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This article examines the role of the visual aspect of the text in the recontextualization of elements from the socialist realist canon. The study focuses on Mikhail Elizarov’s novels “Librarian” and “Cartoons.” It is established that, firstly, Elizarov consciously constructs his works according to the principles of literary cinematicity, with visuality serving as a prominent component. Secondly, visuality facilitates the integration of elements from the Soviet project into the narrative, expressed through spaces and objects. Furthermore, it allows for their recontextualization by embedding them within new contexts. Thirdly, the reactivation of spaces and objects is aided by the figure of the protagonist, who is presented through the technique of traveling. Fourthly, the narrative development of the novels bears similarities to socialist realist plots concerning re-education. Additionally, through the image of the protagonist, the relevance of the opposition between “eye” and “gaze” is emphasized, which in turn contributes to the actualization of ideas related to control and behavior modeling. The gaze of the Other, experienced by the characters, draws them into narrative structures akin to those found in socialist realism, compelling them to adopt specific roles — the role of a character burdened with socialist realist motives. Finally, it is noted that the protagonist’s distinctive position enhances reader identification and alters the very status of the Book.

The article is devoted to the problem of human identity in the modern socio‐cultural space. This problem is actualized in the middle of the 20th – early 21st centuries, when the development of technologies, including information and communication ones, became a trigger that changed the idea of identity formation and its further implementation as a static and/or dynamic construction. Using philosophical, hermeneutic and comparative analysis methods, the authors have revealed that identity ceases to be static and in the post‐industrial (post‐ technical) society it becomes fluid, diffuse and modeled. At the same time, the dominant locus of identity perception and its transmission becomes external, visual, which is associated with transaestheticization, capitalization of the image and lifestyle, marketing and symbolic strategies, initially applicable to the product, and then moving to the representative and communicative plane of human existence. The authors come to the conclusion that it is through the visual that the actualization of a person’s identity occurs both for oneself and for another/others (presentative level).

What is an identity? What do we really see and what is just a delusion (hayal)? Ancient Egyptians used the same word (iwen) to denote both the concept of color and the concept of being. For this ancient people, the word color meant people, beings and character at the same time. In order to give the Deity some extra strength and to emphasize its enigma, they used to say that this deity has a strange and indeterminate color. We have been poisoned by political anthropology for a long time. Red-haired people have been called “damn reds” since the Middle Ages, Chinese people are called “little yellows” nowadays etc. We are afraid of those we call small and green and who are “somewhere outside the planet”. Almost all authors of the comics choose the colors that will represent the negative characters in the story. In digital era, both color and being gain some new identities. What is humanity and how many shades does it have today?

In this article, I analyse three series of portraits by the Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman (2008-2022), as examples of radical resurgence and countervisuality. Monkman is known for his irreverent treatment of the European canon and representation of Canadian history. I first focus on two series which Monkman painted in 2008, as a response to the 19th century traditions of “portraits of Indians” and of “portraits of Indian warriors,” which Canadian painter Paul Kane and American painter George Catlin were famous for. With these 2008 series—acrylics and watercolours—which all include direct allusions to 19th century paintings, Monkman exposes the prevailing vision of Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race. These series also expose European visions of Indigenous sexuality by depicting two-spirit figures. Finally, I examine a recent series entitled wâsê-acâhkosak (Shining Stars) (2020-2022), as an instance of radical resistance since Monkman paints the portraits of contemporary Indigenous heroes who are part of an artistic and intellectual renaissance, within a larger political and cultural context of resurgence.

Writing and visuality are inextricably linked, and not only in non-alphabetic writing systems. How can we look at writing from a semiotic point of view, in order to render its complexity as a multidimensional object between transcription and representation, between notation and image? On the one hand, it may be useful to retrace the path already taken by the history of writing systems and the linguistic, philosophical and anthropological traditions on the subject, trying to reflect on writing as a "semiotic place"; on the other hand, it is possible to draw attention to the constant short-circuits and frequent contaminations that exist between image and writing, in graphics and calligraphy, as well as in poetry and the visual arts, and to try to describe their underlying dynamics.

The ways of representing violence and the role of this category in constructing socialist realist discourse are considered. The novel “The Librarian” by Mikhail Elizarov is chosen as the research material. It is established that the novel synthesizes the tradition of socialist realist novels and genre elements of popular literature, with the author placing emphasis on the representation of violence. The article highlights that violence in the novel is visual and cinematic. It is revealed that the protagonist of the novel plays a significant role in such representation, as the artistic world is demonstrated through their perspective. The article shows that the acts of violence presented in the novel become indexes of a particular “Gromovian” world and contribute to the visual and ideological transformation of characters, as well as an inversion of familiar oppositions. The authors of the article determine that the “Gromovian” world is formed around the Book, which actualizes ideas of the periphery and the “golden age”: it is here where violence becomes a legitimate means of communication with characters from both the “Gromovian” and ordinary worlds. It is noted that violence, both physical and psychological, forms fundamental oppositions in the “Gromovian” world, such as “own” versus “other”, “senseless world” versus “ideal world”, and so on. Finally, it is pointed out that through violence, the socialist realist plot about the “remaking” of the hero and their rejection of their own self for the collective “we” is realized.

