bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
El impacto de la transformación digital en las agencias de publicidad en Colombia
Authors: Alzate Cadavid Manuela , Henao Murillo Elisa
Published: January 2021

Actualmente, uno de los fenómenos que origina una nueva reflexión sobre el quehacer publicitario es la transformación digital que está obligando a una reestructuración de las agencias de publicidad convencionales. Al mismo tiempo el consumidor se convierte en un generador de contenido, dando paso a una relación de horizontalidad entre consumidor y marcas. En consecuencia, esta investigación –con un enfoque cualitativo y siguiendo el método fenomenológico– tiene como objetivo conocer cómo ha sido el proceso de reestructuración de algunas agencias de publicidad reconocidas de Bogotá y Medellín, a partir de la transformación digital de los últimos cinco años, entendiendo qué comprende este fenómeno, qué cambios ha representado para las agencias y cuál es la diferencia en su forma de trabajo, teniendo como punto de partida los aportes de los autores Del Río y Kaufmann (2014), Farfán y Corredor (2010) y Lombardero (2015). Este estudio se realiza por la relevancia que ofrece este tema a diferentes actores, como la academia, las agencias y el sector en general en relación con las nuevas habilidades y técnicas que es necesario desarrollar desde la formación, y como un referente para otras agencias sobre la gestión ya realizada por algunas en respuesta a la transformación digital. En conclusión, la reestructuración de las agencias con respecto a la transformación digital es un proceso que sigue vivo a pesar de haber comenzado hace varios años y les ha puesto el reto de idear estructuras versátiles y autogestionables para adaptarse efectivamente a los diferentes cambios.
CHARLOT E DURKHEIM: APONTAMENTOS SOBRE A RELAÇÃO DO HOMEM COM O SABER
Authors: Baranoski Pereira Francine , Pereira Ana Lúcia
Published: January 2021

Este artigo apresenta reflexões sobre a relação do homem com o saber nas perspectivas de Émile Durkheim (1978, 2006, 2011) e Bernard Charlot (2000, 2001, 2005). O objetivo é refletir e discutir a respeito das teorias epistemológicas destes autores sobre a construção do saber e sua relação nos diversos contextos: educacional, familiar e social. Esta discussão tem caráter multidisciplinar e tem a intenção de provocar reflexões em estudiosos que se interessem pela construção do conhecimento em diferentes contextos. A abordagem metodológica, do ponto de vista dos procedimentos técnicos, parte-se de um enfoque argumentativo de caráter bibliográfico. Nossos resultados apontam que as teorias aqui apresentadas, configuram-se, como obras inspiradoras, de leituras muito relevantes para o pensar contemporâneo da educação, bem como para o processo de ensino e aprendizagem. Dentre as principais contribuições da teoria durkheimiana, destacamos, ainda que dentro de uma perspectiva funcionalista, o enaltecimento da educação no âmbito humano e social.  As contribuições de Charlot destacam-se com mais força, por tratar-se de um teórico contemporâneo que analisa o campo da educação sob múltiplos enfoques. Os aspectos mais relevantes de sua teoria residem em uma sociologia do sujeito ao pensar os alunos como seres sociais, humanos e singulares, que aprendem além dos muros da escola.
CORPO HUMANO UM ARTEFATO CULTURAL NO CURRÍCULO DO ENSINO DE CIÊNCIAS NO TERRITÓRIO FEDERAL DO ACRE: GÊNERO, CIVILIDADE – CIVISMO – MORAL
Authors: Almeida Murilena Pinheiro de , Barzano Marco Antonio Leandro , Castro Cleyde Oliveira de , Soares Cenair Felini
Published: January 2021

Este trabalho visa analisar o funcionamento dos mecanismos de legitimação do tema corpo humano, nocurrículo do ensino de ciências da escola primária, no Território Federal do Acre, de 1910 até 1939. Mobilizouseos aportes da História Cultural, a pesquisa documental, a análise de conteúdo, a técnica snowball e entrevistasem profundidade com professoras. As fontes documentais utilizadas: programas de ensino, regulamentos defuncionamento do ensino primário, fotografias, gravuras, notícias e artigos sobre educação em jornais da época. Aconstrução e abordagem das séries documentais e a análise foram mediadas pelo conceito de representação social. Asrepresentações sobre o corpo, erigidas sob um viés antropocêntrico e uma linguagem androcêntrica, encontravamsesubjacentes aos modos diversificados da escolarização do Território Federal do Acre, e, consubstanciou o temacorpo humano como artefato cultural, no eixo civilidade – civismo – moral, para produzir o brasileiro e a brasileiraacreanos.
ESTÁGIO DE EDUCAÇÃO INFANTIL: AS EXPERIÊNCIAS FORMATIVAS DOS DISCENTES DO CURSO DE PEDAGOGIA DA UFRB
Authors: Cordeiro Karina de Oliveira Santos , Cruz Fernanda Soares Pedreira Andrade
Published: January 2021

