Metaphorical Space Research Articles

Teaching and Learning Within Inter-Institutional Spaces: An Example from a Community-Campus Partnership in Teacher Education

This paper explores the potentiality inherent within a community-campus partnership in the area of inservice teacher education, and the inter-institutional space that has afforded creative and collaborative practices. Through this partnership, we endeavour to find innovative ways to better serve our students and create opportunities for smooth interactions and flow across school and university communities. Unlike other research that explores tensions and/or common ground within community-university partnerships, we seek to understand the potential that is created in the metaphorical space in-between institutions. Using dialogic inquiry, the diverse members of our teaching team, including members of the university community and the K-12 school system, as well as graduates of the program, reflected on the unique material, discursive and relational dimensions of our inter-institutional space. We came to see our graduate program as a hybrid place of connections, rhythms, and intersections in which usual institutional practices are ruptured. Together we identified powerful interrelated structural dimensions of our inter-institutionality, which we referred to as the gathering space, the inquiry space, the transformative space and the empowering space. These themes and the flow that has been created across and between institutions will be discussed in the following paper.

One Hundred Years of Futurism by John London

MLR, .,   Berghaus’s research, which has demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, Futurism was not a neglected topic of scholarship in Italy aer , given that there were  publications on the movement between the end of the Second World War and , with , appearing overall between  and  (p. ). Berghaus’s most recent research, showcased in the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, of which he is the founder and editor, has been focused on the manifestations of so-called ‘art of the future’ outside of Italy, ‘sometimes influenced by Italian Futurism, sometimes existing independently of it’ (p. ). He states that ‘the task for the future is to get out of this monolinguistic culture and to investigate the links between different forms of Futurism or para-Futurism or epi-Futurism’ (p. ). In the light of his perspective and these comments, it is perhaps somewhat incongruent that the focus of this volume is so resolutely Italian, with the partial exception of Matteo D’Ambrosio’s chapter on ‘Numbers’, which addresses some aspects of Russian Futurism. However, this is a minor quibble. is book was a pleasure to read and will reward both the serious scholar of Futurism and the more casual reader of twentieth-century Italian culture who may wish to dip in and out of the Futurist day. R H, U  L S D One Hundred Years of Futurism. Ed. by J L. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. One Hundred Years of Futurism presents an unconventional and innovative take on Italian Futurism and its cultural and artistic reverberations in the century that followed the founding of the movement in , when Futurism exploded onto the European stage. e ideas of the stage, as a physical and metaphorical space, and of performance were central to Futurism. In its assault on staid cultural institutions , Futurism has rightly been seen as a blueprint for many radical Avant-Garde movements of the early twentieth century and the first one to anticipate a new politics of the arts which placed the masses and the active participation of the spectator/viewer at the centre of its creative and ideological concerns. It was also a movement which programmatically aimed at a global reach. From Paris and Milan, Futurism produced waves and ripples that were far-reaching. John London and the contributors to this volume—many of them performers— reinvigorate our understanding of the cultural import of Futurism and its enduring impact upon and appeal for creative practitioners in the century that followed its first manifestation. e volume moves Futurism away from a much too common historical reading towards something more complex, hybrid, and refreshingly transnational. e first four chapters, grouped under the title ‘Aesthetics and Politics’, explore the international and transnational reach of Futurism. Andreas Kramer maps its geographies vis-à-vis the birth of the European Avant-Garde and reflects on Futurism’s characteristic combination of artistic internationalism and political nationalism . e contradictory nature of Futurism, with its odd alliance with Fascism  Reviews in the inter-war years and its genuinely radical call for transformation, is also addressed by James Martin in a chapter that focuses on some notable resemblances between the motif of ‘intersecting planes’, as developed in particular by Umberto Boccioni, and Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the industrial factory. Ricarda Vidal explores the continued presence of Futurist tropes in popular culture, especially in relation to gender construction. e machine man, and especially the idea of the metallized body, is explored through the close reading of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (), a homage to s B-movies exploring speed, driving, and one-dimensional gender constructions. Shiing geographies, meanings, and tropes are also central to London’s excellent chapter on translating Futurism, which refocuses our attention on the role of translation and translatability in the geographical and transnational reach of Italian Futurism. e changes in Futurism according to the varying geographies, both spatial and cultural, are explored in relation to both manifestos and poetic texts. e result is a nuanced reflection on the translatability of Futurist ideology and the rich tapestry of further meaning that translation affords the movement as we move away from its two main languages, French and Italian. e section...

