discuss Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands (2009, Engl. 2010). More aware of the problematic effects of media and modes of representation on the represented world, Schalansky's atlas deconstructs the observer who looks at the territory from outside and above, and reinserts him or her into a landscape of multiple movements and connections. Exploring a multiplicity of cultural techniques and actors, human as well as non-human, involved in the production of the image of the globe, this atlas becomes a medium of “being in the world” rather than one of “looking at” it. Being in the world is also the attempt of another photographic atlas of deep time, Ernst Haas' The Creation (1972), a thorough negotiation between part and whole, that offers an epilogue to my argument, although it is historically, more than four decades before Salgado's Genesis, a prologue to the recent return of the atlas.

Coins and Care-Cloths: The Mystagogical Value of Traditional Wedding Customs

Antiphon 18.2 (2014) 115–143 Coins and Care-Cloths: The Mystagogical Value of Traditional Wedding Customs Michael P. Foley May her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree. W.B. Yeats, “A Prayer For My Daughter” Yeats’ prayer for his two-day-old daughter Anne contrasts the arrogance and hatred of public life that foment war and anarchy with the custom and ceremony of the home that give rise to innocence and beauty. The great Irish poet was not Catholic, and though we might quibble with his understanding of innocence and beauty, his assertions about the power of custom and ceremony in fashioning a happy marital life are a starting point as good as any for reflecting on why the Church adorns her rites of matrimony with traditions that are not, strictly speaking, essential for confecting a sacrament. A wedding where “all’s accustomed , ceremonious” has several advantages. Longstanding nuptial traditions connect the new couple to all who live in Love’s eternal memory, situating their love for each other in a broader and greater narrative of grace, self-sacrifice, and redemption. One wonders if the phenomenon of “bridezillas” is not unrelated to a decline in traditional religious weddings. A monstrously selfish bride operates under the delusion that she is at the center of things rather than the most recent link in a chain of lovers who, following the footsteps of Christ the Bridegroom, take on awesome, humbling, and self-denying responsibilities. At the very 116 Michael P. Foley least, a bride’s egocentrism—or the groom’s, for that matter—is not helped when she is encouraged or allowed to be the creator of her own vows and rituals.1 Moreover, traditional wedding customs are as much a faithful guide to the present as they are a bridge to the past. As we will see in this essay, liturgical nuptial traditions have a pedagogical import, teaching both couple and congregation something about married life. Such teachings are particularly beneficial given the multi-faceted nature of marriage, an institution that combines often-thorny issues such as sexuality, parenthood, extended family , ethnic heritage, and civic responsibility. Even when elevated to the dignity of a canonical channel of grace, marriage does not lose its unique combination of high and low, for it continues to involve (and in a most intimate way) the body personal and the body politic even as it participates in the Body Mystical of Jesus Christ. Marriage is the only sacrament dissolvable upon exit from this life because it is the only sacrament with a peculiar purchase on the goods of this life. It is, to quote another poet, the one sacrament where candidates approach the altar with “carnal and devout intent alike.”2 As such, it is appropriate to have lessons on matrimony’s heavenly and worldly complexity taught through the effective medium of ritual participation and representation.3 1 Conversely, one wonders if older couples from earlier generations did not experience the same need to renew their vows in a separate ceremony because every wedding they attended felt like a de facto renewal , especially when the wedding so closely resembled their own. 2 Alexander Pope, “January and May, or, the Merchant’s Tale,” l. 310. 3 What Pope Pius XI wrote when he instituted the Feast of Christ the King can be applied mutatis mutandis to the power of ritual as well: “People are instructed in the truths of faith and brought to appreciate the inner joys of religion far more effectually by the annual celebration of our sacred mysteries than by any official pronouncement of the teaching of the Church. Such pronouncements usually reach only a few and the more learned among the faithful; feasts reach them all. The former speak but once, the latter speak every year—in fact, forever.” Pius XI, Encyclical on the Feast of Christ the King Quas primas (11 December 1925) 21. See also Second Vatican Council, Constitution...

White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth by Elspeth Tilley (review)

Elspeth Tilley. White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia's Lost-in-the-Bush Myth. Cross/Cultures 152. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Pp. xi, 381. US$116. If you take this book to heart, you will begin to find colonialist discourse in every Australian cultural artefact you encounter. Elspeth Tilley's argument--and she seems to forget at times that it is an argument--is that a white colonialist agenda informs most Australian writing, not just that of the nineteenth century, but contemporary texts as well. She uses the Lost-in-the-Bush Myth, a trope that she labels white vanishing, as her key example supporting this assertion. The book is well researched and thorough in its survey of the literature in and about the topic. It is densely written and full of its own special jargon: "white vanishing" (1 and "passim"), "black vanishing" (48), "white reverse-vanishing" (291), "vanished and unvanished white characters" (99), "white presencing" (154), "heterochronic nexus points" (167), and so on. Tilleys methodology is hyperdeat (to use one of her favourite prefixes): "there are four principal forms of textual imagery that constitute black displacements in white vanishing texts" (56). She takes the literature and looks in turn at the representation of indigenes, white people, time, and space. She defines an indigene as a "white-constructed Aboriginalist image" (19), and you could say that she thereby assures her conclusions about the hidden, obstinate, justificatory aspect of white Australian writing. A question one might ask in passing is why is there no theorised white equivalent to the indigene, a representational medium carrying the freight of white fantasy creation? There appears to be another theoretical problem at the core of Tilley's argument, one she never fully confronts--that is, the actual vanishing of the white child or adult into the Australian bush. What can this loss or disappearance mean? Surely a number of interpretations are possible--a whole range, from white ineptitude to metaphysical desire for death/union with nature, awe in the face of the Australian "sublime," guilt about or punishment for hubristic white occupation. One could even mount an argument for a view of this trope as anarchic rather than normative or conservative. And somewhere in that range are the "meta-discourses of white Australian colonialism" (155). Tilley is impatient with any alternative discourse, however, and at times her monocular, literal cast of mind verges on the parodic. Of the lost white she says: "Or they may be lost forever, either because their body is never found, or they are found dead and are therefore unable to be restored to their white community" (100). Tilley is stronger in her analysis of nineteenth-century texts. Their piety and apparent lack of self-awareness--she uses the terms "apparently-innocent" (1), even "disingenuous" (42)--are grist to the mill of her analysis. Her treatment of the "washing metaphor," whereby the found child is symbolically brought back to whiteness, is perceptive and shaming (109-10); her political understanding of obfuscatory renditions of white victimhood are also excellent, as is her description of the gendering of the land (255-56). One of the best sections of the book theorises that "ignorance is also power" (324) and intriguingly discusses white narcissism, "egology" (Robert Youngs term), and white strategies of disguising "conquest as non-conquest" (324). However, as text after text is deconstructed in the same manner and with the same conclusions, the colonialist case begins to suffer from overstatement and insistence. …