Este artigo apresenta relatos das experiências de estágio na Educação Infantil do curso de Licenciatura em Pedagogia da Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB). O objetivo desse texto é socializar como as experiências formativas de 05 discentes do curso supracitado em atividades de estágio tem proporcionado uma reflexão sobre a construção de saberes para a futura prática docente. Como metodologia, utilizou-se da elaboração de memoriais formativos que expressaram criticamente o processo de iniciação à docência na primeira etapa da Educação Básica. Esse processo contribuiu para reflexões práticas sobre as principais concepções de infância e de atendimento às crianças, à luz das diversas fases históricas e tendências pedagógicas da Educação Infantil.
O RECREIO NA PERSPECTIVA DAS CRIANÇAS
Authors: De Oliveira Fabiana , Francelino Araújo Tuane
Published: January 2021

O artigo investigou os sentidos atribuídos pelas crianças às suas vivências no momento do recreio. O referencial teórico adotado se baseia em alguns interlocutores da Socioantropologia da Infância, dentre outros autores que também fazem parte dos Estudos da Infância e tiveram o brincar e as culturas infantis como fontes de estudo. A pesquisa se caracterizou como qualitativa e a metodologia contemplou a observação participante e a realização de entrevistas por meio do recurso Desenhos com Histórias que nos possibilitou conhecer o modo como elas se relacionam com seus pares e adultos e contribuiu também para olharmos o recreio a partir de sua perspectiva, bem como, pensarmos sua educação. Nesse sentido, a pesquisa sobre o recreio se mostrou relevante ao apresentar a importância de se ouvir as crianças na organização do trabalho cotidiano visando superar a perspectiva adultocêntrica tão presente nas rotinas institucionais.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Infância. Recreio. Pré-Escola.
TRICHOMONAS VAGINALIS in female prison inmates from Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil: prevalence, diagnosis and epidemiological aspects
Authors: Melo Nasser Fava Natália , Da Costa Viana João , Cristina Cury Márcia
Published: January 2021

Trichomonas vaginalis is the etiological agent of trichomoniasis one of the most prevalent sexually transmitted infections worldwide. This paper aimed to determine the prevalence and the risk factors associated to the dissemination of the parasite in the prison environment, as well as comparing the diagnostic methods used for its detection. The present study included 56 female inmates at Professor Jacy de Assis Penitentiary, in Uberlandia, Minas Gerais, Brazil, regardless of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age and sexual orientation. To diagnose T. vaginalis, wet mount and culture in TYM medium were utilized. The results were comparedto the Papanicolaou test, the routine diagnostic method used in prisons. To outline the socioepidemiologicalprofile of the participants an investigative survey was applied during an interview preceding the medical consultation. Of the 56 women included in the present study, six were diagnosed positive for T. vaginalis, by the three methods resulting in a prevalence of 10.7%. Culture and wet mount presented 100% specificity and sensitivity. On the other hand, sensitivity and specificity of the Papanicolaou test were 75% and 96%, respectively. None of the variables analysed, herein, could be associated with the infection. Despite the presence of the parasite, it was not possible to set an epidemiological pattern for positive patients, highlightingthe particularities of this population. Regarding the diagnostic methods, wet mount and culture were equally efficient and superior to Papanicolaou in detecting T. vaginalis.

KEY WORDS: Trichomoniasis; penitentiary; diagnosis; women; risk factors.
A Cause of Recurrent Urinary Retention in Pregnancy; Retroverted Uterus: Case Report
Authors: Sevim Mehmet , Şengül Barış , Alkış Okan , Aras Bekir , Kabay Şahin
Published: January 2021

Acute urinary retention is one of the most common situations encountered in urological emergencies. It is more frequently seen in older men. Acute urinary retention in pregnant women is a rare condition but it may cause abortus, preterm labor and rarely uterine ischemia. It is very difficult to reveal the causes of acute urinary retention in pregnant women. One of them is acute urinary retention due to retroverted uterus which is observed in 11% of pregnant women. In this case, we discussed a young pregnant patient who presented to our outpatient clinic with complaints of recurrent urinary retention due to retroverted uterus.
Management of Giant Retroperitoneal Liposarcoma: A Case Report
Authors: Bitkin Alper , Aydın Mustafa , Yavuz İnci , İnan Ramazan , İrkilata Lokman
Published: January 2021

Retroperitoneal liposarcoma (RPLS) is a rare tumor. Early diagnosis and treatment are difficult due to absence of specific clinical presentations. We report a case of a 66-years-old woman who succesfully underwent complete surgical resection for a giant retroperitoneal liposarcoma. The complete surgical resection is the most important predictor of local recurrence and overall survival. We believe that complete surgical resection involving adjacent organs is a curative treatment to increase overall survival, especially in the presence of invasion of large tumors.
Activating the local food system in emergency food response
Authors: Ollove Andy , Hamdi Samiha
Published: January 2021

Resilient local food systems are a necessary component to keep our communities healthy, especially during times of emergency. With a history of supporting local farmers and food access in less-resourced communities, Fresh Approach was in a prime position at the time of shelter-in-place orders to pivot our efforts to emergency food relief in this time of uncertainty. By collaborating and mobilizing resources, Fresh Approach was able to strengthen existing connections with small farmers, build new relationships with other food access nonprofits, and support families in need by providing them with farm-fresh, local, and healthy produce. We outline how these partnerships and collective efforts have fortified a resilient and transformative food system in our area.
Introduction: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature
Authors: Graff Zivin Erin
Published: January 2021