In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology by Kristine Suna-Koro

Reviewed by: In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology by Kristine Suna-Koro Chris Ángel In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology. By Kristine Suna-Koro. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2017. 308 pp. The author is a Latvian-American theologian and a Lutheran pastor, currently teaching at Xavier University Cincinnati. In this work, she is among the first to bring into conversation the sprawling worlds of postcolonial thought and sacramental theology. To this conversation she brings dozens of other contemporary voices, many female, many from Asia. Among the strongest influences on her work are Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Mayra Rivera, and Kevin Irwin. Suna-Koro argues that traditional Western theology, including sacramental theology, is tainted (though not irretrievably) by its association with the violence perpetrated under the imperialism of centuries past. This has affected not only how Christians view sacraments, but also how they view salvation and the relationship of God to humanity. Thus, the Western theological tradition needs to be critically re-examined, which she calls a ressourcement (10). She perceives multiple crises in the church and in the world: a “sacramental crisis” of growing disenchantment with ecclesial rituals, the planetary ecological crisis, and the crisis of widespread injustice. Sacramental theology and postcolonial thought should address these crises; Suna-Koro argues that, done responsibly, each includes an ethical dimension as well as an ecological dimension. She proposes a sacramental worldview which is not limited to denominational or ritual boundaries. To this end, she proposes creation as an ursakrament. Further, she is especially interested in non- dominative relationships, particularly through the metaphors of hybridity, Third Space (a concept from Homi Bhabha), and counterpoint (from music). These metaphors propose relationships that respect the integrity of each participant, that allow for ambiguity, and that are responsive and reciprocal. For example, in her chapter on the Lord’s Supper, she aims to explore how the Lord’s Supper can “model a synergistic imaginary of sacramental power, empowerment, and agency for liberative change—a certain kind of ‘transubstantiation’ ” (257). She draws [End Page 473] on Luther’s writings and the Formula of Concord, specifically the idea of unio sacramentalis, the sacramental union of Christ’s body and blood with the bread and wine, which she sees as representing a hybrid relationality. Acknowledging the historical baggage of “tran-substantiation,” she wants to reclaim the term to discuss change, “an emancipatory matter in postcolonial perspectives” (266). Suna-Koro makes important contributions with this challenging work. She is an extremely careful writer, with precise diction and expansive citations. Her exploration of the complicated definitions of post-coloniality and related terms is especially helpful. Still, there are few concrete examples in her work, save a few details from her experience of the diasporic Latvian Lutheran church. The complexity of her thought makes this a difficult work to approach, perhaps best for specialists or advanced graduate students. Chris Ángel University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana. Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc

Analysis of the Narrative Types of “Metaphor” in Animated Short Films

The most presented storytelling medium of animation and film are images. The narrative messages that viewers obtain through images are much more rigorous than those from dictation or narration. Therefore, the means to construct story context in an animation narrative is more than the intuitive narrative of character language. Message transmission by hints seems to be an important technique of image narrative in a plot. Potential messages involve metaphors in rhetoric. When applied to an image narrative, linguistic techniques have gone beyond the scope of literal modification. Meaning the viewers’ cognition and past experiences are also involved in the process of image viewing. Therefore, the metaphors in animated movies are a type of narrative produced by multiple elements, as well as a mode of deduction based on real life. According to the related theories of metaphorical mapping, this study explores the analogical narrative process of images in animation cases, as based on Gentner’s structural mapping theory and the blending theory of Fauconnier and Turner. The results of case study show that, in animated movies, analogies are made through similarities in form, meaning the attributes of source and target are blended as the means of metaphor, where the lens movement also contributes to the metaphor of space on the visual psychological level. In summary, this study is expected to serve as a reference for further exploration of the metaphoric narrative of animation in the future.

Is my grief too public for you? The digitalization of grief on Facebook™

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr provide users a metaphorical space to share their feelings and experiences with others, including on the topics of grief and loss. The purpose of the current study was to examine why people post grief messages on Facebook and how they feel about others’ grief posts. Findings showed that participants post about their grief and loss on Facebook to commemorate the dead, express their grief, connect with others, and remember special occasions.

