Stylistic Control Research Articles

Artistic style decomposition for texture and shape editing

AbstractWhile methods for generative image synthesis and example-based stylization produce impressive results, their black-box style representation intertwines shape, texture, and color aspects, limiting precise stylistic control and editing of artistic images. We introduce a novel method for decomposing the style of an artistic image that enables interactive geometric shape abstraction and texture control. We spatially decompose the input image into geometric shapes and an overlaying parametric texture representation, facilitating independent manipulation of color and texture. The parameters in this texture representation, comprising the image’s high-frequency details, control painterly attributes in a series of differentiable stylization filters. Shape decomposition is achieved using either segmentation or stroke-based neural rendering techniques. We demonstrate that our shape and texture decoupling enables diverse stylistic edits, including adjustments in shape, stroke, and painterly attributes such as contours and surface relief. Moreover, we demonstrate shape and texture style transfer in the parametric space using both reference images and text prompts and accelerate these by training networks for single- and arbitrary-style parameter prediction.

Multi-condition controlled sedimentary facies modeling based on generative adversarial network

Multi-condition controlled sedimentary facies modeling based on generative adversarial network

Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness by Patricia Moran

Reviewed by: Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness by Patricia Moran Lizzie Hutton (bio) Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness Patricia Moran Edinburgh UP, 2018, 289 pp. ISBN 9781474418218, $105.00 hardcover. The undeniably autobiographical fiction of British author Antonia White—a quartet of novels and a slender, fiery short story collection—makes a linked set of female Künstlerromans that are grievously underappreciated. Singular for their stylistic control and psychological incision, they delineate a young woman's faltering search for grace in a rigidly conventional middle-class world—or should I say, a devastatingly conventional middle-class world. White's work takes place in London and its outskirts in the 1910s and 20s, in which its heroine's labor of forging a genuine sense of self is continuously confounded by forces beyond her control. Yet this is not art of explicit protest or critique. Like the work of her contemporary Elizabeth Bowen, who was an admirer, White's novels are political without naming their politics as such, so thoroughly does their heroine seem to have internalized the power structures and social expectations against which she struggles. White's is literature tense with the exertions of working to articulate one's own truth in a world that cannot quite accommodate or recognize that truth as such. In contrast to her carefully crafted works of fiction, White left behind rafts of often fervid correspondences and journals, which were posthumously published in 1992, as edited by White's daughter Susan Chitty. It should be noted that in 1985 Chitty also published a memoir of life with her mother, a book whose tell-all glee—for this reader at least—casts some doubt on its usefulness as a reliable guide to White's life and work. Many critics have found the temptations of this biographical material too great to resist. Faced with this archive's abundance of suggestive detail—intimations of incest and rape, accounts of mental breakdowns and forced institutionalizations, records of her many failed marriages, incessant writer's block, and years of psychoanalytic treatment—scholars have come to focus much of their [End Page 504] analytical energies on the intricacies of White's messy life, instead of on the fictionalized life story White still managed to wrest from the apparent turmoil of her day-to-day. In many ways, this has done more to cement White's reputation as a train wreck of a struggling female writer than it has to illuminate her specific contributions as an author. From the title alone, Patricia Moran's new study of Antonia White appears to follow this critical pattern exactly. Moran persuasively takes issue with White's real-life diagnosis as a schizophrenic, only to retrospectively replace it with another diagnosis—bipolar disorder—a disease through which, Moran argues, White's life and thus her work might more accurately and fruitfully be read. In this, Moran hews to the well-established habits of biographical-psychoanalytic criticism, for which White's life, to be sure, offers an especially graphic case study. Moran uses both White's earlier misdiagnosis and this new diagnosis as a crib sheet for explaining the author's personal struggles, especially her difficulties coming into her own as an author. She compares White's disordered life to the (purportedly) more stable careers of Virginia Woolf and H. D., those fellow female modernists who suffered too from severe psychiatric disorders—but who, by Moran's telling at least, were fortunate to have a better understanding of and relative control over their own diseases. Through this lens of pathology, Moran also explicates some of the knottier nuances of White's fiction—reading, for example, White's religiosity (she was a Catholic convert twice over), as well as her emotional entanglements with her domineering father, as symptoms of her struggles with mental illness. From her diaries and letters, White appears to have been debilitatingly insecure, paralyzed in her artistic ambitions by near-constant waves of guilt and shame. She burned through affairs and marriages and bungled her maternal duties, and she chastised herself endlessly for these perceived failures. For Moran, manic depression offers an explanation for these erratic emotions and behaviors also described in her...