In the Introduction, the author proposes a mode of reading that would expose the misunderstanding that is constitutive of both the literary and the political. A reading of the figure of the “blind” reader in two primal, early modern scenes of reading taken up by Ricardo Piglia in his 2005 El último lector [The Last Reader] is then taken up, suggesting that the blind reader might be that reader who—desperately close to the text—is attuned to its marks of invisibility, to those elements of unreadability that serve as an aporetic demand for more (blind) reading. The motif of opacity, or invisibility, recurs throughout Anarchaeologies vis-à-vis a cluster of concepts—misunderstanding, error, equivocation—to which the author turns in order to imagine new interpretative possibilities not only within literary criticism, but within ethical and political thinking as well.
Misunderstanding Literature
Authors: Graff Zivin Erin
Published: January 2021

Graff Zivin draws upon Jacques Rancière’s notion of literary misunderstanding—malentendu littéraire, which bears a formal compatibility to mésentente politique, or political dissensus or disagreement—in order to develop the first concept that structures this book, as well as the relation between literature, ethics, and politics. Here Graff Zivin turns to an understudied scene from Juan José Saer’s 1983 novel El entenado in order to consider a literary practice that performatively and constatively bears witness to the misunderstanding that constitutes the modern subject.
Toward an Anarchaeological Latinamericanism
Authors: Graff Zivin Erin
Published: January 2021

Graff Zivin argues against a mode of reading—of a text, of the archive—that would seek to uncover a buried truth (alêtheia), following the logic of archaeology or arche (ἀρχή‎) logos (λόγος‎): an excavational mode of thought, a cousin of a certain conservative philological tendency that has as its foundation or ground (Grund), which hides beneath it, an identifiable and revealable truth. Instead, the author proposes the notion of anarchaeological, or marrano, reading, an interpretative practice that would take into account the secret, incalculable qualities of the archive or the text. After reviewing several examples of archaeological (Dussel, Bosteels) and anarchaeological (Williams, Draper, Steinberg) engagements with the Latin American archive in general, and the archive of 1968 in particular, Graff Zivin analyzes Albertina Carri’s unsettled relation to the inheritance of her murdered militant parents in the 2003 and 2016 films, Los rubios and Cuatreros.
Ethics against Politics
Authors: Graff Zivin Erin
Published: January 2021

The second part of the book is a critical engagement with the so-called ethical “turn” in critical studies of literature, culture and philosophy. “The Ethical Turn” takes the reader through the tense articulation of ethics and politics in current criticism and political philosophy in Latin America. The first section, titled “Ethics against Politics,” shows how the notion of an ethical “turn” tends to place ethics and politics in a relation of antagonism or substitution (ethics or politics, but not both), which limits the possibilities of both ethical and political thinking. What if the two terms were to be thought instead as operating against each other? Here “against” would indicate both antagonism (ethics versus politics) and correlation, even support: ethics against the backdrop of politics and vice-versa, an arrangement in which ethics and politics would be mutually interdependent.
Untimely Ethics
Authors: Graff Zivin Erin
Published: January 2021

“Untimely Ethics: Deconstruction and its Precursors” takes up Borges’s notion that literary precursors are retroactively determined in order to examine the preposterous timing of this “anarchaeology” of violent ethics. Here, Graff Zivin considers two possible “precursors” of deconstruction, from two quite different traditions, Levinas and Borges himself. Graff Zivin traces the concept of the illegible demand (for reading) in the thought of Levinas and Derrida, suggesting that the most significant consequences of Levinas’s work can only begin to be traced “after” Derrida, and proceeds to argue, through an analysis of Borges’s short essay “Kafka y sus precursores,” that if literary and philosophical precursors can be determined retroactively and anachronically (Borges “after” Derrida), then intempestive reading—reading after whatever is untimely in the work before it—might serve as the condition of possibility for indisciplinary, marrano thinking.
Toward a Passive University
Authors: Graff Zivin Erin
Published: January 2021

The book’s final part, “Exposure and Indisciplinarity,” asks whether and how “anarchaeology,” misunderstanding literature, error, and the violence of ethics-against-politics, may be thought to provide a critique of the very institution that seems to make them possible as ways of thinking: the university. As a mode of conclusion to this book, Graff Zivin proposes the possibility of an institution whose foundation is passive, exposed responsibility. The idea of the “exposed” university would imply not only the university’s exposure to other institutions, or to other ethico-political demands, apparently exterior to the university, but also, crucially, an internal exposure, in which the exposure of one discipline to another would reveal the defective quality of the sovereignty or autonomy of each, the “points of untranslatability” that serve as the condition of possibility (and impossibility) for disciplinary thinking.
Afterword
Authors: Graff Zivin Erin
Published: January 2021