This proposal presents a transdisciplinary pedagogical project on writing and illustration, framed within the formal teaching of Portuguese Language and Drawing subjects in the 12th grade of the Portuguese public education system. Innovative learning methodologies are proposed which aim to enrich educational experiences, to reinforce knowledge networks and social ties, to encourage paths of (self)discovery and to strengthen autonomous, complex, multidisciplinary and creative thinking. This approach, within the scope of the study of narrative-descriptive and poetic texts, was triggered by the handwritten notes the writer Eça de Queiroz kept in his cabinet and which constituted a fundamental strategy in his creative writing process. Thus, this project aims to develop in students from two different courses, the ability to freely transcribe something observed, to draw the visual imaginary after reading a colleague’s text, to produce an illustration with a free theme and style and to write a text based on a colleague's drawing, assuming subjectivity and identity as determining dimensions in the creation of intertextual relations. The virtual presence of Eça de Queiroz Foundation on social networks was used to access and work with the writer's own materials.

Writing about the lyric of Hans Bergel is an unusual challenge for the researcher. The Transylvanian author, who emigrated to Germany, is known especially for his prose texts; his lyric falls on the second place in his writings, but this doesn’t mean, that Hans Bergel’s poems aren’t successful lyrical texts. He describes in them a variety of places, in which the atmosphere and colours reflect not only the lyrical side, but also the narrative side of the author. Bergel approaches the description of a place contemplatively and reflects on its spiritual correlations. His astonishing wealth of thoughts manifests itself in an inspired stream of language to which he entrusts himself. Each of Bergelʼs literary statements has in common the musicality and richness of the language. In everything Bergel writes, one can find his entire personality, his rich experience with literature and the world. He registers the experiences, feelings and thoughts that he has recorded along his life path and he relives his experiences through language. Therefore a story cannot exist without the music of the language, a poem without philosophical and essayistic incursions. The research on the contemporary Transylvanian literature does not focus on this side of Hans Bergel, but there are a few philologists, who refer concisely to the lyric of the author. This paper with the above title would like to widen this research, by revealing new aspects of the work of Hans Bergel. The study of Transylvanian-German literature as minority literature has subject-related risks, because research focuses from the outset on a specific context and operates within a quasi-prescribed framework. One wonders, however, whether it is possible to break out of this framework with either traditional or modern means, and suggest new ways of addressing Bergelʼs work as a theme. This paper seeks to answer this question.

The article analyzes the concept of pollution as a deviation from the order or destruction of the meaning that ensures the establishment and reproduction of this order. We can talk about visual pollution only if we clarify how we see the meaning of visuality. To describe and reveal this meaning, the article proposes and develops the concept of gaze-returning, and it also defines a number of criteria that allow us to characterize some visual phenomena as dirt or visual garbage. The phenomenon of dirt in visible space is associated with the figure of the gaze and the possibility of investing in this space the experience of other senses and the body as a whole. The foreignness of these components of visuality can work to strengthen it — to articulate differences and fix them, and finally, to the technological reproduction of visual images; however, the same components contribute to the simulation of the gaze and the displacement of the living experience of vision by its technical signs, which is the reason of the problem of destruction of the visual order.

The International Exhibition of Music and Drama, Vienna 1892 was the only World’s Fair that was dedicated to exhibiting the development of music and drama history. The event’s conception follows the typical framework of nineteenth-century International Exhibitions. However, to a certain extent, Vienna 1892 was unique because of its attempt to display the music history of Europe and beyond. Therefore, this article investigates the showcasing of music histor(iograph)y in the Musikhistorische Abtheilung (musico-historical section) at Vienna 1892. First, it puts emphasis on Guido Adler’s role as the main curator and how he adapted his musico-historical concept of periodization to fit the spatial configurations of the exhibition space. Second, it renders a closer inspection of the interiors that were dedicated to composers. By using different concepts from cultural theory, the article examines the exhibition’s display practices, (visual) narratives, and arrangements of objects. previous article back to index

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) is the result of the collaboration between the photographer Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes. Both authors were Harlemites, DeCarava was born in Harlem and Langston Hughes made Harlem his home after moving from Missouri to New York City. This essay intends to explore the ways in which The Sweet Flypaper of Life depicts a representation of the neighbourhood of Harlem at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning. It will look at the power that DeCarava’s photographs and Hughes’ text have on creating a specific visuality of African American life, based on the Harlem community, rendering itself to be seen as a family album. The essay will firstly focus on contextualizing the creation and publication of The Sweet Flypaper of Life and afterwards offer a reading of the book using the family album metaphor as a form of agency in the acknowledgment of the African American community, focusing its representation in the aestheticization of beauty, thus distancing itself from the social and racial issues that were usually exposed.

