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Nele Noppe

Website Nico Nico Douga goes live ... house | The Japan Times Online - 0 views

  •  
    With the use of AR, the altering of real-world environments on screen by computer-generated imagery, Web surfers watching the action from their laptops will see an altogether different scene than those who are physically present at Nicofarre. Bands will play virtual instruments, J-pop idols will perform with anime characters - they'll even be able to see hearts or lightning-bolts fly out of a soloist's guitar similar to scenes from the film "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World." What makes this venue special however, is the level of interaction between those at the club and the online viewers. Those watching online can type in comments that are then scrolled in real time on the wall-screens of the main hall, which creates an uncanny sense of connection between the two audiences. The fact that comments are displayed live adds a daring element of freedom, as there is no way to control what is written and therefore put up for all to read. Although the venue's concept has virtually unlimited potential, what could hold Nicofarre back is the video quality. Being a large-scale setup, the spaces between the individual bulbs make the images indiscernible when standing too close. And judging from opening-night headliners, K-pop boy band Tohoshinki and local J-pop phenomenon AKB48, it looks like the club is not courting the usual live-house or clubbing crowd. Musical tastes aside though, the venue is undoubtedly at the cutting edge of "live" entertainment in Japan, and is well worth checking out.
Nele Noppe

"Kinda like the folklore of its day": "Supernatural," fairy tales, and ostension | Tose... - 0 views