The Afterword asks after the role of the university in the age of Trump, in the so-called post-truth era. Specifically, it pursues the possibility of a defense against inventions and untruths that does not, or does not only, rely upon scientific or legal, proof-based knowledge, but also, crucially, that would advance a notion of knowledge, or truths, that pertain to the logic of testimony and witnessing, but which are themselves unprovable in an empirical sense. It may seem a strange moment to turn, or return, to figures such as Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man, thinkers that have been wrongly accused of relativizing truth, or of doing away with truth altogether, but whose work in fact point the way to a different, but no less radical, commitment to the idea of truth.
Xenocitizens
Authors: Berger Jason
Published: January 2021

Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity. In this incisive study, Berger challenges a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, the book uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum writers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models for thinking about personhood and sociality as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. Today, the old liberal-national model of citizen is not only problematic, but also tactically anachronistic. And yet, standard liberal assumptions that undergird the fading realities of humanist and democratic traditions often linger within emerging scholarly work that seeks to move past them. Innovatively reorienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, Xenocitizens offers us a new nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.
Introduction
Authors: Berger Jason
Published: January 2021

The introduction’s first section argues that, amid neoliberal realities, liberalism’s paradigms are in crisis. Positing the concept of “xenocitizen” as a historical way to begin moving past delimiting liberal fantasies, it suggests that contemporary scholarship requires a mode of “actuality without positivism.” The second section uses a hemispheric consideration of Simón de Bolívar’s writing to establish the asymmetrical landscape of nineteenth-century liberalism. Building on these contexts, the last two sections turn directly to the concepts of xenocitizen and ontology: setting the terms of engagement and the conceptual terrain for the chapters that follow.
Emerson’s Operative Mood
Authors: Berger Jason
Published: January 2021

This chapter reexamines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early thinking about the relation of the individual to universal Reason, revealing that Emerson’s writing is philosophically consistent in its insistence that the human self is “operative” in form and function. Shifting our conceptual perspective from a traditional Matthiessenian notion of an “optative mood” to something of a Badiouian “operative mood” opens up new ways to consider how, across the early works, the Emersonian self is shaped by interactions with an impersonal Other as well as the ways these interactions influence the self’s relation to historical landscapes. Intervening in scholarship on Emersonian personhood by scholars such as Sharon Cameron, Branka Arsić, and Donald Pease, this chapter offers an original version of Emerson’s political vision, one that finds in his theory of “religious sentiment” a model for the self that may reframe all of Emerson’s corpus.
Agitating Margaret Fuller
Authors: Berger Jason
Published: January 2021

This chapter offers a competing portrait of Margaret Fuller’s brand of political citizenship. By examining Fuller’s earlier work, especially her writings about music, a new version of her political and social views becomes visible. The affective and formal elements of Fuller’s thought—where various sounds, tones, and pulsations explicitly and/or implicitly mediated her thinking about material reality—reveal a complex dialectic between the personal and the social. Going much further than merely revising the common historical narrative that sees Fuller moving from romantic to radical modes of thinking after her departure for Europe in 1846, the chapter portrays how Fuller develops a model of nineteenth-century political personhood that literary scholars and historians alike have yet to fully address.
Thoreau’s Militant Vegetables
Authors: Berger Jason
Published: January 2021

This chapter takes as its starting point contemporary new materialist approaches to Henry David Thoreau’s writing, especially the work of scholars such as Branka Arsić and Jane Bennett. Complicating the Deleuzian- and neo-Spinozan-influenced forms of democratic vitalism attributed to Thoreau, this chapter traces a competing mode of materialism in Thoreau’s thought, one that is inherently dialectical and, by all standards, illiberal. Building loosely on the speculative ecological work of scholars such as Monique Allewaert and Michael Marder, it argues that Thoreau’s vision of nature in his early works is allied with his subsequent radical political pronouncements in the mid- and late-1850s. The chapter traces the structural aspects of Thoreau’s unique dialectical approach toward materiality and historical reality, examining the types of political ontologies and actants that emerge within these dynamic material relations as well as their specific stakes for antebellum society.
Epilogue
Authors: Berger Jason
Published: January 2021

This brief epilogue ruminates on the theme of care. Building on the previous chapters’ examinations of xenocitizens, it offers a timely call for new forms of political orientation.
Noir Affect
Authors: Rabinowitz Paula
Published: January 2021

The essays in Noir Affect articulate the importance of understanding negative affect and argue that noir is a privileged medium for doing so. Ranging, in its discussion, among a range of media and national contexts, the volume sees noir as a contemporary phenomenon as much as a historical one. Reconceptualized as defined by negative affect, noir becomes a crucial site for thinking about death, decay, anxiety, rage, sadness, guilt, shame, resentment, loss, and the erotic attachment to death. It also becomes a locus of protest and refusal against the boosterish rhetorics of capitalism. The essays in the book argue for the social and political work done by noir affect. Taken together, they make the argument for noir as a vibrant contemporary medium. They also make the argument for negative affect as a crucial political dynamic, one that is underappreciated in many theories of affect. Readers will emerge from the collection with a new understanding of both noir and affect.
Introduction: Dark Passages
Authors: Breu Christopher , Hatmaker Elizabeth A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter makes the case for conceptualizing noir (in various media) in relationship to negative affect. The chapter first charts different accounts of noir, indicating the difficulty that critics have had in defining it. We suggest that the reason for this difficulty is precisely because noir is about negativity and thus eludes any positive attempts at fixing its definition once and for all. While we do produce our own definition of thinking about noir in terms of negative affect, we do not consider it taxonomic or something that clearly defines noir as a genre (indeed, it often fuses with other genres). The chapter also charts a genealogy of negative affect from Freud to Sianne Ngai. It concludes with chapter summaries.
Public Violence as Private Pathology: Noir Affect in The End of a Primitive
Authors: Breu Christopher
Published: January 2021