This article contributes to the research program of “visual turn” in International Relations (IR). It specifically engages Ronald Bleiker's methodological proposal which is rooted in assemblage thinking and calls for a comprehensive and pluralistic understanding of the relationship between visuality and politics. In this framework, semiotics should play a prominent role in attending to the role of images in (co)constituting the international politics. However, we show that Bleiker’s conceptualization of semiotics and its concepts is rather vague. The text therefore discusses how we can approach semiotics in a more rigorous way, and how the concepts of 'symbolism' and 'symbolic signs' can be understood from a semiotic perspective inspired mostly by work of Charles S. Peirce. The text thus offers theoretically sophisticated answer to Bleiker’s call for semiotically informed visual analysis. We illustrate our arguments by discussing scholarship on the politics of jihadist videos.

The article considers a matter of current issue: studying ekphrasis within one piece of literature. The problem of a controversial approach to the definition of ekphrasis underpins the article. The prospective interdisciplinary solution of this problem is connected with the interpretation of the image of the artist Picasso by the playwright O. Bogaev. The intermedial component, the key image of Minotaur, and individual references to paintings are taken into account.

Although the sights and scenes produced are often ones of radical, dazzling estrangement, Medbh McGuckian’s poetry is primarily an art of the eye. The acts of looking and relooking, visualising and envisioning, motivate a great many of McGuckian’s expansive body of poems. By no means the exclusive sensory catalyst for her imagination, sight is nonetheless the central one. The pace of her poems is determined more by their arrangement of images and figures than they are by matters of sound, narrative, rhetoric, or rhythm. The intensely metamorphic quality of those images means that while a reader can rarely settle into a coherent lyric scene or argument, she can often get some purchase on McGuckian’s hermetic texts by tracking a poem’s morphing course of images. The Face of the Earth allows us to see McGuckian’s visual poetics with great clarity.

Since visuality in the (self-)representation of politicians and other influential figures has become an important part of political storytelling, we propose to use visual narrative analysis (VNA) as a systematic approach for its better understanding. VNA is particularly suited for this performative strand of interpretive analysis, as it does not study images in isolation but in the broader context of political narratives. By analysing different layers of communication (images, narratives, competing narratives) VNA enables us to identify internal contradictions that undermine political efforts of self-representation in contexts of global governance (e.g. multilateral diplomacy) and render them unstable and contestable. By analysing competing (self-)representations at a G7 meeting in 2018, we show how VNA can be applied fruitfully to the study of international politics and, second, how VNA can explain some of the reasons why one image became iconic (Angela Merkel as female leader of the liberal world), i.e. appealed to a wider audience, and others (focusing on Emmanuel Macron or Donald Trump) did not. While our article is primarily a demonstration of the methodological benefits of VNA for various research contexts in world politics, it also contributes to conceptual debates on the combination of visuality, narratives and emotions in changing practices of political storytelling.

Fire was an omnipresent element of premodern daily life, yet also an existential threat for urban communities. Drawing on a wide range of sources from contemporary eyewitness accounts to urban regulations from early modern Germany, this paper analyses town fires as multisensory events. It argues that urban dwellers’ senses were used to monitor the city space for potential outbreaks, alert the population to a fire, and move within a burning city. In connection with this, it discusses in which way urban spaces were constituted differently in an emergency situation. The contribution shows how positioning and movement shaped sensory perception and how perception, in turn, influenced the ways people perceived and used space. Town fires were not simply a time of disorder and sensory overload but situations when sensory and spatial ordering was tested and negotiated within political and social hierarchies.

In the contemporary society, media heroes are one of the most influential reference groups, which determines our perception of our own life in terms of happiness, success, justice, well-being, or, on the contrary, in opposite terms. The article is a review of two books: Salakhieva-Talal T. Psychology in Cinema: How to Make Heroes and Stories . Moscow: Alpina non-fiction; 2019. 349 p.; and Lilti A. The Invention of Celebrity. Transl. from French by P.S. Kashtanova. Saint Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing House; 2018. 496 p. The author believes that such works are necessary to broaden the horizons of the sociologist focusing on the development of social representations of happiness, justice and well-being: these works explain psychological and visual (the first book) and historical and media (the second book) prerequisites and tools for creating heroes as role models.