TRANSLATION STYLE, LEXICAL SYSTEMS, DIALECT VOCABULARY, AND THE MANUSCRIPT TRANSMISSION OF THE OLD ENGLISH BEDE

IntroductionAs it survives in the extant manuscripts, the Old English translation of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica (OEB) displays a mixture of Anglian and West Saxon spellings and morphological forms. Furthermore, Anglian dialect words appear, and are admixed with corresponding common Old English (cOE) or West Saxon synonyms.1 Two kinds of explanation for this dialect heterogeneity have been proposed. One is that the work was composed in Anglian or, more specifically, Mercian dialect (probably in the late ninth century), and that subsequendy it was West-Saxonized progressively by copyists who were themselves West Saxon, or trained in the West Saxon writing systems dominant in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries.2 The second is that the work involved dialect admixture from the outset, because (so it was thought) it was the product of collaboration between Mercian and West Saxon scholars at King Alfred's court.3 Although the former explanation has been generally preferred, some recent studies of dialect admixture and 'dialect accommodation'4 in texts emanating from Alfred's programme of scholarly activity, or transmitted as a result of it, invite reconsideration of the problem, and the question of whether the work began its life as a purely Mercian text or as a mixed one deserves to be revisited.5One aspect of dialect in the OEB that has not been explored is the way that some Anglian dialect words appear in systematic distribution with cOE synonyms within particular semantic fields. This phenomenon arises out of the writer's distinctive method of close translation, and the deliberate strategies of lexical and stylistic control that he exercised. In this article I focus upon selected examples, including the vocabulary of death and dying, as a case study of how understanding of the dialect vocabulary of the OEB and its putative Mercian archetype can be extended. By comparing sets of synonyms - including dialectwords like leoran 'to go, depart, die' - with the Latin terms that they translate, I seek to demonstrate that the lexical systems identifiable within the text have important implications for reconstructing the hypothetical archetype, and also for understanding the varied ways in which West Saxon scribes undertook modifications of the text. I believe that the evidence reinforces the probability that the archetype was originally written in Mercian dialect. Furthermore, my analysis indicates how and why the oldest manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner io) can be confirmed as the 'best' upon which to base a critical edition because of its more faithful conservation of Mercian dialect vocabulary, even though it was probably copied within the sphere of West Saxon influence.Date and origin of the translationThere has been general if cautious agreement that King Alfred probably commissioned the OEB as part of his programme of educational reform involving the translation of those books which were 'niedbeoearfosta ... eallum monnum to wiotonne' ('most necessary for all people to know'), as he put it in his prefatory letter attached to the Pastoral Care (CP).6 A single leaf (London, BL, Cotton MS Domitian ix, fol. 11) containing three brief extracts from the text, and datable to the beginning of the tenth century, provides the earliest physical evidence for the existence of the text, and limited internal evidence only points to the same date.7 Firm evidence for the production of the OEB a decade or two earlier as a part of Alfred's programme is lacking. At the end of the tenth century AElfric claimed that Alfred himself translated Bede, and William of Malmesbury assumed the same in the twelfth century.8 Nevertheless, modern scholarship established early that Alfred's personal authorship was improbable on stylistic and linguistic grounds.9 The text differs markedly from his acknowledged works, CP, Boethius, Soliloquies, and Prose Psalms of the Paris Psalter}0 This does not rule out some kind of Alfredian connection, and indeed, both in translation style and in its Mercian dialect features the OEB resembles the translation of Gregory's Dialogues (GD), which Alfred commissioned Bishop Waerferth of Worcester to undertake. …

Controlling User Perceptions of Linguistic Style: Trainable Generation of Personality Traits

Recent work in natural language generation has begun to take linguistic variation into account, developing algorithms that are capable of modifying the system's linguistic style based either on the user's linguistic style or other factors, such as personality or politeness. While stylistic control has traditionally relied on handcrafted rules, statistical methods are likely to be needed for generation systems to scale to the production of the large range of variation observed in human dialogues. Previous work on statistical natural language generation (SNLG) has shown that the grammaticality and naturalness of generated utterances can be optimized from data; however these data-driven methods have not been shown to produce stylistic variation that is perceived by humans in the way that the system intended. This paper describes Personage, a highly parameterizable language generator whose parameters are based on psychological findings about the linguistic reflexes of personality. We present a novel SNLG method which uses parameter estimation models trained on personality-annotated data to predict the generation decisions required to convey any combination of scalar values along the five main dimensions of personality. A human evaluation shows that parameter estimation models produce recognizable stylistic variation along multiple dimensions, on a continuous scale, and without the computational cost incurred by overgeneration techniques.