  • show does not simply depict folklore, but uses it thematically, as a way of reflecting and commenting upon Sam and Dean's relationship.
  • Supernatural makes transformative use of folk narratives
  • Ostension is defined by Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi as "presentation as contrasted to representation (showing the reality itself instead of using any kind of signification)" (1983, 6). Or, as Jan Harold Brunvand describes it, "sometimes people actually enact the contents of legends instead of merely narrating them as stories" (2001, 303). Supernatural does not simply retell folk narratives, but actually performs the stories.
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  • Furthermore, Koven argues that legend ostension in popular culture texts encourages audiences to engage in "some form of postpresentation debate regarding the veracity of the legends presented" (2008, 139) (note 4). This is reflected in Supernatural; most episodes engage with narratives that are usually told in their folk context as if they were "true." Vampires, werewolves, shtrigas, the Hook Man, La Llorona, witches, Robert Johnson's rumored pact with the Devil, zombies, djinn, changelings, evil clowns, and ghosts of all kinds have been featured on the show. Moreover, Sam and Dean's methods of defeating these creatures are those which folk belief likewise deems "true": salting and burning remains, performing exorcisms, helping ghosts resolve unfinished business, casting magic spells attested to by the folklore record, and so forth.
  • The majority of the scholarship on fan fiction, especially slash fan fiction, understands it as a way for women to intervene creatively in male-dominated pop culture texts. Fairy tales can be said to follow a parallel tradition—like fan fiction, fairy tales are a gendered genre of storytelling. As Marina Warner notes, "although male writers and collectors have dominated the production and dissemination of popular wonder tales, they often pass on women's stories from intimate or domestic milieux" (1995, 17). Postmodern feminist writers such as Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, and Emma Donoghue reworked the "old wives' stories" collected by Perrault, the Grimms, and others, seeing in them a space to articulate female experiences and desires—a move not dissimilar to those performed by fan writers, most of whom identify as female.
  • In other words, to traditionalist folklorists, the "folk" were best understood as "illiterate, rural, backwards peasants" (Dundes 1980, 6), who, isolated from modern culture, retained "rural, quaint, or 'backward' elements of the culture" (Toelken 1979, 5). Underpinning this condescension was the theory of "cultural evolution," a late 19th-century adaptation of the then cutting-edge theory of Darwinian evolution to fields that had nothing to do with biology. This theory, whose primary exponents were E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang, posited that cultures, just like individual humans, proceeded in a unilinear fashion through the stages of "savagery" (infancy), "barbarism" (childhood), and finally "civilization"—with upper-class European patriarchal Christian culture representing the pinnacle of civilization (and adulthood), of course. European peasants were, naturally, barbarians, and their folklore represented traces of earlier "stages" of civilization; information on the ancestors of civilized peoples could be supplemented with studies of contemporary "savages," such as African tribespeople (Dundes 1980, 2). Lang, in particular, argued that the child is the microcosm of the culture, and therefore, logically, the stories of lower-class "barbaric" adults were suitable material—after extensive bowdlerization—for upper-class children, as they were all on the same level of development (see Smol 1996). In other words, the still-pervasive notion that folktales, especially fairy tales, are primarily "kids' stuff" owes a great deal to 19th-century racism, classism, and religious bigotry.
  • Endemic to this line of theorizing is the assumption that the folklorist, the one collecting and interpreting folklore, is not of the folk: the folk are always the Other. Traditional folklorists were educated bourgeois outsiders who traveled to rural areas in their own lands—or, better yet, foreign locales—since one cannot find folklore among one's own group, because only "they" have folklore—"we" have Culture
  • Unlike Mulder and Scully, the Winchesters, even before Mary's death, are decidedly working-class; John, prior to becoming a homeless drifter, was a mechanic. Julia M. Wright, in a perceptive article on class in the series, argues that "to hunt in Supernatural is to be immersed in the local, not the multinational-driven culture of brand recognition and globalized consumerism, and this is understood in the series as an insistently classed move" (Wright 2008, ¶15). Although Sam and Dean often behave like professional traditional folklorists—not just by doing research, but also in the fact that they are almost always geographic outsiders to the sites they visit—they are actually amateurs, autodidacts with no formal academic training in the field (note 8).
  • Before getting into this episode's presentation of fairy tales, some background information is in order. Fairy tales, as a genre, are considered to be a subcategory of folktales. The category of "folktale" is a broad one, defined by most folklorists as "a narrative which is related and received as a fiction or fantasy" (Oring 1986, 126), as opposed to myths or legends, both of which are making truth claims;
  • Within that group of stories, fairy tales are usually understood as folktales which involve magic, particularly magical acts, objects, and transformations that are not remarked upon as unusual within the story: no one in a fairy tale stops and cries, "Wait a minute, frogs don't talk!"
  • While initially published for scholars, the Grimms' collection achieved some success as a book for children, and subsequent editions (seven in total, with the final and most widely available edition appearing in 1857) were extensively revised by Wilhelm Grimm to better conform to changing ideas of what was appropriate for young readers. This marked a major shift in the perceived audience,
  • Other revisions, documented by Tatar (1987), Jack Zipes (1991, 45–70, 2002a, 2002b), and Ruth Bottigheimer (1986), reflect a systematic imposition of bourgeois mores, particularly in the realm of gender: this included curtailing the proactivity and direct speech of heroines, while increasing them for female villains (because good women are passive and silent). This was especially noteworthy in stories that featured wicked stepmothers (note 13), as the texts often, in an exception to the general rule of harsh justice, bend over backward to exonerate fathers for their failure to protect their children
  • This story about fairy tales—we can call it the "recovery story"—is a rescue operation, uncovering the "real" fairy tale and liberating it from Disney oppression, and theoretically also recovering the "true" voices of the "original" tellers, usually figured as female. Versions of this approach have a long history in folklore studies, which, in the early days, tended to treat all folklore as brands rescued from the fire: in this case, the "fire" destroying a once-pure folk product is not urbanization and mechanization per se, but the stultifying effects of male collectors and male-dominated popular media.
  • Fairy tales have absolutely been sanitized to rid them of elements deemed unacceptable, whether those elements be violence, sexuality, nonnormative gender roles, insufficient respect for authority, or whatever bugaboos moral guardians wish to prevent young readers from encountering. In addition, female tellers, writers, and collectors have absolutely been ignored, silenced, and subsumed under the totalizing category of the anonymous "folk" by male authorities—and those male authorities such as Perrault sometimes had to turn around and defend fairy tales as worthwhile, despite the perceived feminine (or even, in the case of the French female salon writers, feminist) "taint" of the genre (Warner 1995, 168–70). I merely want to point out that, in the realm of popular culture, the "recovery narrative" is a story we tell about fairy tales, and it's one that both contradicts and relies upon the existence of the "fairy tales are sweet and innocent" narrative for its power. Disney's "normative influence" is so pervasive that any literature or media that concerns itself with fairy tales must negotiate the received Disney understanding, even if only to dismiss it.
  • As James R. Kincaid (1998) might put it, the best thing about innocence is the threat of its violation, and roughing up a story for kids is thrilling in a way that pre-roughed-up stories for adults are not. Thus, it is unsurprising that there are a number of horror films based explicitly on fairy tales, including Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Suspiria, Freeway, and The Company of Wolves.
  • Dean's snide, defensive comments spring from the centuries-long linkage of fairy tales with women: the fairy tale is a gendered genre of folklore. More to the point, fairy tales often suffer the same fate as other female-identified artistic genres such as romance, "chick flicks," and fan fiction—widespread dismissal and denigration. It is no accident that the term "fairy tale" is widely used as a synonym for "childish, unrealistic fantasy"—the kind women must be discouraged from having, at all costs.
  • In response, Sam invokes the recovery narrative, which, in the context of the rest of the scene, suggests a problematic conclusion: it is the goriness and sexuality of fairy tales that renders them appropriate for masculine interest.
  • Within the show, fairy tales do not automatically possess the status of "real" folklore, but must be shown to be both "scary" and "sexy"—as the show's UK tagline promises—to be worthy of the brothers' attention.
Nele Noppe

