scholarly journals The Textual Ecology of Christine Montalbetti’s Journée américaine

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Anne McConnell

Christine Montalbetti’s 2009 novel, Journée américaine, depicts a road trip, as Donovan travels from Oklahoma to visit his college friend, Tom Lee, who lives on a ranch in Colorado. While the road trip provides a basic structure for the narrative, as the text unfolds, we realize that Montalbetti’s narrator prefers to meander, rather than taking us in a linear manner towards a final destination. The narrator dives into memories, digressions, philosophical reflections, and backstories of seemingly peripheral characters in order to flesh out a complex narrative mesh. Timothy Morton’s notion of “the ecological thought” provides a compelling lens through which we can read Montalbetti’s novel, encouraging us to consider the ecological implications of a text that might not at first strike us as having anything to do with ecology. Journée américaine pushes against the outer edge of the text, spilling over into the world and also demonstrating the ways that the environment participates in the text. Montalbetti’s attention to objects, nonhuman animals, and landscapes further emphasizes how narrative does not necessarily require a human subject at the center. In the end, the narrative mesh of Journée américaine demonstrates a sprawling, complex network of relations that unfolds outward and defies boundaries.

A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering their perspective from their everyday lives. A road movie is technically defined as a movie that starts at geographic point A and travels through various pit-stops along the way before reaching geographic point B, the final destination. Road movies are noted for their vivid, dynamic and picturesque narration. Normally the protagonist or traveler is a male and the purpose of journey is self-discovery. Characters’ internal conflicts and transformations are highlighted. The characters in road movies often experience new realities on their trip and often explore the intensity of their alienation and solitude on a possibly long road trip to a remote destination. In road movies, the protagonist is usually considered as on the move. The present paper explores the theme of oppression, rebellion, escape, self-discovery and the metamorphosis of the protagonist as depicted in Frank Capra’s movie It Happened One Night and the Easy Rider by Dennis Hopper. The paper, on a further note, examines the emotional transformations of the protagonists as they sail through varied personal, emotional and social experiences on the way to their destinations. Montage sequences, travelling shots, aerial shots and diegetic music are some of the technical peculiarities employed in road movies. The road movie entered a political phase in the late 1960’s influenced by the low budget biker movies and Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. The narrative is somewhat picaresque in almost all road movies that sequentially present certain pertinent events that culminate in a good or bad ending.


Author(s):  
Iia Fedorova

The main objective of this study is the substantiation of experiment as one of the key features of the world music in Ukraine. Based on the creative works of the brightest world music representatives in Ukraine, «Dakha Brakha» band, the experiment is regarded as a kind of creative setting. Methodology and scientific approaches. The methodology was based on the music practice theory by T. Cherednychenko. The author distinguishes four binary oppositions, which can describe the musical practice. According to one of these oppositions («observance of the canon or violation of the canon»), the musical practices, to which the Ukrainian musicology usually classifies the world music («folk music» and «minstrel music»), are compared with the creative work of «Dakha Brakha» band. Study findings. A lack of the setting to experiment in the musical practices of the «folk music» and «minstrel music» separates the world music musical practice from them. Therefore, the world music is a separate type of musical practice in which the experiment is crucial. The study analyzed several scientific articles of Ukrainian musicologists on the world music; examined the history of the Ukrainian «Dakha Brakha» band; presented a list of the folk songs used in the fifth album «The Road» by «Dakha Brakha» band; and showed the degree of the source transformation by musicians based on the example of the «Monk» song. The study findings can be used to form a comprehensive understanding of the world music musical practice. The further studies may be related to clarification of the other parameters of the world music musical practice, and to determination of the experiment role in creative works of the other world music representatives, both Ukrainian and foreign. The practical study value is the ability to use its key provisions in the course of modern music in higher artistic schools of Ukraine. Originality / value. So far, the Ukrainian musicology did not consider the experiment role as the key one in the world music.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (01) ◽  
Author(s):  
JAVED ALAM SHEIKH

Almost 50 per cent of the world population is constituted by the women and they have been making substantial contribution to socio-economic development. But, unfortunately their tremendous contribution remains unrecognized and unnoticed in most of the developing and least developed countries causing the problem of poverty among them. Empowering women has become the key element in the development of an economy. With women moving forward, the family moves, the village moves and the nation moves. Hence, improving the status of women by way of their economic empowerment is highly called for. Entrepreneurship is a key tool for the economic empowerment of women around the world for alleviating poverty. Entrepreneurship is now widely recognized as a tool of economic development in India also. In this paper I have tried to discuss the reasons and role of Women Entrepreneurship with the help of Push and Pull factors. In the last I have also discussed the problems and the road map of Women Entrepreneurs development in India.


Text Matters ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 62-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulina Ambroży
Keyword(s):  
The Road ◽  

The article examines the correlation between the world and the word in two novels which engage with a post-apocalyptic scenario: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Shifting the focus from the very event of catastrophe to the notion of survival through memory and storytelling, both novels problematize the strained relationship between language and reality in an increasingly diminished and dehumanized world. My aim is to investigate the limits of language as well as its capacity to withstand the chaos, loss, trauma, and death that follow the apocalypse. The issues to be considered include the influence of external experience on forms of communication, the role of central metaphors (the archive and the museum in Markson’s novel; cinders and the road in McCarthy’s) and their relation to the form of both novels, as well as the word’s (in)capacity to preserve human values and hopes. Both novels will be discussed as deconstructionist projects in which language becomes a habitat at once impossible and life-preserving: in Wittgenstein’s Mistress it plays the role of both home and prison, whereas in The Road it functions as messianic discourse which simultaneously carries, propels and extinguishes the human hope for a transcendental reality beyond the post-apocalyptic emptiness and doubt.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 495-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felice Cimatti

The tradition of Italian Thought – not the political one but the poetic and naturalistic one – finds in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze a way to enter into the new century, the century of immanence and animality. In fact, Deleuze himself remained outside the main philosophical traditions of his own time (structuralism and phenomenology). The tradition to which Deleuze refers is the one that begins with Spinoza and ends with Nietzsche. It is an ontological tradition, which deals mainly with life and the world rather than with the human subject and knowledge. Finally, the text sketches a possible dialogue between Deleuze and the poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, one of the most important (and still unknown) figures of Italian Thought.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162095800
Author(s):  
Ludger van Dijk

By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal’s activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of “affordances,” the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.


Author(s):  
Alaparthi Maneesha

This paper describes how to overcome accidents at Ghat roads. In the developing countries accident is the major cause of death. If we look at the top 10 dangerous roads in the world we can see that all of them are mountain roads and curve roads. In the mountain roads there will be tight curves and the roads will be narrow. In these kinds of situations the driver of a vehicle cannot see vehicles coming from opposite side. Thousands of people lose their lives each year because of this problem. The solution to this problem is developing the Aurdino based project to provide safe and secure journey while travelling to the Ghat roads, Hill Stations, etc. It is provided by alerting the driver about the vehicle coming from opposite side. This is done by keeping a sensor in one side of the road before the curve and keeping a LED light after the curve, so that if vehicle comes from one end of the curve sensor senses and LED light glows at the opposite side. By looking at the LED light on/off criteria driver can become alert and can slow down the speed of the vehicle.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Andrew Lapworth

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film –  Leviathan (2012)  – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being.


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