The growth of artistic nationalism in Senegal

ABSTRACT. In the 1960s, Senegal's first national leaders narrowly defined how artists should practise nationalism through their work, particularly in the weaving craft, and enforced this definition through selective state patronage. This ideological and stylistic control echoed state control over economic markets. As subsequent administrations have restructured the economy, leading to a powerful informal business sector, so have independent contemporary weavers redefined artistic nationalism. Using ethnographic and archival interviews, this article examines nationalism in Senegalese weaving, placing the perspectives of contemporary weavers alongside those of two arts administrators who helped to develop state‐sponsored programmes in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that contemporary weavers find inspiration from Senegalese nationalism of the mid‐twentieth century, yet have modified it to encompass individual expression. Because definitions of artistic nationalism in Senegal have shifted, it remains a significant ideology within the national arts scene.

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California (review)

Reviewed by: A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California Joshua S. Walden Dorothy Lamb Crawford . A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 318. Cloth $35.00. ISBN: 9780300127348. At the start of the twentieth century, Berlin, Vienna, and other European centers were homes to robust musical cultures in which many composers and performers of Jewish origin developed successful careers. With Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Nazi discrimination against Jews, and official condemnation of musical works in the modernist mode as "degenerate," a good number of these musicians were forced to emigrate. Fortuitously, the film industry in Hollywood was growing rapidly after the success in 1927 of the early talkie, The Jazz Singer, and the promise of potential employment led many to settle in Southern California. Dorothy Lamb Crawford's A Windfall of Musicians considers how this influx of European musicians impacted the development of Southern California's musical life, from the arrival of the first émigrés through the death of the last of their generation. The book, based on extensive archival research and interviews, explores how these musicians made it to Southern California, the paths their lives took once they arrived, and their lasting impacts on cinema and Los Angeles's rise as a center for art music and musical education. Crawford intersperses chapters about institutional affiliations - the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the film industry, and academic programs - with others that address individual émigrés - in particular Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Toch, and Igor Stravinsky. Along the way she discusses the experiences of numerous others, including conductor Otto Klemperer, and composers Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Ingolf Dahl, and Hanns Eisler. Details of émigré artists' encounters lend particular vividness to the author's account. For example, Crawford describes a Sunday dinner Eisler organized with Charlie Chaplin and Thomas Mann in his Malibu home, and regular gatherings of Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, and others at the West Los Angeles farmer's market. The early reactions of the European musicians to Southern California's dramatically different landscape and culture varied widely. Some felt they had arrived in paradise; others missed their native weather patterns and found it difficult to adjust to the sprawling layout of Los Angeles. Most were surprised at the conservative, unsophisticated tastes of Southern California listeners, many of whom had limited experience with art music, let alone the modern sounds of the European avant-garde. After his arrival in 1933, Klemperer remarked, "My God, my God, I didn't know that such a lack of intellectuality existed" (25). In many cases these musicians rallied together for support, presenting each other's work in settings such as Franz Waxman's Los Angeles Music Festival and Peter Yates's influential series "Evenings on the Roof" (later "Monday Evening Concerts"). They also promoted one another for jobs in cinema and academic music departments. Klemperer built up the Los Angeles Philharmonic. [End Page 98] He brought cutting-edge repertoire and prominent soloists, and attracted devoted audiences and enthusiastic reviews. Although Klemperer suffered for years from depression and poor health, "orchestral music in Los Angeles was brought to maturity" during his tenure (78). Many émigré composers arrived with the hope of working with the movie industry to develop innovative artistic forms. Toch, for example, dreamt of developing a genre of film-opera. Eisler wrote of his intentions to bring modernist music to film scoring. They were mostly disappointed, however, when confronted with studio heads who favored music that emphasized sentimentality and, happy to reuse excerpts from previous film scores, showed little toleration of experimentation. Toch lamented, "Music in Hollywood is a closed shop" (137). Working in film proved trying for many composers, as they were offered low pay and given rapid deadlines and little aesthetic freedom. Waxman and Erich Korngold were among the most successful. They were able to adapt to the industry's demands while developing innovative, personal compositional styles that made a lasting imprint on the future of movie scoring. Others had greater difficulty. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who demanded high wages and stylistic control, ultimately failed in their attempts to break into cinema. Castelnuovo...