esorlehcar: laurashapiro has an interesting post on - 0 views

  • A friend recently commented that she sometimes misses the days when fandom seemed like this shiny, egalitarian place where issues surrounding race (and gender, to a lesser extent) just didn't exist and she didn't realize it was an illusion courtesy of her own privilege, and it struck me how telling a comment that was: For a whole lot of people, the anger that their fandoms are being "polluted" or "ruined" by this kind of discussion stems from a deep-seated conviction that these problems didn't exist in fandom before some troublemakers started talking about them, and they view the people talking about them as the instigators of the problems rather the people who have been hurt by them or seen others hurt by them speaking up to say, "This is wrong, and it's something fandom collectively needs to work on."
David Sydney

Inspiring and Sensational Sales Training - 1 views

Dave as a motivational speaker was extraordinarily exciting and entertaining. He gave us really great insights and we were engaged in all that he was about to share all throughout the train-ing. As...

started by David Sydney on 04 Oct 12 no follow-up yet
Nele Noppe

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0: ... - 1 views

  • I haven't a clue why so little is written about humor. Having a background in sociolinguistics, I have a particular interest in language practices and in how things get said, not just in what gets said. Humor plays such an important role in the community making process, cutting across fan interactions and practices, including romantic and erotic talk.
  • As I argued in Cyberspaces, humor is bound up with class, gender and by extension race and ethnicity and nationality.
  • Due South with its American fan base was part of what Chris Barker calls reverse flow. In his 1999 book, Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities, he challenged the notion that the one-way flow of American programming to the rest of the world would lead to the homogenization of culture and the erasure of local and national identities. The more likely outcomes, he argued, were fragmentation and hybridization.
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  • Of course not all fans responded this way but even the well-meaning comments made in defense of David's actions served to erase his identity as a gay man. I described these fans as textual gamekeepers. Unlike the slash fiction writers who poach by queering the characters that have been written by the producers as straight, these fans "straightened out" the gay storylines. I bet there's a whole lot more textual gamekeeping going on in fandom that has yet to be uncovered.
Nele Noppe

A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture - 0 views

  • Fan community clearly cannot be constituted by anyone other than the fans themselves. This tenet remains central to the constitution of fan culture, just as it is continually renewed by the exchange of symbolic gifts.
  • they exchange personally charged aspects of themselves in a gift culture whose field of value specifically excludes profit, further separating their community from the larger (male-gendered) community of commerce.
  • To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over there—to become part of a larger metatext, the off-putting jargon and the unspoken rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain. Within this circle of [End Page 113] community—and in media fandom, women overwhelmingly make up this community1—learning how to engage is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan.
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  • At the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation. The general understanding is that if no money is exchanged, the copyright owners have no reason to sue because they retain exclusive rights to make money from their property
  • The notion of the gift is thus central to fan economy as it currently stands, although, as Abigail De Kosnik argues in her essay in this issue, it may be time for the community to consider creating an alternative model that will permit women to profit.
  • This exchange in the fan community is made up of three elements related to the gift: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.2 The tension and negotiation between the three result in fan creation of social relationships that are constructed voluntarily on the basis of a shared interest—perhaps a media source like a TV show or, perhaps, fandom itself. Fan communities as they are currently comprised, require exchanges of gifts: you do not pay to read fan fiction or watch a fan-made music vid.
  • Fans insist on a gift economy, not a commercial one, but it goes beyond self-protective attempts to fly under the radar of large corporations, their lawyers, and their cease-and-desist letters. Online media fandom is a gift culture in the symbolic realm in which fan gift exchange is performed in complex, even exclusionary symbolic ways that create a stable nexus of giving, receiving, and reciprocity that results in a community occupied with theorizing its own genderedness.
  • But the items exchanged have no value outside their fannish context. In fact, it is likely that they do not literally exist; fandom's move to the Internet means that the items exchanged are hyperreal and capable of being endlessly replicated.
  • Money is presented less as a payment than as a token of enjoyment.
  • The items offered as gifts are not destroyed but are incorporated into a multivocal dialogue that creates a metatext, the continual composition of which creates a community, and the rhetorical stance of that dialogue is to create a gendered space.
  • The gifts have value within the fannish economy in that they are designed to create and cement a social structure, but they themselves are not meaningful outside their context.
  • Each proffered item represents an aspect of the giver: time, talent, love, desire. The result—"personally charged"12 gifts, responses in kind—generates a female-gendered community, but the role of the individual within that community is equally crucial.
  • When the rules of exchange are broken, the punishment is swift. One recent incident that exemplifies this was the attempt of (male) venture capitalists to profit financially from (female-generated) fan fiction.
  • The FanLib debacle illustrates that attempts to encroach on the meaning of the gift and to perform a new kind of (commerce-based) transaction with fan-created items will not be tolerated. Henry Jenkins notes, "They simply hadn't really listened to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction."17 The site attempted to bypass the artwork-generating [End Page 117] fan community altogether—a serious misreading of FanLib's audience. FanLib broke the rules of the community's engagement by misreading "community" as "commodity," and the site failed thanks to intense backlash, an expression of fannish defense of their field of value.
Nele Noppe

