Zoerhetorical theory -- Human microbiomes in popular science -- Fetuses at the National Memorial for the Unborn -- Vital biocitizens at the gym.

In an analytical yet increasingly intimate conversation, A Passion for Specificity:Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science investigates the differences between experience as conveyed in literature and experience as apprehended through scientific method. Can experiences be shared? How much do language and metaphor shape experiential reports? Where is the dividing line between a humanistic and a scientific approach to experience? In a series of exchanges, Marco Caracciolo and Russell Hurlburt demonstrate that those are necessarily personal issues, and they don't flinch--they (...) relentlessly examine whether Caracciolo's presuppositions distort his understanding of reading experiences and whether Hurlburt's attachment to the method he invented causes him to take an overly narrow view of experience. Delving ever more personally, they aim Hurlburt's experience sampling methods--beeping people to discover what was in their stream of inner experience at the moment immediately before the beep--at Caracciolo's own experiences, an exercise that puts Caracciolo's presuppositions to the test and leads him to discover things about experience that he had thought impossible. A Passion for Specificity, with its personal revelations, unexpected twists, and confrontational style, reads like an epistolary novel, but it is a serious exploration of ideas at the heart of literature and science. It is a thoughtful attempt at advancing the emerging "cognitive humanities," clarifying a number of core issues in the cross-pollination of literature, psychology, philosophy, and consciousness science. (shrink)

Paleolithic representations of human being at Chauvet and Rouffignac / Jeffrey Skoblow -- Eros, event, and non-faciality in Malory's "The tale of Balyn and Balan" / Eileen A. Joy -- The Book of Hours and iPods, passionate lyrics, and prayers: technologies of the devotional self / Tim Spence -- What does language speak? feeling the human with Samuel Beckett and Chretien de Troyes / Daniel C. Remein and Anna Klosowska -- Aninormality / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen -- Humanist waste / Michael (...) A. Johnson -- How delicious we must be/Folcuin's horse and the dog's Gowther, beyond care / Karl Steel -- Excusing Laius: Freud's Oedipus, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and Lydgate's Edippus / Daniel T. Kline -- The trick of singularity: Twelfth night, stewards of the posthuman, and the problem of aesthetics / Craig Dionne. (shrink)

Suture and Narrative: Deep Intersubjectivity in Fiction and Film by George Butte offers a new phenomenological understanding of how fiction and film narratives use particular techniques to create and represent the experience of community. Butte turns to the concept of suture from Lacanian film theory and to the work of Merleau-Ponty to contribute a deeper and broader approach to intersubjectivity for the field of narrative theory. Butte's approach allows for narratives that represent insight as well as blindness, love, and loss, (...) locating these connections and disconnections in narratological techniques that capture the crisscrossing of perspectives, such as those in fiction's free indirect discourse and in the oblique angle of film's shot/reverse shot convention. Butte studies the implications of this chiasmus in the novels and film adaptations of later Henry James works, Barrie's Peter Pan tales and film adaptations, and the films Silence of the Lambsand Nothing But a Man. Suture's story in the twentieth century, according to Butte, is a story of the loss of immediacy and community. Yet in concluding this, Butte finds optimism in the Coen brothers' Raising Arizona as well as in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson and Marc Webb's film Days of Summer. (shrink)

Wordsworth, apocalypse, and prosthesis -- Blake's infant smile: facing materialism -- Byron's sad eye: the tragic loss of tragedy -- Shelley's viral prophecy: the erotics of chance -- Keats's lame flock: the erotics of waste.

Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative by Ruth Mackay traces the figures of flight, grievous falls, and collapsing towers, all of which haunt American narratives before and after 9/11. Mackay examines how these events prefigure 9/11, exploring the narrative residue left by the "end" of horizontal space--when settlers reached America's Pacific Coast, leaving nowhere westward on the continent to go. She then continues into the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. This (...) period of time marks an era of verticality: an age that offers a transformed concept of the limits of space, entwined with a sense of anxiety and trepidation. With this study, Mackay asks: In what oblique ways has verticality leaked into American narrative? Why do metaphors of up and down recur across the twentieth century? With close readings of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Winsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, Upton Sinclair's Oil! and its film rendering There Will Be Blood, Allen Ginsberg's poetic dissections of the nuclear bomb, and Leslie Marmon Silko's imagining of flight in Almanac of the Dead, this interdisciplinary study culminates with a discussion of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Waiting for the Sky to Fall examines how vertical representation cleaves to, and often transforms the associations of, specific events that are physically and visually disorienting, disquieting, or even traumatic. (shrink)

The Ensemble/gb/Community ; The marrow: Laurie Carlos ; The blue note: Daniel Alexander Jones ; The roots: Sharon Bridgforth -- The Break/Awo/Process -- The Bridge/A/Transformation.

Sarraute's indeterminacy: a universe without contours -- Inside Wittig's Chantier: to build a trojan horse -- Garreta: no subject here -- Toward a poetics of unbecoming; or, language has a body -- Conclusion: Unbecoming language.

Rhetorical ecologies of posthuman practice -- Posthuman practice and/as information -- Informing metastable orientations -- Orienting to topological engagement -- Engaging nomadic activity.

Empiricism should not be seen to provide an overarching criterion of meaningfulness for musicological concepts nor a single comprehensive methodology for music research. Understood as methodological concern with observation, it is rather a possible orientation that may receive various degrees of emphasis. Empiricism is not opposed to theoretical systematization, but it can rather be seen as an inclination towards theories which are capable of empirical adequacy. The empirical, or observational component of research may nevertheless be understood in slightly different ways, (...) depending on whether there is only one observer, and depending on whether the observations are treated as falling within a single category. It is argued that either the observer or the observational category has to be assumed constant in order that the research may be called truly empirical. It is also argued that such decisions concerning empirical methodology naturally correspond to distinctions between subdisciplines of empirical musicology, each of them associated with different research interests. Three such orientations are discussed: historico-analytical empiricism, psychological empiricism, and systematic empiricism. (shrink)

In the last two decades an important shift has occurred in music research, that is, from music as an art to music as a process in which the performer, the listener, and music as sound play a central role. This transformation is most notable in the field of systematic musicology, which developed from “a mere extension of musicology” into a “complete reorientation of the discipline to fundamental questions which are non-historical in nature, [encompassing] research into the nature and properties of (...) music as an acoustical, psychological and cognitive phenomenon”. Three recent strands of music research will be briefly discussed, namely empirical, computational, and cognitive musicology. They will be interpreted in the context of the “cognitive revolution” in the humanities and the sciences. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century systematic musicology, which was based on the comparative method, played a prominent role in the discipline: however it was appropriated by the Nazis and fell out of favour after the war. It was replaced by ethnomusicology and structuralist music theory, both of which emphasized the individual context and eschewed comparison between contexts. Both also developed an epistemology based on the generation of meaning through the act of "experiencing and understanding music" : this epistemology, characteristic of (...) cultural musicology and theory in general, is quite distinct from that of the cognitive sciences of music. The otherwise confusing variety of musicological practices subsumed under the category "systematic musicology", as set out in Honing's article on which this is a commentary, can be usefully seen in terms of two distinct dimensions, those of method and of epistemology. It follows from this that empirical methods are as consistent with, and as potentially valuable to, CMT as they are to CSM, and that EMR has the potential to reach both constituencies. (shrink)