This chapter argues that Chester Himes’s midcentury noir, The End of a Primitive, explores the forms of private violence produced by the repressive public sphere of what he terms the short 1950s. Like many of Himes’s narratives, the novel foregrounds interpersonal antagonisms around race and sex, emphasizing the way in which what is repressed in the public sphere (interracial political struggle but also interracial sex) returns with a vengeance in the private sphere. In attending to the novel’s dramatizing of noir affects, the essay also articulates the value of the negative political and historiographical vision advanced by Himes’s noir narrative.
Noir Pedagogy: The Problem of Student Masochism in the Classroom Economy
Authors: Hatmaker Elizabeth A.
Published: January 2021

In “Noir Pedagogy,” Hatmaker draws on a range of different noir novels and films as well as Jacques Lacan’s conception of the four discourses, and Gilles Deleuze’s and Jean Laplanche’s differing accounts of sadism and masochism to theorize power and transference in the contemporary classroom. The chapter begins with the problem of the student who, in various ways, colludes with their own failure. Such a narrative of failure is classically noir. The chapter examines this dynamic as it plays out in the unequally structured classroom. It goes on to theorize different versions of noir affect in the classroom, including students who embody the sadistic masculine position (the detective or dick), the sadistic hysteric position (the femme fatale), and the masochistic feminine position (the corpse). The chapter concludes by pointing toward a collective praxis of working through trauma that can move the classroom out of the shadow of noir and transform it into a more affirmative and just environment.
Playing with Negativity: Max Payne, Neoliberal Collapse, and the Noir Video Game
Authors: Rejack Brian
Published: January 2021

This chapter analyses the Max Payne series of video games (2001–2012) as an emblematic instance of the noir video game. The analysis focuses on the games’ relations to the anxiety, mourning, and anger associated with the decline of the public sector and the paired rise of globalization and neoliberalism. After the reading of the Max Payne series, the chapter turns to the relationship between gameplay and affect, arguing that various strategies of “counterplay,” as they have been undertaken through the series, offer another way to interrogate the games’ noir affects. The chapter thus introduces an influential example of noir in the context of mainstream video games, reads that series in relation to affects associated with the contemporary geopolitical order, and demonstrates how the gaming medium can afford critical potential through the affective investments we place in the activity of play.
Afterword: Melodrama, Noir’s Kid Sister, or Crying in Trump’s America
Authors: Rabinowitz Paula
Published: January 2021

This chapter reflects on both the power and the limitations of noir affect as a global model for the neoliberal present, arguing that we also need to attend to noir’s younger sister, melodrama. If noir affect is a mode of contemporary culture, melodramatic affect may trump it as the present’s dominant mode. In a world in which right-wing strong men (starting with Donald Trump himself) are openly enjoying power and propagating sexual violence and in which respectability regularly is undone by exposed secrets, melodrama is the dominant mode. The contemporary social narrative takes the form of obscene fathers, family romances, and family secrets made public. If noir tends to be about a masculinized social world, in which the femme fatale plays by masculine rules and usually loses, melodrama has a different, potentially more feminist resonance: it articulates a feminine social world, which is structured around the revelation of violent sexual secrets existing behind the façade of respectability. Such forms of melodramatic affect shape important moments of contemporary political struggle as the #MeToo movement has demonstrated.
Introduction: Coming after Violence in Literature
Authors: Cherbuliez Juliette
Published: January 2021

The introduction contextualizes the role of Medea through history of violence in performances today and in the history of French theatre of the seventeenth century. It shows how and why violence was never banished from the stage, contrary to prevailing scholarship. It then outlines the concept of the “Medean principle” of violence as a means to consider how tragedy rehearses questions of violence and suggests why Corneille’s 1634 Médée occupies an exceptional place in theatre history. It offers an overview of how the Medean presence functions as a disruptive but persistent force—by disrupting temporal structures upon which premodern theatre is based.
The Medean Presence: Violence Unmade and Remade
Authors: Cherbuliez Juliette
Published: January 2021