This article is a close reading of The Worshiper of the Image (1898), a tragic fairytale by Richard Le Gallienne — a symbolist allegory, whose female character is a coming-to-life visual image. This character is distinguished by polymorphism which manifests itself both in the story’s plot and in the character’s mythical autobiography, namely, in her reincarnations over centuries. The visual hypostasis of this character is L’Inconnue de la Seine — a popular and mysterious kitsch object, the mask of a girl who allegedly drowned in Seine in the second half of the 19th century. The interaction of the Image with other characters is determined by the concept of contagion, i.e., immediate power contact which alternates with abstract allegorical interpretations of the Image (considered, for example, as the embodiment of Art or Beauty); in the course of the narrative, the contagious image gradually displaces the story’s living characters, including the wife of the main character who uncannily resembles and doubles the image. These narrative and visual collisions reflect a precarious position of the visual image in the decadent culture — a conflict between the visual image and narration: the narration fails to provide an exhaustive ekphrastic description of the image and evasively multiplies contradictory impressions of other characters about it instead.

With the development of visual communication in the present age, the analysis and reading of visual texts in order to decipher the meanings and express their meanings is of particular importance. Critical discourse analysis, as one of the approaches that considers both the context of the text and the social context of the text, has made it possible to study discourses in works of art. The purpose of this paper is to introduce visual discourse or visuality as a way to analyze images, and its theoretical framework is dedicated to reviewing the critical visual methodology, which is an integrated model of Rose and Fairclough methodology. In the process of analysis, the Mellat Bank's advertising campaign has been visually criticized in order to elucidate its visual discourse based on the textual components of the images and the fields of its representation. The structure of technology, the configuration of images, and the social effects of visual components are discussed in the sites of the text, discourse action, and social action. The findings of the research indicate that the discourse function of this campaign is to highlight the value of money as national and cultural capital and to promote empathy and patriotism in the audience, during which the Mellat Bank changes its identity from a financial institution to a cultural institution.

The standard academic publication is often not an effective way to trigger the sociological imagination. This essay discusses an alternative means to invite people to think sociologically: a webcomic. In a collaboration between a sociologist and a team of comic artists, we created a webcomic (www.erccomics.com) to highlight insights from a research project on the social shaping of beauty standards in the transnational modelling industry. In the making of this Beauty comic, three "translations" had to be done: from analytical to narrative, from verbal to visual and from conceptual to concrete. We discuss how these translations were done and what we learned from this, including broader implications of these translations for (social) science communication, the public relevance of sociological research, the usefulness of thinking in different modalities and the fraught relationship between standard academic modes of communication and the sociological imagination.

Art has explored the problem of the body and corporeality in various ways. As a result, the body was subject to constant reinterpretations in the artistic practice – as an object of different narratives, goals, politics, a field of interference, an object of artistic fetishization, sexualization or desexualization. This text discusses selected aspects of the presence and experience of the body in visual arts, referring to artistic realizations and endeavours of radically different “nature”, and thus – referring to the ontology of the work of art. The main field of reflection is the transition from the representation of the body (media images of an absent body) to the presentation and presence of a real body as a material and medium of expression. In this context, not only the consequences related to the artistic mediatization and performatization of the body and corporeality are presented, but also the tensions between observing (visuality) and the experience of the mediatized body.

How to think the world, its plurality, coexistence in times of post-politics and after the global failure of theories of salvation? This article reviews theories of world, globe, sphere, worlding, planet, reflects on the most recent critiques of the concept of world and asks about the role of Mexican literature in the attempt to configure relational practices that allow thinking the plurality of worlds as the potential of a common world. The exploration of narrative (Glantz), chronicles (Monsiváis) and poetry (Moscona) demonstrates the critical work of literature in the face of the ambiguity of the media and its global connectivity. The singular, the fragment, the body, the voice, the affections are the starting point of a situated epistemology, critical of the global, and at the same time capable of relating to the plurality of worlds in order to think possible worlds as an ontological modality of a common world.

Most authors admit that code-switching is the process of switching different languages, their varieties, speaking styles, etc. Today the majority of people in the world are multilingual and often mix languages in different ways, which makes code-switching a quite common global phenomenon. Code-switching incorporates government, cultural, religious and network contexts, and the frequency of code-switching in such multilingual conversations is an indicator of the global dominance of multilingualism. Online communication fosters social communicative practices consisting of code-switching and marks the development of verbal behaviour of multilingual communities. Code-switching also affects language visuality, its images are tools for the social construction of reality. The developed verbal practices support effective communication and affect the expression of new meanings. The article aims at presenting the features of code-switching in digital communication with 8 examples of different length, topic and author, in which the native Lithuanians code-switched to English and used elements of the Internet language. These examples were taken from the social networks Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the authors analyzed the grammar, spelling and punctuation of both Lithuanian and the English words, the type and use of the code-switched English elements, special characters, abbreviations, emoji and other features of the Internet language. The results show that online communication is not entirely textual, with various means of text composition communicators make their code-switched English elements more visible and alter the appearance of messages. Such practices correspond to the features of social networks and seem to follow the popular Internet culture trends.

