Search results for "aesthetics"

2021

Fictosexuality, fictoromance, and fictophilia are terms that have recently become popular in online environments as indicators of strong and lasting feelings of love, infatuation, or desire for one or more fictional characters. This article explores the phenomenon by qualitative thematic analysis of 71 relevant online discussions. Five central themes emerge from the data: (1) fictophilic paradox, (2) fictophilic stigma, (3) fictophilic behaviors, (4) fictophilic asexuality, and (5) fictophilic supernormal stimuli. The findings are further discussed and ultimately compared to the long-term debates on human sexuality in relation to fictional characters in Japanese media psychology. Contexts f…

Empowerment as an affective-discursive technology in contemporary capitalism: insights from a play

2019

Over recent years, an increasing body of research in social and cultural studies has investigated the contemporary processes of social change from the point of view of affective capitalism. In this article, we take under scrutiny one of its technologies, namely, empowerment, by which we mean a state characterised by feelings of strength, ability and power that enable agency. More specifically, we investigate the way empowerment is presented in a cultural product, a play that tells a story about personnel training in a factory, shown in a city theatre in Finland. By linking recent theorisation of affective capitalism with an investigation of the intertextual and interdiscursive relations of …

The leftovers. The dead in life and social disappearance.

2020

Through an analysis of the TV series The Leftovers, we delve into the concept of "social disappearance" and into how it expresses the limits between life and death. The analysis focuses on the event that drives the plot: the mass disappearance of millions of people without reason. It has three moments: (1) the reconstruction of the order that the disappearance has broken; (2) the deviation of the mourning processes from their original logic; and (3) the acceptance that in the post-disappearance world nothing will be the same as before. The text offers some suggestions for thinking about possible lives in a world that is broken and with no promise of reconstruction, a world in which "social …

Book review: Rodanthi Tzanelli, Socio-Cultural Mobility and Mega-Events: Ethics and Aesthetics in Brazil 2014 World Cup

2016

The New Soviet Man With a Female Body: Mother, Teacher, Tractor Driver…

2020

Naujojo žmogaus sukūrimo idėjos užuomazgų galima rasti senovės Graikijoje ir Romoje, taip pat utopistų, švietėjų kūriniuose, teologiniuose tekstuose, tačiau ši ideologema galutinai susiformavo XIX a. pabaigoje, o bandymai ją realizuoti praktiškai sietini su (para)totalitarizmo įsigalėjimu. Vienas iš žinomiausių tokių bandymų pavyzdžių – siekis sukurti Naująjį sovietinį žmogų. Šis bandymas nuo kitų skiriasi komunistine ideologija, kuri kiekvienam reiškiniui suteikia „papildomų reikšmių ar funkcijų“ (Prozorov, 2013, p. 210). Kitaip tariant, visus dalykus SSRS galima suprasti ir paaiškinti tik diktatūros tikslu – utopinė ateities visuomenė „komunizmas“, kurios vardu valstybė viską ir visus reg…

Reflexive Modernization and the Disembedding of Jūdō from 1946 to the 2000 Sydney Olympics

2004

This article considers some of the sociologically significant changes to jūdō in its process of transformation from a Budō based martial art into a modern competitive spectator sport. Taking the period of time from 1946 until the Sydney Olympics, an examination is undertaken using Giddens’s notion of reflexive modernization in which key aspects of the original jūdō are disembedded or ‘lifted out’ of the practice. They are then re-embedded with western structures, practices and meanings. Central themes to emerge from this analysis are the social forces of internationalization, institutionalization and commodification of jūdō over this period, each of which contributes to a reflexive moderni…

Odyssey Towards a Sirenic Thinking: An Attempt at a Self-Criticism of the Listening Paradigm Within Sound Studies

2021

Abstract This text departs from a contradictory claim in deaf studies and sound studies: both disciplines describe a hierarchical regime of the sensible – visuocentrism and audiocentrism – which they try to counter with conceptualisations as “acoustemology” or “deaf gain.” However, as we argue, they both thereby erect what they claim to overcome: a sensual regime that privileges one sense over another and a restricted conception of subjectivity deriving from it. First, we draw a philosophical line in the critique of sensual regimes. Then we propose a figure for the transcendence of the separation of the sensible: in re-reading of the myth of Odysseus and the sirens, we engage various exampl…

'I love Rock 'n' Roll'--music genre preference modulates brain responses to music.

2013

The present study examined the effect of participants' music genre preference on the neural processes underlying evaluative and cognitive judgements of music using the event-related potential technique. To this aim, two participant groups differing in their preference for Latin American and Heavy Metal music performed a liking judgement and a genre classification task on a variety of excerpts of either music genre. A late positive potential (LPP) was elicited in all conditions between 600 and 900 ms after stimulus onset. During the genre classification task, an early negativity was elicited by the preferred compared to the non-preferred music at around 230-370 ms whereas the non-preferred g…

And the World Continues to Spin…: Secularism and Demystification in Good Omens

2018

Pratchett’s narratives tend to portray not only multicultural but also multireligious societies. In contrast to earlier writers of fantasy, however, Pratchett writes from a decidedly atheistic point of view, an issue Daniel Scott explores in depth in this chapter. He argues that co-authors Pratchett and Gaiman use Good Omens to perform what, following Rosemary Jackson’s theory of fantasy literature (1989), is a dual subversion; in using biblical prophecy to hold a mirror up to society, they also show the faults and cracks in the mirror itself, sometimes overtly, but mostly by implication. By reducing it to this level of intertextuality, they strip it of its higher or absolute metaphysical v…

Matei Visniec: aproximación a un universo dramático a través de sus animales

2014

Matei Visniec (1956) is an author from Romania, who uses both French and Romanian expression in his plays. The coordinates of his dramatic fictional universe bring together the absurd, the symbolic, the fantastic and the conflicts in the city of men, sometimes with accurate historical and current references. Animals, present onstage in many different ways, are very common in his plays. They constitute a strange wildlife between animal and human, between the real and the fantastic.Their presence in this theatrical universe fits into their symbolic aspect, which defies the imagination by means of what is enigmatic and incomprehensible; but it also falls into their committed side to the extent…