Mimetic Techniques Research Articles

Mimetic Possibilities: Collaboration through movement in multimedia opera

Abstract In the opera Act I: Invocation – The Ghost Trilogy, artists from music composition, Greek tragedy, creative coding, and opera performance collaborated to create an artwork that engages with philosophy and technology. A light sculpture with a novel Internet of Things (IoT) architecture was adapted for the opera’s stage, where both the sculpture and its controlling interface were programmed to visually represent musical processes within the composer’s approach. While filming, the light sculpture contributed to the dramatic context through movement and gestural interaction between the sculpture and the soprano. Drawing upon Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and its inquiry into movement for engaging with new technology expressively, movement and gesture, transpiring from mimetic techniques in the opera, were central in this interdisciplinary collaboration.

Ciprofloxacin as a tryptophan mimic within an antimicrobial peptide

Combination of peptide conjugation and peptide mimetic techniques produces a selective antibacterial molecule from two broad spectrum antimicrobials.

Poetics of the Steel Plate Engraving: Letitia Landon and <i>Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book</i>

The central argument of this detailed reading of Landon’s editorship of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book of 1832 turns on the technology of the (capitalist) steel plate and its composition through the accumulation of lines rather than through mimetic techniques. I suggest that Landon foregoes the mimetic contract in favour of a metonymic contract of juxtaposition deriving from her decision to prioritize the poetic line and the second-order poetics of stereotype and cliché (both terms of print technology). She employs a technique of adjacency and a continual play on the meaning of the line in order to set in motion a questioning of British assumptions about trade hegemony and the colonial imaginary that many of the poems invoke. I suggest that this is a genuinely new and original poetics.

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle: 5G Network Design and Simulation Based on Mimetic Technique Control System

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) exhibits promising advancement with underwater acoustic wireless network communication (UWSN). Conventionally, IoUT has been utilized for the offshore monitoring and exploration of the environment within the underwater region. The data exchange between the IoUT has been performed with the 5G enabled-communication to establish the connection with the futuristic underwater monitoring. However, the acoustic waves in underwater communication are subjected to longer propagation delay and higher transmission energy. To overcome those issues autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is implemented for the data collection and routing based on cluster formation. This paper developed a memetic algorithm-based AUV monitoring system for the underwater environment. The proposed Autonomous 5G Memetic (A5GMEMETIC) model performs the data collection and transmission to increase the USAN performance. The A5GMEMETIC model data collection through the dynamic unaware clustering model minimizes energy consumption. The A5GMemetic optimizes the location of the nodes in the underwater environment for the optimal data path estimation for the data transmission in the network. Simulation analysis is performed comparatively with the proposed A5Gmemetic with the conventional AEDG, DGS, and HAMA models. The comparative analysis expressed that the proposed A5GMeMEMETIC model exhibits the ~12% increased packet delivery ratio (PDR), ~9% reduced delay and ~8% improved network lifetime.

Focus dissipation as a narrative and mimetic technique: A case study of Virginia Woolf’s “Blue & Green”

This paper addresses the issue of focus dissipation as a narrative and mimetic technique based on ludic transformations of Figure/Ground correlation in literary text. Such transformations are triggered by text-driven attentional shifts that violate, shatter, or split the integrity of focal elements in literary texture, thus generating a range of verbal and/or multimodal stylistic effects. Woolf’s “Blue & Green” (1921) suggests a sample of condensed mimetic and diegetic manifestations of focusing/refocusing/defocusing, which heightens textual ambiguity caused by temporal, spatial, epistemic, colour, and substance oscillations. The split of initially focal elements into a set of microfoci, accompanied by the interaction of sensory (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and kinesthetic) modes, gives rise to what is known as verbal holography in literary mimesis. The motion of foci, highlighted by the wave-like chains of short nominative sentences and excessive syntactic parallelism, creates a narrative construal of dynamism vs. stability as an iconic trigger of the readers’ emotional response.

Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France by Christy Wampole

Reviewed by: Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France by Christy Wampole Gerald Prince Wampole, Christy. Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France. Columbia UP, 2020. ISBN 978-0-231-18517-2. Pp. xiii + 278. In this insightful and engaging book, Christy Wampole explores what she calls degenerative realism, a kind of literary realism that emphasizes deterioration and decay in its representation of contemporary life. Produced by white (but not necessarily old) men, degenerative realism is not a literary movement. It is a manner characterizing novelists like Frédéric Beigbeder, Michel Houellebecq, or Yann Moix. Using mimetic techniques, though not exclusively, these writers evoke a present-day (French or Western) world unable to overcome such perceived dangers as demographic decline, radical Islam, feminism, and a reality infected by spurious information. In notably lucid and penetrating pages, Wampole details how the anxieties induced by demography and its presumed links with sexuality, immigration, and the changing social place of women constitute a useful frame for the depiction of an "Occident émasculé" (28). Moreover, she considers the ways in which the internet has altered the literary condition. She underlines how, in their attempt to figure the contemporary world, to generate an "effet d'immédiat" (2), and to address the quandaries born of a post-truth media environment, the practitioners of degenerative realism follow many of the precepts and adopt many of the methods of journalism in general and of New Journalism in particular. She also underlines how, although degenerative realist novels use features associated with the roman à thèse (including polemical treatises, for example, and explicitly ideological discourses), they ultimately differ from it because they are too disenchanted and apathetic to promote any thesis forcefully. Wampole does much more. For instance, she ponders the demise of the Minitel, specifies the characteristics of littérature pamphlétaire, and examines some of the possible implications for fiction of an era where truthiness, alternative facts, fake news, or, to rely on an old-fashioned term, lies, become the norm. Furthermore, she provides interesting discussions of such novels as: Michel Houellebecq's Soumission (2015), which depicts the transformation of France into an Islamic state; Aurélien Bellanger's La théorie de l'information (2012), which presents various aspects of technological developments and describes the Minitel's fortunes and misfortunes; Jean Raspail's Le camp des saints (1972), an exemplary thesis novel that is very popular among white nationalists and that foregrounds many of the concerns, apprehensions, and fears prominent in degenerative realism. Above all, perhaps, Wampole's thoughtful study succeeds in getting the reader (this reader!) to reflect upon many questions, general and particular. What is one to make of Myriam in Soumission and how much attention should one pay to the Camusian resonances of Bellanger's protagonist, Pascal Ertanger? What is the difference between a roman à thèse and a roman engagé? What role, if any, does degenerative realism play in contemporary American or European literature and what role will it possibly play? Degenerative Realism is a thought-provoking and valuable piece of work. [End Page 245] Gerald Prince University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Virginia Woolf’s “Blue & Green” revisited: Dimensions of the research space

This paper gives a survey of approaches to the analysis of Virginia Woolf’s “Blue & Green” (1921), a meditative sketch, a prose poem that belongs to experimental modernist prose, integrating various mimetic and diegetic techniques highlighting the issue of colour perception from its symbolic, eidetic, and intermedial perspectives tightly linked to the specificity of human imagination. The paper brings these research perspectives together, elaborating them to further introduce, in the forthcoming paper, a new vista of Woolf’s “Blue & Green” interpretation via the phenomenon of focus dissipation as a ludic narra­tive and/or mimetic technique based on text-driven attentional shifts.

Mimesis, Murakami and Multimedia Art: Parallel Worlds in Performance

The artistic techniques of mimesis—the representation of reality in art—make it possible to “render the unreal familiar or the real strangely unfamiliar.” The author, a composer and intermedia artist, uses mimetic techniques in acoustic composition, video art and field recording to reimagine everyday experience, as in his multimedia piece Landscape: Home. The author analyzes passages from the novel Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami to understand Murakami’s use of “parallel worlds” and the “reality effect.” This literary analysis aims to highlight the potential of mimetic techniques for artistic practice in sound and image, particularly in the author’s Landscape series.

Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol by Priya Wadhera

Reviewed by: Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol by Priya Wadhera Warren Motte Priya Wadhera. Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017. Pp. 204. $100.00. Recognizing that it may strike some people as a bit inconsonant to compare Georges Perec and Andy Warhol, Priya Wadhera argues a brief for that comparison early on in her book. Both of them are playful, she suggests; both challenged prevailing conventions; both worked within constraints while they pushed the limits of the possible; both overcame early critical indifference and established themselves as widely influential figures in late twentieth-century culture. Their respective practices converge upon the notion of the copy, she contends, and on the strategic manipulation of that notion in order to ask fundamental questions about the nature of art in our time. She proposes to parse their work in an attempt to put into evidence what is "original" in the copies that they put on display. "My focus lies primarily with Perec," Wadhera warns her reader in the introduction (3), and what follows bears that out, for she does not turn to Warhol with any sustained attention until the final pages of her book. Yet what she has to say about Perec and his mimetic techniques is compelling enough to compensate for that imbalance. Her discussion is devoted mainly to Un cabinet d'amateur (1979), a brief novel that entertains very strong inter-textual relations with what is often considered Perec's masterpiece, La vie mode d'emploi (1978). In the former text, Perec plays with the idea of the copy from first page to last, on a variety of levels: through ekphrasis on a first and most obvious level, but also, more subtly, through pastiche, mise en abyme, autoallusion, and other strategies still. Four principal questions interest Wadhera: "what is a copy, what is copied, how is it copied, and why is it copied?" (9). Addressing those questions, she postulates a useful typology of the copy in Un cabinet d'amateur, limning three broad categories: pastiches of art history and criticism; evocations of paintings; and intertextual allusions. Devoting several chapters to each of those categories, Wadhera examines them in pleasing, rigorous detail. Along the way, she visits certain other, related concerns. She thinks about forgery, for instance, and about the sometimes uncertain relations between the copy and the "fake." Calling upon the way that Gérard Genette understands intertextuality, she reflects on quotation, on plagiarism, and on allusion. Each of those gestures involves copying, of course, though in rather different modes. In her final chapter, entitled "Copy Play in Perec and Warhol," Wadhera underscores the ludic, articulative impulse that animates the best work of those artists, and she examines how they encourage us to reconsider the principle of authenticity and the value that we invest in it, a reconsideration that may have serious implications for the way we imagine the aesthetic artifact and its uses. [End Page 155] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2019 L'Esprit Créateur

Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis

Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis

Alternative history and christian themes in modern ukrainian literature

Alternative history and christian themes in modern ukrainian literature

‘Is she alive? Is she dead?’ Representations of chronic disorders of consciousness in Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma

Depictions of coma have come to dominate literary and filmic texts over the last half century, a phenomenon coinciding with advancements in medical technology that have led to remarkable increases...

Texosome-based drug delivery system for cancer therapy: from past to present.

Rising worldwide cancer incidence and resistance to current anti-cancer drugs necessitate the need for new pharmaceutical compounds and drug delivery system. Malfunction of the immune system, particularly in the tumor microenvironment, causes tumor growth and enhances tumor progression. Thus, cancer immunotherapy can be an appropriate approach to provoke the systemic immune system to combat tumor expansion. Texosomes, which are endogenous nanovesicles released by all tumor cells, contribute to cell-cell communication and modify the phenotypic features of recipient cells due to the texosomes’ ability to transport biological components. For this reason, texosome-based delivery system can be a valuable strategy for therapeutic purposes. To improve the pharmaceutical behavior of this system and to facilitate its use in medical applications, biotechnology approaches and mimetic techniques have been utilized. In this review, we present the development history of texosome-based delivery systems and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each system.