The Whittrick Play of No Nothing: Alan Spence, Edwin Morgan, and Indra’s Net

The article will attempt a reading of Alan Spence’s play No Nothing (2015). Special attention will be given to the issue of literal and metaphorical space(s), a peculiar, liminal setting of the play, and the ways it determines the flyting between the two characters, two iconic Glaswegians: Edwin Morgan and Jimmy Reid. It seems that in this theatrical space history, politics and poetry inter-are. We may notice how two completely different masters of speech (a poet and a trade union leader) exchange their views on life, how they reflect upon the meaning of their achievements, and how they find a space of convergence in their affirmation of life. As their flyting is “about life, the Universe and everything—from Glasgow to Infinity and beyond,” the article will also address the space of dialogue between Spence’s and Morgan’s poetry. The metaphor of Indra’s net will serve as a useful tool in exploring spatial dimensions of the play and the issue of interconnectedness.

Masculinities, History and Cultural Space: Queer Emancipative Thought in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys

At Swim, Two Boys, a 2001 novel by Jamie O’Neill, tells a story of gay teen romance in the wake of the Easter Rising. This paper considers the ways in which the characters engage in patterns of masculine behaviour in a context that excludes queer men, and the rhetorical effect of transgressive strategies to form a coherent identity. These patterns include involvement with the masculine and heteronormative nationalist movement, as well as a regime of physical exercise, and a religious upbringing in 20th-century Ireland. The strategies of broadening the practices of masculinity include their renegotiation and redefinition, as well as attempts to (re)construct the Irish and the gay canons of history and literature. These strategies, as exemplified by character development, become a rhetorical basis for the novel’s main argument for inclusiveness. This analysis deals with the central metaphors of space and continuity in the novel in the light of a struggle between identities. It also observes the tradition of parallels drawn between the emasculated position of the gay man and the Irish man at the beginning of the 20th century, and O’Neill’s rhetorical deployment of the shared telos in construction of a coherent gay Irish revolutionary identity.

Imagery and Metaphorical Space of the Term in the Language of Scientific Texts by V. Vinogradov

The article considers the functions of the system of verbal imagery’s in the creation of the scientific style of V.V. Vinogradov. The figurativeness of basic, background and metaphorical terms is described. The semantic structure of the image of the basic term «style» is analyzed, figurative paradigms of the concepts Language, Speech and Style are revealed. The article shows the relationship between scientific thinking and metaphorical style, the role of sustainable cognitive metaphors in the creation, storage and transfer of pragmatic information and the creation of a cultural and historical context.

Interpretation of Space Through Metaphors

The present paper aims to analyze the metaphorical representation of space from a cognitive point of view in the English language. To achieve this purpose it mostly focuses on the investigation of space metaphors. It also presents certain ways in which metaphoric expressions represent space. Different view points of the lingusits are stated throughout the paper. The author attempts a better understanding of metaphors in terms of expressing space. The paper is fully representative of the state of the art in terms of language and space research , and point to new directions in terms of findings, theory and practice. This article is to a large extent about how these and other unconscious spatial activities relate to language and how language relates to space. This is an area of enquiry that has interested linguits, philisophers , and psychologists for a very long time and for a variety of reasons. In recent years cognitively oriented linguits have devoted more and more research , effort into trying to comprehend the space – language relationship especially space metaphors. The present paper aims to give an overview of some aspects of this effort, its current state. Examples provided contribute to demonstarte that space metaphors constitutes an essential part of our conceptual system.

Muzikos konceptualizavimas erdvės ir judėjimo metaforomis

Siekiant geriau suprasti ryšius, siejančius muzikos garsų savybes su erdvės ir judėjimo metaforomis, kurios yra įprastai pasitelkiamos kalbant apie muziką, atlikti du tyrimai. Pirmo tyrimo metu aiškintasi, kaip muzikai priskiriamos sinestetinio pobūdžio konceptualiosios metaforos, antro tyrimo metu – kaip priskiriamos sąvokos, išvedamos iš įprasto klausos suvokimo. Rezultatai rodo, kad sąvokų priskyrimas muzikos fragmentams pasižymi tam tikru sistemiškumu, tačiau jis nėra tiek specifiškas, kad vienai garso savybei būtų taikoma tik viena sąvoka, o vienai sąvokai – tik viena garso savybė. Taip pat nebuvo aptikta esminių skirtumų tarp to, kaip sąvokas muzikai priskiria muzikinį išsilavinimą turintys ir jo neturintys tyrimo dalyviai.