Reputation of LiveJournal as a platform - 0 views

  • On another topic, only tangentially related to RaceFail '09, is the perception I have that Livejournal, as a blogging platform, continues to be considered some weird incestuous second-class place compared to Wordpress or Blogspot or something. I frequently see derogatory comments out in the blogosphere about LJ bloggers, implying that anyone writing on LJ isn't worth paying attention to. (Yes, Scalzi, this means you, and not just for yesterday's post.)And I have to ask, why is a freestanding blog more valid somehow than an LJ? Is it somehow the community nature of LJ? The icons? The friends-list function? What is it that makes LJ so much tackier than Blogspot?... or is it that LJ is perceived as majority female?
  • then you are So Super Great And Powerful because readers come all the way to look at your blogI think there's something to this. The perception of Manly Independence, even though it's false because they're still using a blogging platform like Blogspot or Wordpress, it's just a little more detached from the other blogs on Blogspot or Wordpress. So they have to use an RSS reader with their morning coffee, instead of a flist.
Nele Noppe

The Visual Linguist: Equivalences for "Language" - 0 views

  • However, this is not the take that most comparisons of the verbals and visual forms take. Rather, they often try to make direct superficial analogies between specific types of structures. For example, "such and such" is the equivalent of a "word" or "sentence." This is often why many want to claim that single images have "grammar" — because a single image has lots of information in it, like a "sentence" and unlike a "word" — even though composition within single images behaves nothing like a grammar. (...nor should we expect it to given the differences between sound and light!)A similar endeavor has tried to find "minimal units" of the structure of the forms, following the school of Structuralism (most popular in American linguistics from around 1920-1960ish). However, again, just knowing minimal units doesn't tell you about the broader structure, and units larger than minimal units might also be useful and insightful. It also gives no beneficial comparison other than that "minimal units" exist in both domains.All of this is an argument for looking beyond the superficial understandings of "language" and to look for comparisons in deeper, more fundamental aspects of structuring.
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    "All of this is an argument for looking beyond the superficial understandings of "language" and to look for comparisons in deeper, more fundamental aspects of structuring." -> take broad view
Nele Noppe

betweenthebliss: gay in the media, slash, and why trek fandom makes me wibble. - 0 views

  • i said in my comment to cimorene that it kind of boggles my mind to think that in fifty or a hundred years we could actually have a genre movie where the studly captain and his stalwart first officer would be each other's love interests-- that some day we could have movies about two guys or two girls falling in love while also being chased by zombies or flying through space or having duels with magic. that maybe some day we'll have books, movies, tv shows and comics where "omfg, i'm gay!" isn't the issue that takes over the entire story.
  • which brings me to the point, what i love about trek fandom. every fic i've read so far has played right into this amazing assumption, which i haven't seen discussed anywhere but which seems to be one of those understated understood fandom constructs-- that in two hundred years there won't be much to fuss about for gay relationships or same-sex attraction.
Nele Noppe