Dramatic and Narrative Techniques in the Novellas of Aphra Behn

The various ways in which Aphra Behn's prose works can be connected to her dramatic output have interested scholars of both Behn and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose fiction more generally in recent decades, in light of similarities in the staging of settings, thematic and characterization connections, and Behn's adaptation of dramatic scenes for her prose fiction. This article looks at three of her early novellas—“The Fair Jilt” (1688), “The History of the Nun” (1689) and “The Lucky Mistake” (1689)—and adds to existing scholarship by examining how Behn uses frame-breaking techniques and metalepses in a similar way to metatheatrical methods, blurring the lines between the world of the text and the world of the audience. The features that are examined include the prologue-like expositions (or pre-expositions) to her stories, described as such because of their philosophical preoccupations and lack of emphasis on traditional topics such as setting and character, as well as her employment of narrator comments, which, in Behn's hands, can act like asides in a play, focusing on character consciousness or providing narratorial commentary. This article also shows how mimetic techniques such as these are mixed with diegetic techniques such as focalization (narrative perspective) in order to demonstrate how Behn's novellas, like her plays, present plots driven by verbal artistry.

Semi-discrete numeric solution for the non-stationary heat equation using mimetic techniques

It is proposed that the diffusion equation can be solved using second-order mimetic operators for the spatial partial derivatives, in order to obtain a semi-discrete time scheme that is easy to solve with exponential integrators. The scheme is more stable than the traditional method of finite differences (centered on space and forward on time) and easier to implement than implicit methods. Some numerical examples are shown to illustrate the advantages of the proposed method. In addition, routines written in MATLAB were developed for its implementation.

A mimetic iterative scheme for solving biharmonic equations

A new mimetic iterative scheme for solving general biharmonic equations under Robin’s conditions is presented. This approach combines recently developed mimetic techniques for partial differential equations (PDEs) with an efficient iterative scheme based on a global conjugate gradient and a local preconditioned biconjugate gradient methods. The elegant matrix formulation of mimetic methods allows us to present an original convergence analysis of the proposed scheme. Numerical experiments provide strong evidences of the advantages of the novel approach.

Ideological Restraint in Gary Snyder's Nature Poetry Elucidated by a Few Prosaic Excesses

In its discussion of Gary Snyder's nature poetry, this article focuses on what it defines as its deliberate strategy of ideological restraint, the way in which its direct and precise imagery studiously avoids projecting cultural ideas onto the natural environment. For purposes of elucidation, this poetic strategy is contrasted with some striking prosaic excesses — examples of anthropocentric projection — in the opening essay of Snyder's The Practice of the Wild, 'The Etiquette of Freedom', in which Snyder equates the meaning of 'wildness' with 'freedom', an equation heavily fraught with ideological connotations. Snyder's nature poetry, however, is seen to eschew ideological discourse by way of its mimetic techniques and its language of concrete perception that is physically and materially grounded in a particular locality. This argument is rounded off by an analytical illustration in the form of a close reading of an exemplary poem from Axe Handles.

Astringency of tea catechins: More than an oral lubrication tactile percept

Oral astringency is the dry sensation experienced in the mouth on consumption of plant-based polyphenols (catechins) found in wine and tea as well as certain fruits and vegetables. It is commonly explained as arising from the loss of lubricity owing to the precipitation of proteins from the salivary film that coats and lubricates the oral cavity. Here, we investigate this hypothesis directly by probing the impact of astringent compounds on the lubricating properties of saliva. By preadsorbing saliva onto an elastic hydrophobic substrate to form a highly lubricating and robust film under conditions designed to mimic the low pressure rubbing contacts experienced in the oral cavity (Bongaerts, Rossetti, & Stokes, 2007), we probe the interaction of this film on exposure to solutions containing tea catechins. We examine the response of the adsorbed salivary film to polyphenol structure, concentration and temperature, as well as the influence of astringency modulating solutions consisting of a thickener (maltodextrin) and milk. We find that a significant increase in friction coefficient occurs upon exposure with epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) solutions due to a depletion of the lubricating proteins from the elastic substrates. The friction coefficient increases more rapidly with increasing EGCG concentration, this is in line with a corresponding increase in astringency perception. In addition, the inclusion of a hydrocolloid thickener in EGCG solutions caused a decrease in astringency perception probably due to specific EGCG–maltodextrin interaction and to an increase in viscosity, which lowers the friction coefficient between the elastic substrates. These findings show that the physical interaction of saliva proteins with EGCG molecules, which we probe through the loss of saliva lubricity, can be advantageously used to predict the astringent acuity of EGCG using our simple oral mimetic technique, supporting the hypothesis that astringency is related to a loss of lubrication. However, epicatechin (EC) did not alter the lubricating properties of the salivary film, although the EC solutions were perceived to be astringent, an observation which seems to question a simple causal dependence on oral lubrication. In addition to that, milk mitigated the astringency perception of EGCG solutions although considerably reducing saliva lubricity. We conclude that the depletion of saliva lubricating proteins is not necessary to obtain an astringent perception, and that astringency is unlikely to be a purely tactile percept.