A Study on Meaning and Metaphor of Space in Essay <Sanchonyeojeong>

A Study on Meaning and Metaphor of Space in Essay <Sanchonyeojeong>

Coordenadas geográfico-literarias de la construcción de identidades: El hombre de Moserrat de Dante Liano y La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde de Omar Cabezas

El hombre de Montserrat (1994), de Dante Liano (Guatemala, 1949), y La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde (1999), de Omar Cabezas (Nicaragua, 1950) son dos novelas centroamericanas en las cuales la geografía y el espacio literario se relacionan desde el puno de vista de su descripción textual, las metáforas espaciales y el espacio en el texto.

The Puppet and Visual Theater

Visual theater is an inter-disciplinary art form at the seam-line between performance and visual art. What is the role of puppets, masks and objects in visual theater? Can puppet-theater be regarded as an independent medium that is but a reduced, singular expression of visual theater? Is not all theater visual? In this paper Ophrat shall follow the puppet’s journey in the metaphorical space and time of theater, from mimetic and narrative functions to the values of matter, shape and medium: in other words – from the theater to the visual.

Logical Space and Logical Time Variations on Hegel’s “Being-Nothing-Becoming”

Since some time the metaphor of logical space has been used to open new approaches to Hegel’s “Science of Logic”. Frequently it is noticed that in such an interpretation logical space must be understood as dynamic. However, as far as I can see, nobody has done yet the step to introduce the concept of logical time into the discussion, even though this step seems to suggest itself. The following contribution seeks to develop this thought and arrives at some new conceptions, such as the curvature of logical space, logical actuality and semantic present, which may seem strange at first sight, but which follow consistently from the explication of the fundamental idea. The first aim in doing this is to broaden our conceptual repertoire do deal with Hegel’s Logic. This may open new perspectives of interpretation which may prove inspiring. Secondarily, the article also defends a systematic thesis which stands on its own and lays claim to truth. This claim goes far beyond a mere interpretation of Hegel and implies a fundamental critique of his philosophy. The comprehension of logical time-space leads to the requirement of logical chance event – and not only real chance. This goes against Hegel claim to absolute necessity in the dialectical development of his Logic and leads to a new philosophic comprehension of logic as such.

Open Awareness: Holding the Liminal Space in Transpersonal Coaching and Therapy

“Holding The Space” is the metaphorical container for the therapeutic interaction between the coach or therapist and client. Although the held space is largely intuitive, transpersonal practitioners who wish to teach, apply and develop its practice are faced with the challenge of reproducing it consistently and intentionally. Some important aspects of the held space include energetic resonance and rapport, a participatory perspective, mindfulness, intentionally cultivated attitudes of acceptance, compassion and interconnectedness, and induction of a state of awareness of wider perspective and receptivity. We propose a unique mode of mindful perception ideally suited to Holding The Space, called “Open Awareness”. The characteristics of this state are a mindful mode of perception; metacognitive introspective awareness; extrospective and somatic awareness; a reframe of personal identification leading to a sense of interconnectedness; and a fluid, dynamic balance between conscious focus and peripheral awareness. Open Awareness is simple enough to learn and apply quickly, and profound enough to evolve consciousness through regular practice. In general, the process begins with a shift of awareness to the physical senses, expansion and deepening to more subtle mental objects, and intentional resonance with the metaphorical space in between people and objects. The expansion of awareness is both inward (deep personal) and outward (interpersonal and transpersonal). Open Awareness is a distinct state, but shares characteristics with other disciplines such as Open Focus, Open Monitoring, Focused Attention meditation, and Focus-defocus practice. We advocate Open Awareness as a useful tool for coaches and therapists and suggest research to develop further applications. KEYWORDS Holding the Space, Transpersonal Coaching, Transpersonal Therapy, Mindfulness, Open Awareness.

Thomas Middleton’s Legal Duel: A Cognitive Approach

This article explores the Duel Scene (Scene 9, 99-277 (II.iii)) in Thomas Middleton's play The Phoenix (1607) in light of cognitive metephor theory. In reading this scene alongside the cultural and social changes in Elizabethan and Jacobean legal discourse, the mutual exchange of influence to both legal and political language and to drama and the theatre. The specific use of metaphoric blended spaces opens up for a combined linguistic and historical analysis.

