Subsequent Scene Research Articles

Editors' Note: Strange Magic

Editors' Note:Strange Magic Amy Herzog, Associate Professor of Media Studies, PhD Program in Theater and Joe Rollins, Associate Professor and Executive Officer of Political Science Thrice the brinded cat hath mewedThrice and once the hedge-pig whinedHarpier cries 'Tis time, 'Tis time . . . Transformation, temporality, and power: these are our concerns here in the Enchantment issue of WSQ. But where shall we begin? With the amateurish Circe who set the bar too low? With the three weird sisters who pricked their thumbs and asked too little for themselves as a monarch fell to chaos? Or should we begin in Salem? Oz? Hogwarts? Through the looking-glass? Cocoa Beach? Perhaps we should begin in a time not so long ago, and in a place that is not so far away: 1964 in a suburb of New York City. The television show Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery and featuring Agnes Moorehead, premiered in 1964 and ran until 1972. Set in the time of its production, Bewitched seems now, in many ways, to have been ahead of its time. The show offered viewers queer glimpses into an enchanted world where entrenched economies of power and resistance were realigned in unexpected ways. The show's writers transformed 1960s tropes of inequality into narratives of anti-witch discrimination (fear of the unfamiliar; flawed and damaging stereotypes; disapproving families; worries about "mixed" progeny; an epistemology of the broom closet), and thus safely relocated politically contentious issues into the realm of comic fantasy. The show's main storyline featured a beautiful young witch named Samantha Stevens (Montgomery), who was married to a mortal advertising executive named Darren (played by two different men, Dick York [End Page 9] from 1964 until 1969 and Dick Sargent from 1969 until 1972). Their mixed marriage (witch with mortal), provided viewers with a culturally safe lens through which to view the most controversial politics of the day—communism, anti-Semitism, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and obliquely, even homosexuality. The show's gender dynamics were complex and multifaceted, and could be read alternately as both sexist and feminist, often within a single episode. The most prevalent plot tension running through the show was the question of whether or not Samantha should use the magical powers that were her birthright, or conform to the more pedestrian wishes of her boorish, mortal husband. Samantha's mother, Endora (Moorehead), was (for many young viewers) the audience's heroine and Darren's antagonist. Invincible, powerful, urbane, and peripatetic, Endora had little patience for or interest in mortals and she harbored special disdain for her son-in-law in particular. In one of the early episodes, Endora is found reclining, reading alone, on a chaise in her daughter's bedroom when three misbehaving young boys disrupt her peace. Announcing rowdily that they are a cowboy, an Indian, and a horse, Endora blithely replies, "I'm a witch." "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" inquires one of the children. With bland indifference and a teetering gesture of her hand, Endora replies, "Comme ci, comme ça." In a subsequent scene, Endora has vanished but the three children are found tied up and gagged on a bed. Such is the nature of power and its seductions. Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 10] Despite her nearly invincible power, Endora's devotion to her daughter, and later to her grandchildren, contained her and forced her to exhibit self-restraint in ways she found not only pedestrian and unfamiliar but shockingly at odds with her otherwise privileged existence. For all her apparent omnipotence, Endora found herself trapped in some of the darker spells that still hold us in their grip: the marketplace of capital, strict gender roles, colonialism, and the heteronormative family. In this issue of WSQ, guest editors Ann Burlein and Jackie Orr bring together a diverse group of thinkers who strive to unravel some of this dark magic and weave something hopeful in its place. In Trans-Forms/Bending Lines of Flight, Bayer, Keating, and Cross, each consider, in their own ways, the transformative capacities of language. Echoing throughout these articles are sounds, words, and voices that work to create new...