The Medean presence is neither progressive nor genealogical; this chapter demonstrates this concept by tying Pier Paolo Pasolini to Ovid in a non-chronological consideration of literature as an art of destruction. An analysis of Maria Callas’s performance in the titular role of Pasolini’s 1969 Medea offers structural connections to the Medea of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, connections that upend a traditional understanding of history, influence, and the constitution of character. Medea is an exception in this text generally studied and celebrated for its narratives of transformation, which are also considered as generative or explanatory origin stories. Medea is exceptional because her transformations are really nontransformative: they leave nothing behind but the story of their violence. Through this Medea story, Ovid constructs description as a “monument of destruction.” This chapter suggests a link between literature description and destruction, wherein violence is precisely beyond structural control.
Staying Power: Performing the Present Moment of Tragedy
Authors: Cherbuliez Juliette
Published: January 2021

Chapter 3 explores Jean Rotrou’s neglected 1634 Hercule mourant, performed during the same season as Corneille’s Médée. In doing so, it conceptualizes the present moment of spectacle—what it means to attend to the theatrical presence of violence—through post-structuralist performance theories of “presence.” Hercule mourant, a Neo-Stoic play exemplary of a Medean tragedy, exposes the conceptual model of endurance as an experience of tragedy. In this performance of Hercules’s death by his wife’s poisoned gift, Hercules’s slow demise is a major portion of the drama’s action. Drawing on the play’s performance archive confirming its incredible spectacularity, this chapter exposes the tension between the invisibility of burning from within and the audience’s poetic apprehension of such violence through stage and rhetorical effects that slow down the moment of crisis to which an audience attends, and whose effects it hopes to feel. Hercule mourant provides a potential counter-example to common notions of catharsis that purge the immoderation of the spectacular, instead belaboring it. It asks audiences to consider endurance as a model of attending to violence.
Flying toward Futurity: Spectacularity and Suspension
Authors: Cherbuliez Juliette
Published: January 2021

Corneille’s 1660 prequel to 1634’s Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or is usually dismissed as political propaganda. Instead, this chapter considers the play’s technological innovations as part of its aesthetic and political work. An on-stage Medean presence pits two forms of temporality against each other, each performed by a different stage technology. The chapter explores technological innovations in set design and special effects, which offer contrasting experiences of time: rapid transformation versus narrative suspense. The chapter shows how the play changes the rules of dramatic narrative by challenging audience expectations of what will happen. This play offers, contra such conceptual historians as Reinhart Koselleck, an early example of the collision between pre-modern forms of history and more progressivist senses of temporality. This collision is shown to invoke the metaphor of suspension only to replace it with that of suspense, thus effecting a replacement that positions the threat of violence close at hand.
Medea Overlived: The Future of Catastrophe
Authors: Cherbuliez Juliette
Published: January 2021

The final chapter turns to the particular nature of a Medean tragedy—that is, the tragedy of what Isabelle Stengers has called the “challenge” of a mother who kills her children but does not perish and is therefore without issue or, paradoxically, finality. This idea of tragedy in the neoclassical age is taken up through this temporal lens, by considering primarily Racine’s last play Athalie (1690). Through the idea of “lastness,” the chapter considers how tragedy demands a peculiar reading of time, of history, of our place in time, and of our relationship to a temporality out of our control. It considers the changing concept of “catastrophe,” originally a theatrical term that originally meant the final steps of a tragedy’s resolution, but shifted, in the eighteenth century, to designate an unpredictable cataclysm. Both within its verse and in its reception Athalie is the drama of a shift in temporalities, from one in which we lived history as an unfolding of events in the past, present, and future; to one in which the future’s devastations are always a surprise.
From the Particular to the Universal: Vittorini’s Italian Adaptation of Ask the Dust
Authors: Ferme Valerio
Published: January 2021

This essay investigates Vittorini’s translation of Fante’s Ask the Dust into Italian as Il cammino nella polvere and the reasons why Vittorini decided to translate the Italian-American author at a time (1941) when Fascism’s rhetoric was becoming increasingly anti-American. With the help of theories of intercultural translation, Ferme evinces the choices Vittorini made in translating Ask the Dust and his tendency to move away from particular emotions toward abstraction and universal values. Transforming Fante’s original into an Italian version marked by strategic omissions and full rewritings, Vittorini made the work a key part of his ‘grand’ project of using new ethnic American writers like Fante to exemplify the mondo offeso (injured world) of the 1930s and 1940s. Ferme’s analysis illuminates the impact that Fante’s work had on a generation of Italian writers fighting fascist censorship and repression.
Where Spirituality Ebbs and Flows: Religion and Diasporic Alienation in Ask the Dust
Authors: Roszak Suzanne Manizza
Published: January 2021

In recent scholarship on the work of John Fante, issues of spirituality and the sacred have not been a popular emphasis. Yet in Ask the Dust spirituality is intrinsically tied to representations of the Italian diasporic experience in the United States, including social alienation and selective accommodation, two key concepts in diaspora theory. Despite his self-professed Americanism, Fante’s protagonist Arturo Bandini faces alienation by members of Los Angeles’s white majority, and he hesitates to adopt entirely the social mores of this culture into which he has thrust himself. The ensuing ebb and flow of his spirituality becomes a barometer of both of these experiences. Bandini’s skepticism about organized religion and even the existence of God marks his attempts to shake off his Italian cultural inheritance and accommodate the norms of secular, consumerist America. At the same time, he exhibits almost violent bursts of investment and pride in Catholic doctrine and culture that indicate the depth of his alienation in 1930s Los Angeles. Tracing this ebb and flow of investment in the sacred allows us to reach a more nuanced understanding of both the novel and the Italian diasporic experience in the United States.
“Sad Flower in the Sand”: Camilla Lopez and the Erasure of Memory in Ask the Dust
Authors: Meylor Meagan
Published: January 2021