The paper focuses on the animated adaptation of Edgar Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” created by “United Productions of America” in 1953. The film is analyzed in the broad context of the studio’s aesthetical principles, its artist’s special affinity to the Bauhaus style and their interest towards Cubist and Surrealist experiments. “UPA”'s specific visual primitivism, or “limited animation”, is an experimental technique, closely related to the aesthetics of avant-garde, a quest for the new imagery and new rhythmic structure of a film. Making The TellTale Heart, its director Ted Parmelee and background artist Paul Julian created primarily a film about a madman, a split personality with distorted vision; this character perfectly matched the Cubist method and the idea of simultaneous “vision in motion” (L. Moholy-Nagy), actual for the artists of “UPA”. However, at the same time the studio was ready to meet the expectation of the mass audience, introducing the parallels with crime drama films. Parmelee and Julian strive to demonstrate multidimensionality and variability of psychic phenomena. The main visual images of the film are symbolically linked to the problems of power, control, time, and decay. The principles of collage, described by John Hubley, one of “UPA”'s leading artists, are employed in different techniques. First, the fusion of multiple emotions of Poe’s narrator is represented by sophisticated multi-layered images. Second, the eye of the obsessed narrator creates the chains of similar elements, which are successively combined through montage. The ending of the film visualizes the result of the crime, its reverse effect. It is impossible neither to hide nor to destroy the victim’s body, as it over and over returns in its reflections. The evil observer’s control is not overcome, but increases.

The coronavirus epidemic has provoked changes in most spheres of public life and has given rise to many ways of rethinking in matters of security, economics, social philosophy, ethics and so on. Against the background of discussing global issues, some kind of simple but not problem-free perspective is being lost – the spectacle of an epidemic from the spectator’s point of view. This perspective is the most obvious, but requires further analysis. In quarantine conditions, spectator’s contact with the phenomenon is entirely mediated by the screen determining his perception of the epidemic as a media phenomenon. Dividing the existential experience caused by the epidemic (direct one) and the spectator’s experience (indirect one), we put the former in parentheses and focus only on the latter, not being interested in the epidemic as a phenomenon, but in the “phenomenon of the epidemic on the screen”. It is the representation of the epidemic that is the problem: despite real-time broadcasting and the unprecedented “visibility” of the epidemic, quarantine visuality is eventless. Discussion of the epidemic captures the information field and its totality makes a claim to an exceptional event. However, its exclusivity is refuted historically, and eventfulness has no place in the philosophical sense. The spectacle remains – but its mode is specific. The brilliant analysis of spectacle by Guy Deborah and Jean Baudrillard in the case of a modern epidemic is inappropriate: the usual way of experiencing a spectacle in the case of an epidemic is changing – this spectacle is non-spectacular. The spectacle of an epidemic is a “quarantine spectacle”: isolated from “what is” and / or isolating spectators from it. Without displaying death (except in the form of mortality curves that have nothing to do with a specific death), the screen does not reflect what is happening inside the epidemic itself. The fundamental representativeness of death is complemented by a number of invisibilities – the invisibility of the unceremoniously buried dead, the invisibility of isolated patients, the invisibility of physicians protected by their suits and, most importantly, the invisibility of the threat. However, since the screen cannot remain blank, it is filled with images of scarcity and absence: the image of an empty city is decisive for quarantine visuality. The representation of the epidemic, despite the fact that it is broadcast online as a constant update of statistics, avoids both eventness and entertainment.

The article is devoted to the study of visual and graphic features of the E. A. Mnatsakanova’s texts in the book “Steps and Sighs” published in Vienna in 1982. The relevance of studying visual poetry is substantiated. A brief review of articles and dissertations, which highlight the work of the poetess, is given. At the same time, a significant gap was revealed in the study of her work - the poorly studied visual aspect in the presence of a layer of works in which the visual-auditory nature of poetry by E. A. Mnatsakanova was noted, which abandoned the traditional grammatical structure in favor of the traditional musical structure. Two types of visual-graphic techniques are considered that are most clearly manifested in the book “Steps and Sighs” - firstly, the location of the text on the page, among which the following techniques are highlighted: continuous writing of text, dividing the text into several vertical streams, fragmentation, indentation, spaces , holophrastic constructions and, secondly, typeface accidents, within which the use of foreign and uppercase fonts is considered. Comprehensive research methods led to the conclusion that the visual-graphic techniques used by Mnatsakanova are due to the visual-auditory nature of her work and the “stereo-scopic-phonic” thinking of the poetess. Also identified are three functions that the visual-graphic techniques considered by the author of the article perform in the text: organizing the sound structure of the poem with the help of indents, spaces, holophrastic constructions, meaning-forming, i.e. creating additional semantic accentuation using font accentuation and the function of holistic perception of the text, providing the possibility of multidirectional reading (writing solid text, dividing text into several vertical streams).

