The Stereoscope and Popular Fiction: Imagination and Narrative in the Victorian Home

The stereoscope was a popular parlour toy that provided a powerful psychological viewing experience in the heart of the domestic space. In this article, I consider the stereoscope’s position as an instrument that was experienced, and often represented, in relation to the imaginative narrative processes of memory and fantasy. By reading the stereoscope’s position within popular fiction, the article seeks to uncover the way in which the stereoscope was consumed. The article shows that for many in the mid-Victorian period, the stereoscope operated as an everyday narrative-forming experience with a strong relation to the popular periodical fiction that was read alongside it in the domestic space. The first section of this article considers the cultural and psychological position of the stereoscope within the home, reading this alongside a number of short stories published in the popular periodic press. The second section consists of an analysis of the stereoscope’s involvement with psychological dualism and self-doubling, issues which stem, in particular, from the device’s reliance on photography. These aspects of the device are explored in relation to a nineteenth-century short story which draws a problematic relation between one’s self and one’s portrait. Finally, the article draws these issues together to show the importance of imaginative narratives within the stereoscopic experience. The viewing conditions of the stereoscope encouraged viewers to engage in an anticipatory, open-ended, and imaginative fantasy narrative. It is this unique narrative character of stereoscopic viewing experiences which most prominently distinguishes the device from other visual media.     

Commentary: Tex-map Mania: The Outline of Texas as a Popular Symbol

The Canto general is a book containing a large collection of poems by Pablo Neruda that shows the intricate relationships among nature, places, and peoples in the Americas. The third section in the book, “Los conquistadores,” has heretofore received scant critical attention. Its warp is Neruda's depictions of nature, Indians, and the conquistadors. “Los conquistadores” is shown to be much more than a reiteration of the Black Legend, which presents the Spanish conquest and settlement of the Americas in an entirely negative manner. Neruda's vision of a new people bonded to nature for nourishment and united in a collective will is discussed, and the role of the Conquest toward that end is explained.     

The Ambivalent Thematics of Commodity Fetishism in Contemporary Latina/O Narrative Fiction

One of the chief cultural dynamics in the contemporary United States is the omnipresent commodity fetishism that drives its consumer society, so it comes as little surprise that this figures prominently in the attempts of much contemporary U.S. Latina/o fiction to come to terms with the social milieu of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States. This essay argues that Helena Maria Viramontes’s Miss Clairol, Sandra Cisneros’s Barbie-Q, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao each manifest a deep-seated ambivalence towards commodity fetishism: an awareness of how the agency to break with traditionalist modes of being and some measure of cultural assimilation might be achieved through engagement with fetishized attributes commodities place on offer, yet one that is tempered by an appreciation of the dangers such as alienation and cultural homogenization that also proceed from immersion in a world defined by commodity fetishized relations.     

类型:民间故事的存在方式——读祁连休《中国古代民间故事类型研究》

在国际民间故事研究界,由芬兰学者阿尔奈(Antti Aarne,1867—1925)和美国学者汤普森(Stith Thompson,1885—1976)共同完成的民间故事类型索引被称为国     

Emplotment as Epic in Archaeological Writing: The Site Monograph as Narrative

To emplot a narrative as epic is to present a story of vast scope and multiple plots as a legitimate member of a tradition of other such stories. This article argues that emplotment as epic is the broadest of three levels of plot in archaeological writings. At that level, the site monograph emerges as a characteristically archaeological form of narrative, fundamental to archaeology as a discipline and a source of chronic anxiety for archaeologists. The ‘stories’ told in site monographs are epic in length, diversity of materials covered and multiplicity of themes, plots and authors. Indeed, the more complexities of that sort the better, since those are features that help to emplot the work as good archaeology.     

走向“近代”与“文学”——日本大众文学源流的再思考

大众文学是20世纪日本文坛独具特色的一种文学形态,因此日本学界对其理论研究可谓是汗牛充栋,论争不断。本文从其中的一个问题即产生的源流出发,在梳理日本大众文学源流研究的基础上,进一步剖析大众文学与日本的“近代”、“文学”等概念确立的内在关联。日本近代社会促成了大众文学的发生,而大众文学也起到了塑造日本国民精神与素质的重要作用;日本文学的近代性孕育于大众文学,而大众文学也承载了日本近代文学独特的生命力。至少在源流上,在日本是不存在大众文学与纯文学的界限之分的,二者的对峙图式只是其发生的一种建构而已。     

Digging Holes in Popular Culture: Archaeology and Science Fiction Miles Russell (ed.) with a Prgace by Douglas Adams

Abstract

The heritage management policy in the UK is to delegate management and protection of scheduled ancient monuments to quasi-autonomous heritage agencies. These agencies are an improvement on what preceded them: the dry, conservative and underfunded Ministry of Works. However, by analysing the way in which Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments manages the castles in North Wales one can see that the current system has many inherent failings. Underfunding, a lack of commitment to education and preservation and the artificial division of responsibility along modern pseudo-national boundaries are evidence that the current policy has run its course and now needs to be re-thought. Furthermore, there must be more effort made to present a more inclusive heritage by accepting that the heritage sites in Wales exist within a multicultural Britain and a world of shared human experience. Emerging as a model for future heritage management is Denbigh Castle in North Wales. The site was abandoned in 1998 after Cadw decreed that it did not generate enough income. Subsequently rescued by the local council, it is now thriving. Denbigh stands as an example of how a heritage site can be integrated with the local community that has lived in its shadow for hundreds of years.     