"An Eloquent and Impassioned Plea": The Rhetoric of Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don

"An Eloquent and Impassioned Plea":The Rhetoric of Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don Elisa Warford (bio) Since Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita's publication of a new edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don in 1992, a steadily growing body of work on Ruiz de Burton and her novels has emerged. The critical corpus on her is still not large enough, though, to match her significance in California history and in the literary tradition of Latina writers in California. As the first narrative about the state's Mexican landowners published in English by a Mexican American woman and from the perspective of the conquered Mexican culture, The Squatter and the Don (1885) is remarkable for the ways it complicates nineteenth-century stereotypes of Latin Americans, particularly Latin American women, as several critics have successfully argued. But what is often overlooked is the novel's pervasive rhetorical appeal. The narrator of this "novel with a purpose," as more than one reviewer called it, is constantly aware of her readers and seeks to educate them about the plight of the Californios and to persuade them to take action against the injustices the Californios suffered at the hands of the US government, which promised them the full protection of the law due any citizen of the United States (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 568). While the novel did not attract the national audience Ruiz de Burton might have hoped for, contemporaneous reviews uniformly praise it for its stylistic control, "well drawn" characters, "sprightly, natural" dialogue, "entertaining style," and "dramatic power" (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 566, 566, 566, 569). The review from the Daily Examiner notes, "people with grievances are not usually popular, as frequently they are wearisome. But this failing cannot be laid to the charge of the author of 'Squatter and the Don.' … The author has managed to combine instances of all these sins of omission and commission in a very pleasant and readable tale" (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 565). A large part of Ruiz de Burton's success in creating a "pleasant" tale that also manages to persuade is due in large part to her skillful adaptations of literary forms her audience would have been familiar with. Like The Grapes of Wrath (1939), perhaps the best-known California social protest novel, The Squatter and the Don borrows from [End Page 5] several different genres that are well suited to social protest, including verbatim legislation, the jeremiad, sentimental romance, and naturalism. Such combinations illustrate perfectly Mikhail Bahktin's theory of heteroglossia, which allows for a dialogic interplay of different voices that have not previously been heard. The novel is not merely a lament for a past way of life; as most reviews emphasize, it succeeded in showing that the problems faced by the Californios affected all Californians. In presenting her case, Ruiz de Burton works against popular portrayals of Californios, and she does so brilliantly, dismantling stereotypes and prejudice. The title page of Squatter describes it as "a novel descriptive of contemporary occurrences in California." The book depicts the Alamar family's struggles against a group of "ruffianly" squatters who settle on their land, kill Don Mariano's cattle with impunity, and eventually force the family to retreat from its ranch to San Francisco. In the second half of the novel, the Alamars join forces with other San Diegans to advocate for a much-needed railroad terminus in their city. They find their hopes for the wealth a terminus could bring dashed by government corruption and prejudice. Ruiz de Burton's own life attests to the currency of the Alamars' struggles: while she was writing the novel, she, like the Alamars, was entangled in legal battles over the title of her Jamul, California, ranch. Mariano Vallejo and numerous old Californio families were also struggling to retain their estates and wealth, and many died considerably poorer than they once were. This issue was not a fait accompli. While critics today often classify The Squatter and the Don as historical romance, to do so tacitly acknowledges that the question was already moot at the time of the novel's publication and robs it...

Critical literacy, genre and the National Curriculum dilemma

Abstract At one time or another most of us have probably been involved in processes we dislike whose outcomes we fear simply to subvert what we assume to be someone else’s agenda. We become involved, for example, in national curriculum planning because we believe we might be able to alter outcomes for the better. We might even believe we can subvert attempts to reinforce cultural norms in the name of ‘standards’ by ensuring that ‘access’ includes access to the ‘genres of power’. If, however, there is no direct relationship between stylistic control and access for marginalised groups to real power, if current approaches to ‘genre literacy’ actually tend to reinforce traditional pedagogical practices and even, in doing so, threaten to reconstitute the cultural deficit model our participation may actually reinforce the agendas we seek to subvert. Is there a possible, positive response to this sort of dilemma? It is argued here that in seeking a healthy fusion of power, applied linguistics is in a position to discover the appropriate response.

New Interpretations for Interpretation in Measure for Measure

The problems which have made Shakespeare's Measure for Measure a play have always been clear: the action is stiff, the characters unpleasant and the ending contrived. But while earlier critics complained about Shakespeare's failures (of nerve, of stylistic control, of objectivity), recent critics have provided a series of enlightened apologies for the play. This criticism, however, presents something of a problem in itself. In their own way critics are little better off than the characters as they try to come to terms with experience that seems to defy any terms at all. In what follows I want to examine the play's problems and their implications in light of the criticism which repeats the problems, and then to explore some more recent approaches to interpretation particularly psychoanalytic approaches as a way out of the problem. These are not based on psychoanalytic theory but rather on the kind of listening and interpretation that goes on in a psychoanalytic hour, with its tactics for dealing with problematic discourse its distrust of literal reference; its lack of tact; its systematic impiety; its seemingly perverse openness to

The Theme of Alienation in Silas Marner

Research Article| June 01 1965 The Theme of Alienation in Silas Marner Fred C. Thomson Fred C. Thomson Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1965) 20 (1): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/2932493 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Fred C. Thomson; The Theme of Alienation in Silas Marner. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 June 1965; 20 (1): 69–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2932493 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1965 By The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.