Looking across the Hearing Line?: Exploring Young Deaf People’s Use of Web 2.0

Looking across the Hearing Line?: Exploring Young Deaf People’s Use of Web 2.0

Hellish Love: Genre in Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae

For Gian-Biagio Conte, genre, rather than being rigidly constituted by formal features, is discursive form capable of constructing a coherent model of the world its own image. It is a language, that is, a lexicon and style, but it is also a system of the imagination and a grammar of things (1994, 132). Over the past two decades Ovidian scholarship has abandoned seeking the essential generic identity of a literary work and has shifted instead to examining the interaction of genres within a poem--in other words, functionalism, rather than ontology. (1) Innovating upon Richard Heinze's work on Ovid's poetry, Stephen Hinds his Metamorphosis of Persephone spearheads some of the most successful studies of Ovid by investigating the generic dynamics of epic and elegy, not as metrical forms, but as the discourses associated with these forms. Inspired by these scholars' works, I shall consider Claudian's reception and deployment of classical generic poetics within the changed configurations of literary genres the fourth century a few selected passages of the De raptu Proserpinae. Since much of Claudian's corpus is political poetry or propaganda, scholars have focused more on his historical significance than on his literary achievement. (2) A subject of recent scholarly interest, the unfinished epic De raptu on the abduction and marriage of Proserpina stands out from Claudian's corpus as an endeavor motivated largely by his literary ambition to treat an important myth that had never been told a separate epic. (3) As such, this poem offers a unique chance for an analysis focused on the literary complexity of a doctus poeta who interacts with the tradition of Roman epic poetry terms of topoi, narrative, and genre. (4) A self-conscious imitator of his epic predecessors, Claudian succeeds transferring, and transforming, an abundance of literary motifs through which he engages the generic dynamics historically deriving from the fruitful experimentation of the Augustan poets. (5) But certain respects, Claudian departs significantly from earlier epicists, for the fourth century which he wrote was a period of generic instability that saw the reshaping of classical genres and the emergence of new poetic forms. In this context we must remember a central idea of Hans Robert Jauss: literary genres are not normative (ante rem) or classificatory (post rem) but historical (in re), in a continuity which each earlier genre even furthers and supplements itself through the later one. (6) Functionalism must be tempered with a diachronically responsive approach that accounts for the evolving horizon of expectation. If by Claudian's time a certain amount of force still remained the classical epic despite its furcation into genres like the panegyric epic, the cento epic, and the biblical epic, the same cannot be said of elegy, the genre of servitium amoris that had not been practiced since the first century C.E. Indeed, if the erotic discourse of elegy De raptu intrudes upon the martial discourse of the epic a la Ovid to destabilize the authority built upon the latter, it is mediated at times through the hexameter epithalamium that serves as the generic counterpart to the mediating figure of Proserpina the narrative. In this paper, I first revisit the opening scene of the Underworld, a passage which Stephen Wheeler detects borrowings from the epic tradition that mark the poem as a tale about preservation of cosmic order. This scene engages with the epithalamium as well, providing the first clue about how the first two books of De raptu are framed generically. In section 2, I offer a reading of the subsequent scene, the Embassy of the Fates, which subverts Pluto's power by creating an elegiac moment, thereby dissuading Pluto from launching a Gigantomachic war. The purpose of the embassy--to bend (flectere) Pluto's will by offering a bride (Proserpina, as Zeus later decides)--leads to section 3, where I consider how Claudian constructs his poetic program from Virgil's Aeneid while imitating the erotic politics of Ovid's Metamorphoses. …

Reward-Motivated Learning: Mesolimbic Activation Precedes Memory Formation

We examined anticipatory mechanisms of reward-motivated memory formation using event-related FMRI. In a monetary incentive encoding task, cues signaled high- or low-value reward for memorizing an upcoming scene. When tested 24 hr postscan, subjects were significantly more likely to remember scenes that followed cues for high-value rather than low-value reward. A monetary incentive delay task independently localized regions responsive to reward anticipation. In the encoding task, high-reward cues preceding remembered but not forgotten scenes activated the ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, and hippocampus. Across subjects, greater activation in these regions predicted superior memory performance. Within subject, increased correlation between the hippocampus and ventral tegmental area was associated with enhanced long-term memory for the subsequent scene. These findings demonstrate that brain activation preceding stimulus encoding can predict declarative memory formation. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that reward motivation promotes memory formation via dopamine release in the hippocampus prior to learning.