Science in the Open » Blog Archive » Peer review: What is it good for? - 0 views

  • Scientists worship at the altar of peer review, and I use that metaphor deliberately because it is rarely if ever questioned.
  • Somehow the process of peer review is supposed to sprinkle some sort of magical dust over a text which makes it “scientific” or “worthy”, yet while we quibble over details of managing the process, or complain that we don’t get paid for it, rarely is the fundamental basis on which we decide whether science is formally published examined in detail.
  • There is a good reason for this. THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES! [sorry, had to get that off my chest]. The evidence that peer review as traditionally practiced is of any value at all is equivocal at best
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  • But there is perhaps an even more important procedural issue around peer review. Whatever value it might have we largely throw away. Few journals make referee’s reports available, virtually none track the changes made in response to referee’s comments enabling a reader to make their own judgement as to whether a paper was improved or made worse. Referees get no public credit for good work, and no public opprobrium for poor or even malicious work. And in most cases a paper rejected from one journal starts completely afresh when submitted to a new journal, the work of the previous referees simply thrown out of the window.
  • We never ask what the cost of not publishing a paper is or what the cost of delaying publication could be.
  • There is a direct cost to rejecting papers, both in the time of referees and the time of editors, as well as the time required for authors to reformat and resubmit. But the bigger problem is the opportunity cost – how much that might have been useful, or even important, is never published? And how much is research held back by delays in publication? How many follow up studies not done, how many leads not followed up, and perhaps most importantly how many projects not refunded, or only funded once the carefully built up expertise in the form of research workers is lost?
  • Journals need to acknowledge the papers they’ve rejected, along with dates of submission. Ideally all referees reports should be made public, or at least re-usable by the authors.
  • Traditional peer review is hideously expensive. And currently there is little or no pressure on its contributors or managers to provide good value for money. It is also unsustainable at its current level. My solution to this is to radically cut the number of peer reviewed papers probably by 90-95% leaving the rest to be published as either pure data or pre-prints. But the whole industry is addicted to traditional peer reviewed publications, from the funders who can’t quite figure out how else to measure research outputs, to the researchers and their institutions who need them for promotion, to the publishers (both OA and toll access) and metrics providers who both feed the addiction and feed off it.
Nele Noppe

Abstracts - 0 views

  • Different periods of literary and philosophical thought place emphasis more strongly on either continuity or originality, and thinkers of modernity often privileged originality and artistic genius as they laid the groundwork for a value system that still affects the landscape of contemporary popular culture.
  • Countering this ascribed modernist valuation of originality, postmodern theorists and artists have emphasized pastiche, appropriation, and intertextuality.
  • copyright laws and marketplace expectations have helped establish aesthetic discourses within fan communities that often mirror modernist emphases on originality and authenticity.
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  • despite a cultural value placed on repetition, fandom still remains at least tenuously invested in more traditional notions of originality and uniqueness.
  • In contrast to Eliot's model of artistic genius, emphasizing originality and ownership of individual creativity, I’d like to foreground the fan community as a collective creative culture that values sharing, allusion, and repetition as aesthetic (and affective) choices.
  • Rhetoric is basically a pedagogical discipline comprising a number of pedagogical principles, where one is the principle of imitatio. According to the imitatio principle you have to, very actively, collect an arsenal of different strategies in the process of learning how to write and present a material.
  • With focus on imitatio and from perspectives such as genre, intertextuality, narratology, semiotics, we discuss the creation process of fan fiction in general and slash in particular.  
  • Further, and crucially, fic is a form of discourse that does not just analyse canon – it has the power to add to and change it as fanon and canon mix, encouraging ongoing reinterpretation and reframing of canon within the fanon/canon ‘verse as a whole.
  • Reading and writing fic remains a more popular online activity than taking part in meta discussion, but are the two activities so very different?
  • Harry Potter
  • from a close reading of a set of French potterfictions, my presentation will try to identify and compare the typical “scripts” used by the authors:
  • However, the various academic accounts written about yaoi have a tendency to pathologize yaoi as well as its female fans in terms of gender displacement, female sexual oppression, or sexual starvation.
  • how Queer Theory can assist the academic discussion of yaoi and slash, and counter the tendency to pathologize.
  • The British television show Torchwood has generated a vast amount of fan fiction. Among these stories are some which involve human-animal transformations.
  •   In this paper I intend to study how the human-animal transformations are described in a selected number of fanfic texts.
  • Can these stories be read as a comment on the relation between human and animal, or should the animal in this context rather be read as merely a symbol or a plot device?
  • Ludology, the academic study of games, has maintained a critical distinction that, fundamentally, a game cannot contain a narrative, as its focus is more oriented toward necessarily non-narrative interaction between the game and its players.  Fan fiction seems capable of exploding, or at least complicating, this claim, as the process of a writer’s active and creative engagement with a previously existing storyworld, expressed through fan fiction, appears clearly to meet the requirements both for a game,
  • close readings
  • In existing studies on fan fiction, it has been established that the majority of previous studies have been ethnographical or social in nature. Only very recently have studies on the literary aspects of fan fiction begun to emerge.
  • Harry Potter
  • helps us shorten the gap between literary practices of 'high' and 'low'.
  • Fan Fiction – ‘The Logical Extension’
  • The Love Song of T.S.Eliot and fandom  
  • Fan Fiction – as Dickens (Might) Have Written It
  • Redefining the EveryFan? Implicated reading and janeites on-line
  • Flexible Dancers: How Doctor Who fan fiction subverts and confirms the elements inherent in the romance novel genre
  • A Revamped Lover? The Limitations of the Romance Format in Black Dagger Brotherhood Slas
  • ”This Man Is My Friend – Nobody [Else] Touches Him”: Paris/Kim Fan Fiction from Star Trek: Voyager
  • Sex, power and kittens – human-animal transformations in Torchwood fan fiction
  • “It takes a real man to have a baby”: heterophobia or heteroflexibility in Supernatural mpreg
  • t fan fiction is a form of derivative or appropriative fiction
  • I suggest that we need to look toward tropes, the use of familiar plots, scenarios, and characterization as central organizing and generating principles for fan fiction communities.
  • yaoi and its Western fans are more receptive to a queer interpretation than slash and its fans are. Other key points raised by the research included fans’ rejection of ‘mainstream’ characterization of females, a strong awareness of legal and ethical issues and a desire to challenge contemporary accounts of ‘their’ fandom.  
  • Polish fans unlike their American or European colleagues are quite puritan.
  • Should the fan fiction writer be seen first and foremost as a reader, which is undoubtedly an essential role in fan fictions?
  • where a general rule is to stay true to the canon’s descriptions of characters,
Nele Noppe