While scholars of Ask the Dust have given considerable attention to the novel’s protagonist Arturo Bandini, his Mexican American love interest Camilla Lopez has been relatively neglected. Scholarship concerning Camilla has been limited to her destructive relationship with Arturo and her attempts at adopting Hollywood values. By foregrounding the figure of Camilla through the socio-historical lens of the marginalization and deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the 1930s, this chapter offers important insights into Fante’s novel, most notably in its treatment of ethnic identities within Los Angeles. It also provides a feminist reading of Ask the Dust by examining Fante’s treatment of working-class female subjectivity and of how Camilla’s recurring presence and absence draw attention to the Mexican past of Los Angeles, a history often erased in the city’s collective memory.
“A Ramona in Reverse”: Writing the Madness of the Spanish Past in Ask the Dust
Authors: Gardner Daniel
Published: January 2021

At the turn of the twentieth century, real estate boosters seeking to promote southern California drew upon the national popularity of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona, in particular its fantasy of the Spanish past. The fantasy’s colonial discourse deployed stereotypes marked by an ambivalence that romanticized “going Spanish” even as it portrayed Mexican communities as burdens necessitating subjugation through various strategies including repatriation. John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939) repudiates the stereotype of the colonial fantasy by critically mimicking the Spanish past. By reversing the discourse of Ramona, Ask the Dust exposes the imperialist nostalgia of the fantasy, recognizes the instability of the regional sense of colonial authority, protests the racial injustice of the discourse, and recuperates the voice of the Other that the fantasy seeks to silence.
Dancing with the Dust: Translating Ask the Dust to the Stage
Authors: Morrison J’aime
Published: January 2021

This essay reconstructs the process of creating DUST, an original dance-theatre adaptation of John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust. The essay details the director’s work with student actors, faculty designers, and production team, and explores the methods used in the process of devising this adaptation. The performative relationship between movement and language, words and choreography, is emphasized throughout. Character analysis focusing on the tangled histories of Camilla and Arturo as outsiders suggests the persistence of loss that attends the experience of displacement caused by emigration, exile, and other such dislocations. The writing in the essay seeks to replicate the imaginative process of creating an embodied translation of this haunting novel.
Ask the Lyrics: John Fante in Music
Authors: Mazzucchelli Chiara
Published: January 2021

The crosspollination of literature and lyrics is not a new phenomenon in popular music, and classics of world literature continue to inspire songwriters who incorporate them in their art in different ways and forms. Although perhaps not yet quite recognized as a classic author, the Italian-American novelist John Fante has had an impact on popular culture and music both in Italy and in the United States. Reviewing a range of Italian and American songs that draw inspiration from Arturo Bandini, the protagonist of Fante’s saga, this essay explores the relationship among literature, music, and society through a reflection on the impact that a non-canonical American writer has on popular culture and how his ethnic experience reverberates in the singer/reader/listener’s life before earning approval from mainstream critics.
Watch Out or You’ll Wind Up in My Novel: The Lost World of Ask the Dust
Authors: Guffey Robert
Published: January 2021

This essay analyzes the influence of John Fante's 1939 novel Ask the Dust on recent works of fiction such as Noah Van Sciver's 2015 graphic novel Fante Bukowski. It also explores the influence of such Fante's predecessors as James Branch Cabell, author of Jurgen, on Fante's own fiction, focusing particularly on Fante’s early short story “To Be a Monstrous Fellow.” Key authors of Los Angeles fiction, from L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz) to Steve Erickson (Days Between Stations), are juxtaposed with Fante and his unique literary interpretation of southern California as presented in Ask the Dust.
Amid the Dust
Authors: Amico Miriam
Published: January 2021

“Amidst the Dust” pays homage to the author’s personal experience conducting research for her MA thesis on Italian-American writer John Fante. Her two months spent in Los Angeles—the city where Fante set many of his literary works—were crucial to developing a richer understanding of Fante’s perception of his identity as a son of Italian immigrants. The essay focuses on the trove of treasures archived in the John Fante papers at UCLA Library Special Collections, detailing daily encounters with manuscripts and personal notes, and reflecting on the nature of ethnic identity while drawing parallels between Fante’s experiences (and those of his characters) and her own journey.
John Fante: The Passion That Became a Festival
Authors: DiLello Giovanna
Published: January 2021

The John Fante Festival “Il dio di mio padre” started in 2006 in Torricella Peligna, a small town in the Maiella mountains of Italy’s Abruzzo province, where John Fante’s father Nick Fante was born. After making a 2003 documentary film about John Fante, Giovanna Di Lello founded and still directs the festival, which is organized by the municipality. In this essay the author explains her passion for John Fante and how over the years the festival has become a reference point for Fante enthusiasts around the world, featuring numerous writers, musicians, artists, and scholars from Italy, the United States, and elsewhere who come to pay homage to Fante and his works through lectures, concerts, and readings.
I Had Bandini: Reading Ask the Dust in Prison
Authors: Williams Joel
Published: January 2021