Landsat-7 ETM+ radiometric normalization comparison for northern mapping applications

Relative radiometric normalization has long been performed to generate consistency among individual Landsat scenes for production of composites containing multiple scenes. Normalization methods have relied on matching identical and assumed invariant features in both images of an overlapping pair, or on invariant targets that are not necessarily the same features. Problems with overlap normalization methods include sensitivity to outliers in overlap data caused by atmospheric or land cover change between scenes, which can lead to radiometric error propagation across a mosaic caused by a normalized scene becoming a reference for the subsequent scene entered into the mosaic. Solutions to such problems include interactive outlier removal to generate a normalization function using a ‘no change’ data set and methods that are robust against outliers to automatically generate normalization functions with minimal user input. This paper compares two normalization methods that use a robust regression technique called Theil-Sen with an established overlap normalization method. The first method uses Theil-Sen regression to generate a normalization function between overlap regions, while the second uses Theil-Sen to normalize to coarse-resolution composite reflectance data from the SPOT VEGETATION (VGT) sensor. The results of the normalizations were evaluated in two ways: (1) using statistics generated between overlap regions; and (2) separately using coarse-resolution data as a reference. Both overlap normalization methods performed almost identically; however, Theil-Sen was faster and easier to implement than its traditional counterpart due to its insensitivity to outliers and capability for full automation. While overlap and coarse-resolution normalizations each outperformed the other when evaluated against its calibration set, error propagation caused by outliers in overlap samples was avoided in the normalization to coarse-resolution imagery. Advantages offered by normalization to coarse-resolution data using robust regression, including full automation, make this method particularly attractive for generation of large area mosaics containing 100 Landsat scenes or more.

Sensitivity of the normalized difference vegetation index to subpixel canopy cover, soil albedo, and pixel scale

The sensitivity of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to regional variations in the bulk subpixel properties of discontinuous plant canopies is investigated within the framework of a linear stochastic-geometric landsurface reflectance model. Analytical formulas are developed for i) the rate of change of the NDVI with respect to subpixel components and ii) the variance of the NDVI for an ensemble of pixels. Atmospheric effects are not considered. The formulas are first applied to the analysis of the NDVIs of a series of five simulated scenes of Poisson distributed plants, aggregated to three different pixel sizes. Varying only a single parameter in each subsequent scene provides an understanding of the influence of that variable on the behavior of the NDVI. Next, a comparison is made between the actual NDVI of a pecan orchard calculated from aerial radiometric data obtained during the June 1988 Maricopa Agricultural Center Experiment, and the predicted NDVI using the geometric reflectance model and ground truth. Finally, the NDVI of a natural landscape that possesses randomly distributed juniper trees and random soil background reflectance is investigated. Investigations are generalized to other plant geometries and solar angles through the use of a nondimensional similarity parameter η. The functional relation among the amount of canopy cover, shadowed ground, and illuminated ground, which occurs only for spatially homogeneous plant distributions at large sampling scales, facilitates the analytical treatment of the NDVI and reflectance equations.

Originality in Seneca's Troades

T HE first step in detecting the original is to isolate the derivative. In a Rostock lecture I argued that Seneca used four Greek sources in the composition of his play.2 The use of Euripides' Hecuba and Troades has been regularly assumed.3 Euripides provided Hecuba, Helen, and the chorus of captive women,4 and he especially influenced Seneca's lyrics. The kommatic parodos is pure Euripides. Seneca used as well a famous tragedy, Sophocles' Polyxena, which may be reconstructed with some confidence and which was concerned with ideas treated later in the Antigone.5 From the Polyxena derived the famous Fiirstenstreit between Pyrrhus and Agamemnon and the brief subsequent scene with Calchas (203-370). The messenger speech in the exodos describing the death of Polyxena descends from a similar speech delivered by a messenger in the exodos of Sophocles' play.6 Finally, the presence of Polyxena as a persona muta and not the loquacious Euripidean prisoner reflects the unsatisfactory dramatic situa-

THE CROSSWISE BINDER

A mosaic in the Chiesa delle Martorana in Palermo, Sicily, figures the Nativity, as described in the apocryphal Evangels, as taking place in a cave near Bethlehem. In the upper portion of the mosaic, with the angels, are two male figures, presumably St. John the Baptist and Simeon, who was not to die until he had seen the Christ. The Virgin is shown holding the child in the crib or manger, by which stand a horse and cow. St. Joseph is seen below, and, as was often the case, a subsequent scene is depicted showing the bathing of the child. The child in the crib has the binder arranged crosswise, as is seen in most representations dating from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, evidently the fashion of those days. The child on the nurse's lap could have a congenital dislocation of the hip with the position in outward rotation,