Theory and Fiction: Rorty's View of Philosophy as Literature

Richard Rorty was one of the most committed and respected critics of the distinction between philosophy and literature. He urged philosophers to adapt an ironist stance, characterized by a double commitment to historicism and nominalism, thereby simultaneously abandoning their inveterate representationalism as well as their predilection for hypostasizing abstract concepts. The ensuing return to the individual and contingent was also supposed to facilitate the absorption of philosophy into the realm of literature proper. This brief essay focuses on some aspects of the relationship between philosophy, literature, and history, highlighting thereby the role that theorizing of an abstract kind plays in the construction of fictional worlds—marking out a territory within the crafting of literature itself that draws on the non-nominalist mode of discourse usually favored by philosophers.     

历史与神话:天地会西鲁故事由来及天地会起源

有关创教和起会的历史神话是我国民间教派和帮会共同的现象。合理解读这些神话,既是民间教派和帮会研究的任务,也是进一步探明民间教派和帮会历史的一把钥匙。本文抓住“戏剧化”这一关键环节,对明清民间教派和帮会创教、起会历史神话中的“昏(君)奸(臣)与功(臣)”故事结构模式进行探讨,进而用天地会的历史解析其起会历史神话“西鲁故事”的形成过程,力求廓清笼罩在天地会起源问题上的迷雾。     

Engineering as a Source of Scientific Ideas

Abstract

Engineering has discovered some laws of nature as limits to what can be done, from which have developed the sciences of thermodynamics, information theory and cybernetics. Considered as a science, engineering lies between physics and biology, because its machines have physical structures and properties but biological organizations and functions. The old idea of the living body as an engine retains its power in modern biology; and the reconsideration of various natural non-biological processes in terms of engineering and biological concept reveals inadequacies in modern physical theory.     

Keftiu in Context: Theban Tomb-paintings as a historical Source

It is generally asserted that the representations of Aegeans in Theban private tombs cannot be regarded as a reliable historical source, since the gift-bearers of this independent region were depicted by Egyptian artists as tributaries. The present paper is an attempt to test the validity of this orthodoxy from the Egyptological perspective. The new explanatory approach is based on a contextual analysis which embraces the entire body of foreigners' processions in the Theban tomb-paintings. It is suggested that these scenes provide, within certain iconographical conventions, an accurate record of historical reality, thus offering a valuable insight into the mechanisms of pharaonic power. The question of the political vs. economic nature of the depicted activity, the diplomatic gift-giving, is taken up in an appendix at the end of the paper.     

《左传》的口头叙事研究——以重耳故事为例

《左传》中的重耳故事是一个完整的、独立的、自足的叙事圆环,可以作为一个独立的叙事整体进行研究,也是《左传》采录口头文本的痕迹的最佳例证。以口头诗学理论三个层面的结构性单元(程式、主题、故事范式)逐层分析《左传》中的重耳故事可以发现:《左传》对重耳的叙事多次运用了口头叙事所特有的主题与重复叙事,《左传》中的重耳故事与西方的英雄传说在故事范式方面有着惊人的一致性。这些分析基本确定《左传》中有关重耳的记载源于当时口耳相传的故事文本,而并非史实的直录或作者的构思创作。     

Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen,A. E. Waite,and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominate fin-de-siècle studies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival.     

Writing for Immediacy: Narrative Writing as a Teaching Technique in Undergraduate Cultural Geography

Narrative inquiry is an innovative means of encouraging students to internalize concepts, reflect on experiences or create applications for theoretical ideas. The use of first-person creative writing in a second-year cultural geography course prompted initial scepticism from students but eventually highlighted their constructivist engagement with course concepts. Despite a number of ethical, evaluative and moral dilemmas, encouraging the use of creative writing as a form of narrative inquiry allowed students to tell their stories so that they were valued and connected to wider disciplinary concepts.     

Divination as a Way of Knowing: Embodiment,Visualisation, Narrative,and Interpretation

Divination, which is a way of exploring the unknown, has been practised worldwide for millennia. It involves complementary modes of cognition associated with representational and presentational symbolism. Wherever a theory of divination has been carefully elicited from practitioners of the art, there is a recognition of overlapping inductive, intuitive and interpretative narrative techniques and ways of knowing. In any society in which mechanical divinatory procedures are combined with visualisation or bursts of intuition, researchers should be able to empirically investigate this cognitive-embodied field of practical mastery. This investigation, in turn, ought to enable them to develop meditative empathy towards acts of divination as well as a sophisticated theory of divinatory practice.