Meme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.
  • Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]
  • Meme-theorists[which?] contend that memes evolve by natural selection
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  • Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.
Nele Noppe

McLuhan Studies Premiere Issue: Eco's Prophetic Vision of Mass Culture - 0 views

  • Even in his first essays in the sixties, the author's approach to reading, interpreting and commenting on culture could already be seen as that of a semiotician who had not yet adopted the technical jargon of the discipline. In fact, it would not be too far-fetched to consider the Eco of the sixties as essentially a young Adso (see the discussions on reading signs betwen William and Adso in The Name of the Rose) ready to learn about semiotics from the right mentor. We must also remember that as soon as Eco no longer feels satisfied by the early writings of French semioticians and structuralists like Barthes and Levi-Strauss, he turns to the studies of Jakobson and Peirce on the science of signs.
  • Also, few intellectuals can match Eco's great interdisciplinary skills.
  • In general, Eco's critics (most of them academic) have suggested that he is successful because he publishes trendy books.
Nele Noppe

Fandom Involvement: Just some musings - 0 views

  • Reading is active participation; whether we realize it or not, our mind is engaging with the text. Choosing not to comment does not constitute passive participation. These readers have watched/read/listened to the source text (text in the broad sense) and actively sough out more for some reason or another.
  • Whoa! There is no passive involvement in fandom!
  • There's a part of me that is really annoyed by "reading deeply." That whole school mentality. Sometimes, when an author describes red shoes, they just mean read shoes - not a journey, not separation from the womb, just SHOES. And, since it is fandom, I like to enjoy it on a superficial level. If it's for fun, I don't want to have to really think about it. Lazy.I can understand that. Though, my first though is that the author might have just meant "red shoes" but the reader brings more meaning than just that.
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  • the author might have just meant "red shoes" but the reader brings more meaning than just that.
  • a writer is not fully in control of his/her reading, a reader brings new and different meanings to a reading, and culture and canon do the same
  • I love how half of fandom dies down for a month or two when it is time for college finals (not because everyone in fandom is a student but because half of fandom is grading papers).
  • I think for some of us, it's fun to take it seriously. I have a hard time just...relaxing and having fun with anything, though.
  • Once upon a time, being a fan was fun. And now there's fandom drama and politics and fansite mergers and splitaways and people being mad at each other and blackmailing and lawsuits and all sorts of fandomwank and some of that fun is no longer there, but at the same time it's so much more... meaningful. And it builds character.
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    "...the author might have just meant "red shoes" but the reader brings more meaning than just that."
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