This study is aimed at discovering the connotation and denotation that can be interpreted in shop signs found in Banda Aceh. Additionally, it also sought for the visuality, spatiality, and gestures that can be interpreted in shop sign found in Banda Aceh. This study used the qualitative approach in carrying out the research process which is the critical discourse analysis. The subject of this study was the shop signs that can be found in Banda Aceh while the object of this study is all the texts, pictures, and symbols in the signs. The data collection was done by taking pictures of the shop signs. The data analysis was carried out by using coding analysis and a three-step analysis. The results show that the denotation found in the shop signs are mostly the shop name, pictures, and philosophical symbols. Concerning to connotation, most meanings carried out in the shop signs are culturally interpreted. Moreover, concerning the visuality, the color used depends on the shop types whether it is black and white to highlight classiness and youthfulness, colorful colors for baby shops, and appetizing colors for the desert shop. In regards to the spatiality, most of the important information is placed on the left and the center part of the board sign. This is in order to ease information recognition. Last, the gestures are rarely used in the shop sign. It was only found in a coffee shop which is the steaming coffee cup, flying balloon in baby shops.

This article will consider the motif of the frame — conceived of as a device which isolates and presents that which falls within its bounds — in two experimental British post-war novels (Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out and Ann Quin’s Berg, both published in 1964) as a means of drawing parallels between experimental literature and conceptual art in Britain during the 1960s. I argue that Brooke-Rose and Quin develop a heightened interest in visuality in the 60s, which, in the early works examined here manifests as a thematization of vision, and in later works provokes more overt visual experiments with typography and illustration. These novelistic experiments with visual technique take place within a wider context of increasing interdisciplinarity within art forms over the course of the 60s and 70s, which a cross-investigation of visual arts and literary experimentation helps to reveal. Quin’s Berg and Brooke-Rose’s Out form a complementary pair in terms of thinking through issues of presentation and representation. Berg — with its egocentric protagonist and the window frame through which he views the outside world — calls up associations with single-point perspective, the development of this perspectival technique in the history of painting (especially the fact that the technique was historically reserved for ‘important’ figures like kings). Out’s fractured, multi-perspectival narrative, on the other hand, resonates with cubist art and contemporary developments in cinematic editing (the techniques of the French New Wave), presenting a ‘natural’ frame formed by the overlapping branches of trees, underlining the text’s interest in visual patterning and complexity. Using Phillip King’s Window Piece (1961) as my main example from the visual arts, I discuss the reconceptualization of the frame by the experimental writers and artists of the period, looking forward slightly to Jacques Derrida’s conception of the frame in The Truth in Painting (1978), which signals a loss of faith in intellectual and disciplinary mastery. Derrida’s writing ‘around’ Art — with connotations of both enclosure and obliqueness — and his purposefully perforated frame which does not seem designed to contain anything, are akin to Quin’s and Brooke-Rose’s novels, whose frame motifs — rather than containing the images they are presenting — serve to problematise the idea of strict boundaries, borders, and in a more abstract sense, of remaining within presupposed categories of definition in general. As such, the novels end up enacting a sort of theory of their own, a theory of limits with bearing on both aesthetic and social contexts within their narratives.

Women and femininity have historically been excluded from representation in cultural production from the French Caribbean. This marginalisation is evident in public memorials throughout Martinique and Guadeloupe, which predominantly encapsulate and perpetuate narratives of (White) male agency and (hyper-)masculine resistance to slavery. This paper identifies three major typologies of femininity in Antillean memorialisation: women as national allegory, as passive supporters of heroic men, and as resistors in their own right. These portrayals will be analysed to reveal the allegorising and stereotyping of femininity, its instrumentalisation for the accomplishment of political goals, the objectification and eroticisation of the female body in these works, and its potential as a subversive irruption into the male-dominated domain of public memorialisation.

James Grover Thurber (1894–1961) is not only a famous humorist and cartoonist, but also an author of sophisticated psychological fiction, a thoughtful reader of Henry James and Edgar Poe, American and European modernist writers, etc. The basic conflict between male and female gender roles, vital for Thurber, is dramatically reflected in the visual and acoustic imagery of his stories. Thurber makes his male characters in a modernist way sensitive to “the sound and the fury” of the world. Thurber’s stories are based on the complicated psychological cases, e.g. the impact of sound on male behavior or the transformation of sound into visual images. The paper deals with James Thurber’s short stories of the 1940s that represent the mechanisms of power. The majority of the stories are dialogues between men and women (usually 2–4 participants) who reveal the connectedness of power and subjectivity. They are usually married couples; the women are housewives. The paper mainly focuses on the stories “The Whip-Poor-Will” (1941), “The Сane in the Сorridor (1943) and “Am I Not Your Rosalind?” (1947). There are some especially interesting cases, including various images of blindness (some of them based on Thurber’s biography) and peculiar “male” borderline states of mind challenging “normal” visuality (intoxication, hallucinations, dreams, etc.). Any rhythm is usually perceived as a source of terror. Thurber’s male characters are especially sensitive to the sounds made by animals and birds which symbolize the intrusion of the absurd into everyday life. On the contrary, women have onedimensional vision and are insensitive to most loud sounds; their mechanical perception reminds the automata of Romanticism.