The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words by John Henderson

BOOKREVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 423 future. Van Dam succeeds in providing Constantinian scholarship with an escape from the defile between Constantine the sincere zealot and Constantine the cynical convert, and his book shouldprovea fruitful originforfuturestudiesof thisturning point inthehistory of the Roman empire. University of Georgia Craig H. Caldwell, hi The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words. By John Henderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Pp. ix, 232. Professor Henderson's book offers the first full-length treatment in English of Isidore of Seville'sEtymologiae. This work, completed shortly beforeIdisore'sdeath in636 a.d., consistsof a systematic survey of the world ofhistime intheformof a thesaurus ofLatin words, most of which are provided with an etymological explanation. The main aim of Henderson's book is toprovide thereader with a guide throughthe twenty books of this work showing how the material was organized in a way that would have been meaningful for Isidore's seventh-century audience. In PartOne, Preliminaries, Henderson discusses the short dedication toKing Sisebut and the prefatory correspondence between Isidore and Braulio of Zaragoza. Itwas Braulio who was responsibleforthefinaleditingof the work and foritsdivision intotwenty books. In a detailedanalysisof thecontentsofBook 20,Henderson illustrates inhis introduction how eachbookwas further subdividedintosubject headings,displayinga three-tier nested system for ease of reference. With thesepreliminaries out of the way,Henderson launches inPartTwo, Reading the Etymologiae,intoa detailedbook-by-book analysisshowinghow a sequentialreading provided a thorough-going education attuned to the Graeco-Roman/fudaeo-Christian outlook of Isidore's time. Books 1 to 3 are shown to run through the primary and secondary syllabuses of early medieval education: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The analysis of each book aims to underline its structure and to explain a selection of etymologies through a mimetic translation technique. The way this works may best be illustrated by a detailed look at Henderson's discussion of Book 4 on medicine. First comes a translation of the etymology: nomen utemMedicinae, a modoy id est temperamento, impositum aestimatur, "Medicine is reckoned to have been saddled with its name from the modicum of moderation." Here perhaps "saddled with" does not quite give the tone of impositum, which is used as a technical term from Varro on for the "imposition" of a name upon a thing by its original name-giver. Next the tripartite structure of the book is underlined: a trio of inventors founded a trio of heresies and all cures come in three genera, each of which includes three species. On 4.12 he notes "No space for etymology, no translating, defining, describing, grouping.Just blanknomination." Here we need some explanation. Are thesesingle word listingsintentional or are theysimplysymptomatic of an incomplete state of composition? Henderson's steady hand guides us through the books that follow. Book 5 moves on to law, which isboth human and divine, so that law-as-scripture leads us into the ecclesiastical topicsofBooks 6 to 8,where etymologizing onHebrew names is imported fromJerome. This topicof linguistic diversity, centraltoJerome'sinterpretation of thebible, iscontinued inBook 9with itsdiscussionof languages,populations,and societies. Book 10 is inserted at thiscentralpoint to illustrate a completelydifferent organizingprinciple, thatof an 424 PHOENIX alphabetical dictionary of common nouns. Here Henderson's translation technique is at its weakest. Why is the title of Book 10, de vocabulis, rendered as "on epithets" (rather than simply "on words")? Does the mimetic technique in rendering homo ab humo as "man from manure" (for, e.g., "human from humus") serve to enlighten or mislead? After thisalphabetic interludethegrand scheme is shown to be resumed inBooks 11 to 17 with the discussion of themes arranged under the over-arching topic of nature, taking us from man and monsters, through the world and the earth, via the trappings of civilization, to rocks, metals, agriculture, and botany. In Book 18 the rural peace is shaken by theintroduction of war,which leads inthefinaltwobooks to whatHenderson identifies as themain "lifeways"(199) that make urban civilizationpossible: ships,clothing,food, dining, transport, tools, and harnesses. The book endswith a conclusion (210) showinghow thecurriculum mapped out inthe Etymologiae was to form the basis of the early medieval educational focus on the creation of truthfrom words. A finalappendix (212) containsa useful account of the careerof the firstmodern...