Williams recounts the true story of how he was well into his third decade of a 27-year-to-life prison sentence for murder when he discovered Ask the Dust. The gritty-poetic voice of the novel and its tragicomic treatment of the struggles of Arturo and Camila spoke so directly to him that his love of reading grew into a need to write, and he set to work crafting his own short stories. A serendipitous encounter with a visitor who put him in contact with Fante biographer Stephen Cooper turned into a long and transformative correspondence, mentorship, and friendship. The results: a book of short stories in French translation entitled Du sang dans les plumes, brought out in 2012 by the Paris publisher 13E Note Editions; and then, after 28 years behind bars, parole and freedom.
Writing in the Dust
Authors: Rifkin Alan
Published: January 2021

In this elegant and insightful piece of literary journalism, Alan Rifkin offers a sweeping account of how John Fante’s Ask the Dust has come to be a touchstone among contemporary writers in Los Angeles and southern California and a wellspring of the region’s literature. Combining his own personal journey as a writer of fiction and non-fiction with a survey of the works of such authors as Steve Erickson, Carolyn See, Joan Didion, Salvador Plascencia, Kate Braverman, and others, Rifkin traces a line connecting all of them to Fante’s signature work and its dreamlike image of the metropolis: “Every Los Angeles writer at the outskirts of vision feels a connection to Ask the Dust, the 1939 novel that, more than any other, seems to weep over this city’s corpse in the ecstasy of possessing it.”
How Hitler Nearly Destroyed the Great American Novel
Authors: Holiday Ryan
Published: January 2021

Investigative journalist Holiday scrutinizes the archival record to clarify the collision of historical forces that long haunted the trajectory of Ask the Dust. Informed by primary research into the John Fante papers at UCLA Library Special Collections and beyond, this essay explains how in falling victim to political pressures of the Second World War, the novel gains significance that remains relevant to our own age today. Before Mussolini’s fascist censors targeted Fante’s writings, agents of Adolf Hitler were hijacking the attention of Fante’s editor and draining the assets of his publisher for releasing an unauthorized, unexpurgated edition of the dictator’s notorious Mein Kampf in a legal case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The issues involved in that case and their effects upon Ask the Dust teach us as much about Fante’s day and age as about our own era of alt-right provocateurship and #atnoplatform.
Interview with Robert Towne
Authors: Rabin Nathan
Published: January 2021

In this interview, legendary Hollywood screenwriter Robert Towne explains how discovering Ask the Dust influenced his writing. The novel’s depiction of 1930s Los Angeles and the era-specific dialogue of its characters helped inform his writing of the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Chinatown (1974). Wishing to go on and adapt Ask the Dust to the screen—a process that would end up taking decades—the young Towne sought out the novel’s aging, ill, and irascible Fante, earning a hard-won friendship that in his own advancing years Towne recalls with affection.
Letters from Los Angeles
Authors: Louter Jan
Published: January 2021

In this series of letters written to a friend back home in the Netherlands, Dutch filmmaker Jan Louter describes the time he spent in Los Angeles making his 2001 documentary A Sad Flower in the Sand. Equal parts meditation on Ask the Dust and impressionistic travelogue throughout the city and as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the letters give voice to Louter’s deep appreciation of John Fante’s art. Rich with sketches of such other important people in the Fante orbit as John’s wife Joyce, their son Dan Fante, and screenwriter Robert Towne, the writing in these letters conveys a penetrating European perspective on Fante’s masterpiece and a profound sympathy for its wounded author.
“My Dear Bukowski,” “Hello John Fante”: Preface to Ask the Dust
Authors: Fante John , Bukowski Charles
Published: January 2021

This chapter reproduces two letters, first the one that John Fante sent to Charles Bukowski in January 1979 thanking him in advance for agreeing to write a preface to the forthcoming reissue of Ask the Dust by Black Sparrow Press, and then the one that Bukowski sent Fante in response the following month. The letters are followed by the original typescript of Bukowski’s now-famous Preface, which helped revive Fante’s novel after four decades in out-of-print oblivion.
Prelude to “Prologue to Ask the Dust”
Authors: Cooper Stephen
Published: January 2021

In this talk, delivered at the 2014 California State University, Long Beach, symposium celebrating the 75th anniversary of the publication of Ask the Dust, Cooper recounts the story of how he came to discover a remarkable letter, to that point unknown, written by John Fante in 1933. Addressed to fellow Italian American writer Jo Pagano, who like Fante had ventured west from Colorado to seek writing success in Los Angeles, the letter provides insight into the crippling doubts and frustrations that burdened the young Fante even as it reveals his deep-seated confidence that he would one day write a great novel. Published here for the first time, this letter prefigures another remarkable Fante letter, the one written in 1938 that is now known as the Prologue to Ask the Dust.