Imagining transformative spaces: the personal–political sites of community archives

Although much has been written about formal archival spaces, little scholarship has addressed the physical spaces of community archives. This paper asks: How do community members imagine the physical spaces that steward identity-based community archives? Based on focus groups with more than 54 community archives users at five different community archives sites across Southern California, this paper examines how members of marginalized communities conceive of the physical space inhabited by community archives representing their communities. The sites explored range from a prominent location on a university campus, to storefronts, strip malls, and small cinderblock buildings. Yet across sites, users spoke about community archives spaces as symbolic and affectively moving locations. Many users described their community archives site as a “home-away-from-home,” marked by intergenerational dialog and a profound sense of belonging. For other users, community archives sites were described as “politically generative spaces” which foster dialog and debate about identity, representation, and activism and enable the community to envision its future. And yet, while the very existence of community archives is political, many participants felt that the full political potential of these sites is not yet realized. By listening to the voices of the communities represented and served by community archives, our research both indicates that a shift is warranted in archival metaphors of space and reveals how community archives are personally and politically transformative spaces for the communities they represent and serve.

Beyond Home And City: Poems By Ishigaki Rin And Shiraishi Kazuko

Beyond Home And City:Poems By Ishigaki Rin And Shiraishi Kazuko1 Mizuta Noriko Translated by Eiji Sekine Ishigaki Rin has a well-known poem titled "The Nameplate": 自分の住むところには自分で表札を出すにかぎる。 自分の寝泊まりする場所に他人がかけてくれる表札はいりもろくなことはない。 病院へ入院したら病室の名札には石垣りん様と様が付いた。 旅館に泊まっても部屋の外に名前は出ないがやがて焼場のかんにはいるととじた扉の上に石垣りん殿と札が下がるだろうそのとき私はこばめるか？ 様も殿も付いてはいけない、 自分の住む所には自分の手で表札をかけるに限る。 [End Page 120] 精神の在り場所もハタから表札をかけられてはならない 石垣りんそれでよい。 It is imperative that I put my nameplate by myselfOn the door of the place where I live. It is always terrible when someone else places my nameplateAt the entrance of the place where I lodge. When I was hospitalizedMy nameplate at the entrance of my room read: Ms. Ishigaki Rin."Ms." was added to my name. When I stay at an innNo nameplate will be put outside of my room.But soon I will enter into a crematoryAnd a nameplate will be placed above its closed door:It will read Ishigaki Rin, Esq.How can I refuse such a plate at that moment? Neither "Ms." nor "Esq."Should be added to my name. It is imperative that I put my nameplate by myselfOn the door of the place where I live. I should also not let someone else place for meThe nameplate for the place where my soul is. A plate that simply reads Ishigaki RinIs the best one. This poem is highly acclaimed, to the extent that some critics even insist that Ishigaki Rin was born to compose this very poem. She wrote it in 1968 when she was forty-eight. Her second poetry anthology, including this one, was published in the same year (titled Nameplate and Other Poems) and allowed her to become one of the most well recognized contemporary poets. [End Page 121] It is often said that the last four lines articulate the poem's theme: The poet declares that her spiritual identity should not be articulated by others; instead, she should be the one who decides and expresses her own identity, which defines her as a simple self with no socialized or honorific titles. Home, hospital, and crematorium are used as metaphors that indicate the concreteness of the place where her soul may be lodged. The hospital and crematorium are examples of the "terrible" places where someone else chooses and positions her nameplate, while in "the place where she lives" her everyday life, she herself sets her nameplate; it is a place of her own and a metaphorical space where her soul resides. This simple and articulate poem fully displays the poet's clean and firm attitude towards life (she lives with her simple and naked self) and her strong individuality (she does not pretend to be someone other than her natural self). She insisted on her "female" individuality in the sense that women often live with no title and no respect from society, and rarely have a chance to display their own nameplates at the doors of their houses. However, Ishigaki later confessed that she hesitated to choose "mo" over "wa" to topicalize the "place of her soul" in the final lines of the above poem. Her hesitation is indicative of the concrete nature of the place in which her self lives; that is to say that her "home" is not just simple metaphor for her "soul." The place referred to in the lines, "I should also not let someone else place for me/the nameplate for the place where my soul is," is chosen as another example of a possible space she may be in, similar to other spaces such as home, hospital, and crematory. An explanatory word choice here (lit. "also the place where my mind/spirit exists") sounds almost a redundant addition to the poem's message on the aforementioned places: The use of "mo (also)" indeed helps the lines justify their own significance. "The Nameplate" marks the beginning of Ishigaki's name recognition as a professional poet, but it is not the first poem she composed; rather, it demonstrates one of the conclusions of her poetic enterprise. Ishigaki Rin was born in 1920. At the age of fifteen, she started to work after graduating from a higher elementary school. She worked for the Industrial Bank of Japan for 40 years; at 55, she reached the age limit and retired. She was 25 when WWII ended. She continued working before, during...