The Notebook and the Gun: Performative Witnessing in Goodness

The Notebook and the Gun: Performative Witnessing in Goodness Jenn Stephenson (bio) “How does it feel?” “how does it feel?” (11). In an early scene of the play Goodness by Canadian playwright Michael Redhill,1 one character asks, “How does it feel?,” to which another replies with the same question with a different intonation, “How does it feel?” In repetition, the question turns the object of interrogation from a direct experience “How does it feel?” to a metaexperience of the experience: “What does feeling feel like?” and “What does it feel like to be asked the question how does it feel?” The main action of the play revolves around an encounter between a genocide survivor who tells her story and the initially reluctant listener who becomes a witness to that story. In that light, this question “How does it feel?” characterizes the play’s central attitude toward storytelling and listening, an attitude which privileges affect over knowledge and which employs a marked theatricality to translate that affective power of response-ability generated by a survivor-storyteller into an engaged [End Page 97] moral responsibility for that story taken up by a listening witness. As Kelly Oliver writes, “Just as the various parts of the body cannot function without the circulation of blood and oxygen, the psyche cannot function without the circulation of affective energy ... We have an ethical and social responsibility to be vigilant in our attempts to open up the circulation and flow of affective energy in all of our relationships” (20). In this paper, I will demonstrate the way in which Goodness models the circulation of affect through dramatic creation. The play advocates for an active and ethically responsible audience witness—what I am calling a performative witness—generating a hopeful witnessing strategy arising directly out of the play’s looped metatheatrical structure of stories within stories. When dealing with retelling significant traumatic events through drama, one approach is to adopt a style of documentary realism in the conviction that a strongly mimetic technique has the strongest claim to communicating truth. The more the presentation can deliver details, both factual and emotional, pertaining to the original event, the more convincing and moving it will be. Communicating the truth of an experience through an imitative imaginative re-enactment, however, can have a peculiar disconcerting effect. Julie Salverson, who writes extensively on the witnessing of trauma through drama and storytelling, recounts her audiencing experience to one such retelling of a traumatic past: “What disturbed me was a sense that [the performers] were not present in the performance, were not noticing themselves in the picture, and consequently, that we as audience members were neither asked nor able to implicate ourselves. Audience and actors together were looking out at some exoticized and deliberately tragic other” (“Change” 122). Salverson argues that this emotionally submerged attitude and passive or effaced sense of self, which she names an “erotics of injury” (“Change” 119), comes out of a naturalistic performance style and circumvents real engagement with the story at hand. Placing an emphasis on the obligation of the audience to become responsible witnesses to trauma, Salverson challenges us to find [End Page 98] alternative performance modes and alternative dramatic styles and forms which promote active engagement for both performers and audience. Considering the aesthetic component of art in relation to its content, Theodor Adorno famously condemned the writing of poetry in the aftermath of the Holocaust as “barbaric” insofar as works of art generate aesthetic pleasure, and in this way such works antithetically offer pain and horror clothed in beauty (Adorno 125–27). To see healing rather than horror in such art works, we might reread that word “barbaric.” When we say something is barbaric, it is savage, cruel, or inhuman. However, this denotation of savagery comes out of a prior meaning: from the Greek word βάρβαρος, (bárbaros) probably a reference to the stammering “barbar” speech of foreigners, thus Barbarians (oed). So, likewise, something barbaric is foreign or alien to civilization. In this second mode, poetry of the Holocaust is barbaric in the sense that it is unfamiliar or strange. Such an approach may remake an unspeakable history, rendering trauma again speakable through an aesthetic of...