The article deals with the key aspects of visualization of the thinking activity in the past and the specific features of such activities at the present stage in the context of visual and digital rotation. Seen as particularly problematic is the representation of cognitive activity in the cinema. It is shown that the Logos embodied on the screen earlier had either hung on the cross, or sat frozen in Rodin’s position of a person resting, which contradicts the dynamic nature of the cinema, where the meaning is to move at the maximum speed, using the most modern means of transportation. As a first step to the image of thought itself, kung fu films are presented, in which thought coincides with the movements, and the movements are inseparable from thought, since the kung fu master shows not feelings, but only flights of thought, which are also movements of the body. In the second stage, the era of the «Matrix» has been put forward, where, according to S. Zizek, practically any theoretical concept has been able to recognize itself. This is shown as the embodiment of the mind in the World Wide Web, perfectly coinciding with nonlinear natural thinking. The ornamentation of self-contained thought is explored, which gives rise to a design without an inner meaning. The alienation of history and reason from the creative and the thinking process is revealed, which makes it possible to visualize the qualitative leap from the political economy of the goods to the «political economy of the sign», within the framework of which the commodity and sign structures mutually transform each other, making possible the joint circulation in quality the single entity—goods-images possessing «sign exchange value». As a result of understanding the intensive development of design in the postmodern era of fundamental changes in meanings, meanings, values and worldviews and its role in modern media culture, it is asserted that design, similarly to economy as a whole, is ethically neutral, and the question of «form responsibility» is not removed. Involvement of the software field in various spheres of modern life, including design, makes it possible to correlate the terminological pair—upgrade and downgrade with the autochthonous Russian dichotomy of modernization—traditionalism, which creates a springboard for further philosophical cognition in the context of the logic of visual thinking. В статье рассматриваются ключевые аспекты визуализации мыслительной деятельности в прошлом и ее специфика на современном этапе в контексте визуального и цифрового поворота. Особо проблематизируется репрезентация мыслительной деятельности в кино. Показано, что воплощенный на экране Логос ранее либо висел на кресте, либо застывал в роденовской позе человека отдыхающего, что вступает в противоречие с динамичной природой кино, где смысл заключается в том, чтобы двигаться с максимальной скоростью, с по-мощью самых современных средств передвижения. В качестве первого шага к изображению самой мысли представлены кунг-фу фильмы, в которых мысль совпадает с движениями, а движения оказываются неотделимы от мысли, поскольку мастер кунг-фу демонстрирует не чувства, а только полеты мысли, которые одновременно являются и движениями тела. В качестве второго этапа выдвинута эпоха «Матрицы», где, по словам С. Жижека, узнает себя практически любая теоретическая концепция. Это показано как воплощение разума в мировой паутине, идеально совпадающей с нелинейной природой мышления. Исследуется орнаментализация замкнутой в себе мысли, что порождает дизайн без внутреннего смысла. Вскрывается отчуждение истории и рассудка от творческого и мыслительного процесса, что позволяет зримо представить качественный скачок от политической экономии товара к «политической экономии знака», в рамках которой структуры товара и знака взаимно преобразовыва­ли друг друга, делая возможной совместную циркуляцию в качестве­ единой сущности — товаров­-образов, обладающих «знаковой меновой стоимостью». В результате осмысления интенсивного развития дизайна в постмомернистскую эпоху фундаментального изменения смыслов, значений, ценностей и мировоззрения, а также его роли в современной медиа-культуре, автор отмечает, что дизайн, как и экономика в целом, этически нейтрален, что не снимает вопрос об «ответственности форм». Привлечение области программного обеспечения различных сфер современного бытия, включая дизайн, позволяет соотнести терминологическую пару — апгрейд и даунгрейт с автохтонной российской дихотомией модернизации — традиционализма, что создает плацдарм для дальнейшего философского познания в контексте логики визуального мышления.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the collaborative work of Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld from Dos guiones, specifically the play "¿Quién viene con Nelson Torres?”. It is a work-installation with pieces of handcrafted video montage that has as its thread the fragmentation of a larger work. As these are the first visual and textual incursions, one can see the beginning of what will be the critical, theoretical and aesthetic setting that Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld will develop over the years in various proposals for exhibition and joint work. This article will elaborate a critical proposal of three fundamental aspects for the critique of the image and text in "Who comes with Nelson Torres? Firstly, the politicization of the image will be observed through the montage as a political form of appearance and exhibition. Secondly, we will analyze those figures that remain outside the partition to expose "the unnamed" through a political and aesthetic stance. Finally, the concepts of spatiality and community in the work will be introduced to understand the process of dislocation of the space that is occupied by a multiplicity of singularities that make up a community.