Film, Performance, and the Spaces Between: The Collaborative Works of Mara Mattuschka and Chris Haring

This article takes as its starting point five collaborative experimental films by choreographer Chris Haring and filmmaker Mara Mattuschka. Transposing live stage performances into self-contained cinematic worlds, these works represent compelling examples of intermedial exchange. The article draws on intermedial discourse, performance theory, dance film, and theories of space, body, and voice to illustrate how the films self-consciously stage their own process of transformation through an emphasis on the physical, sensual, and metaphorical spaces between.

Film Chronicle

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) The Dark Corner, directed by Henry Hathaway (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2005, and Netflix) Woman on the Run, directed by Norman Foster (Flicker Alley, 2016, and Amazon Video) Detour, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (Amazon Video) Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur (Warner Archive, 2014, and Amazon Video) The Postman Always Rings Twice, directed by Tay Garnett (Warner Brothers, 2012, and Amazon Video) Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012, and Amazon Video) Criss Cross, directed by Robert Siodmak (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2004, and Amazon Video) L. A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson (New Regency, 2015, and Amazon Video) In The Dark Corner (1946), before the camera turns to the private eye and his secretary sharing a cozy table in the High Hat Club, it lingers on the image of a pianist tickling the jazz ivories onstage. Oddly, the image takes the form of a shadow cast against a blank wall. Why a shadow? It is hard to think of any reason for the shot except the director Henry Hathaway’s wish to demonstrate a familiarity with, supply a requisite icon of, the genre he is working in. You know a private eye by his fedora and gat and hard-guy talk; you know a film noir by its shadows, and The Dark Corner is absolutely a film noir. Hathaway’s movie nicely typifies the genre, coming as it does from noir’s richest period, the fifteen or so years after the close of World War II when Hollywood, seemingly anxious about the nuclear arms race, McCarthyism, big-city crime, or the unsettling prospect of new roles for women, translated those anxieties into hundreds of dark dramas. Often aided by émigré cinematographers and set designers who knew a thing or two about dark German Expressionism, the studios devised an instantly recognizable noir look, dramatically deep blacks and glaring whites, the twin effects of low-key, high-contrast lighting—“mystery lighting,” the great Hungarian-born cinematographer John Alton called it in his 1949 book Painting with Light. We also see strongly rhythmical line-ups of shadows, say those cast by the slats of Venetian blinds or the banisters of stairs in run-down boarding houses, and we see women’s hair and the curling smoke from cigarettes, both backlit, both alluring. Light in noir tends to come from sources within the mise-en-scène. These sources viewers in the 1940s quickly learned to read as emblems of a certain type of big-city life, simultaneously mysterious, violent, and cheaply glamorous. Neon signs for nightclubs blink on and off; streetlamps glare in reflection from [End Page 665] puddles on the wet asphalt; that kind of thing. If a door should suddenly open, it admits a stab of white into the blackness, and possibly the flash of gun muzzles, as in that most iconic and influential of noirs, the Hemingway adaptation The Killers, from 1946. To return to The Dark Corner, along with the noir look it features some quintessentially noir plot turns—a chase through busy streets and sudden outbreaks of violence, usually photographed in shadows so as not to offend the censor—and standard noir character types, like a pair of beautiful dames, one who can be trusted and one who can’t (the latter betrays her old husband sexually, then pulls out a gun). Along with these women, the story provides a tough thug, a tougher police lieutenant who drops by to give the private eye a hard time, and above all that private eye himself, Brad Galt, who like many male figures in film noir is damaged goods, having a guilty past to live down and depressive moments to get over. Galt dreads his “dark corner,” the sense that an unjust world is closing in, the better not to give a sucker like him an even break. This dark metaphorical space lends a real depth to all the literally shadowed doorways and nighttime streets we see. Partially countering the darkness, and making Hathaway’s film more varied and interesting, is its soundtrack, an unusually full repertoire of ordinary, undramatic urban noises, the shriek of a child’s...