As argued by scholars such as Lina Khatib, Ariella Azoulay and W. J. T. Mitchell, the production and circulation of images recorded by citizens played a crucial role during the 2011 Egyptian uprising. The use of images attracted global attention, mobilized action and actively performed the protests’ crucial aims to renegotiate the country’s body and image politics. The inherent act of protest in citizen photography and the “war of presence” spilled over into the act of archiving the protests as a form of resistance in itself. Consequently, a large number of online archive projects were launched during the 2011 uprising. What role does this large body of visual material and the online archives that store it play today, eight years after the outbreak of the uprising? With a focus on Egypt, this paper asks whether the dynamics of these archives “died” with the violent crackdown on public protest and the increased censorship imposed on citizens by the current military regime. Through an examination of archive “858: An Archive of Resistance” by Mosireen Collective, I propose ways in which digital archives containing images produced by civilians serve as sites on which the “war of presence” can continue to be fought within present-day Egypt.

The author interprets the figures of European workers and colonized Africans presented as slaves of capitalism and imperialism, the image that circulated in the social and cultural imagination in Germany after the Berlin Conference (1884-1885). The aim of the article is to introduce the concept of “counterimagination” and show how the image of the rabble became juxtaposed with a visualization of the black slave. The author argues that both figures were considered to be a real threat to the German social order and to German Kultur, and concentrates on the popular images of the “other” circulating in the German visual culture after 1880. The first part of the article is devoted to the aesthetics of the weekly satirical magazine Simplicissimus founded in April 1896. In the second part, the aggressive propaganda campaign against the Occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial troops is discussed. The author describes the mechanisms of envisioning black soldiers and points out the anticolonial reactions to the “Black Shame” campaign.

This paper analyses product packaging as cultural icons that condense and spread socio-cultural values. Some global brand's packs became unmistakable signs of those brands (take the contour bottle of Coca-Cola or the Nutella jar) but also objects able to communicate consumption values, cultural habits and collective usages. Through the analysis of some case studies from the fields of branding and marketing, this paper aims at investigating the semiotic processes that transform packaging from commercial and common objects to cultural icons. The main idea is that intermedial translations and interdiscoursive migrations are the fundamental mechanisms involved in this processes of iconization (with specific packaging items moving from the field of branding to those of arts, music, movies, design, fashion).

Interest of the authors focuses on the process of introduction and test of different types of virtual reality in sphere of mass media. In the framework of the active integration and update of new digital technologies whose development is pushed by technogenic revolution, media industry becomes a kind of platform to test innovative projects which brings the dynamics to development of the civilization based on digital economy. Currently the most prospective innovations are artificial intelligence, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). VR considered as a new communicative format introduces fundamental changes to the media system, demands to review radically the approaches of production and consumption of media content and causes conflict situations. That is why theoretical understanding and description of those changes is required and should be based on interdisciplinary approach. The purpose of the article is to highlight and update social aspects of VR implementation, initiate the discussion what is relevant for number of humanitarian scientific studies.

This paper is an extract from Geopolitics of the Visual City (2015), published in Japanese by the sociologist Yoshimi Shunya, in which the author draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Jonathan Crary to explore not how people’s gaze has been reconstructed in modern times, but how the reorganisation, redistribution and disciplining of the gaze fundamentally informs the way modernity is experienced in cities. The aim is to document a veritable epistemological change: namely, that the city has ceased being driven by architectural principles and now conforms to the demands of visual media.

I aim to reflect in this article how the representational regimes are formed and operate from the visual culture and, especially, I try to discuss the German Colonial Society visual politics. I claim, in the first place, that the use of stereotypes in the incessant and repetitive work of certain representational practice to determine an exclusive meaning about certain theme is one of the basis to the production and reproduction of such effort. In this case, I work with the concept of ‘ethnographical gaze’ in the visual production of the absolute otherness of the African subject. Secondly, I aim to point how the meanings that are thought to be rigid suffer important semantic changes. Finally, I present in which ways those images circulated amidst the German imperialist politics of the twentieth century.

En la poesía hispánica el autorretrato conoció su auge en el Barroco y el Modernismo. Existe, además, una tradición femenina del género en la que sobresalen autoras como Sor Juana y Delmira Agustini. En este trabajo se propone una lectura de tres poemas de Amanda Berenguer (Montevideo, 1921-2010) en los que la poeta se autodescribe en distintas etapas de la vida, mientras transita respectivamente su cuarta, sexta y octava década. Su objetivo es confrontar las diversas estrategias de autofiguración que presentan estos textos, atendiendo a los tópicos, isotopías y procedimientos derivados de las tecnologías de la imagen que ellos manifiestan. In Hispanic poetry, the self-portrait reached its peak during the Baroque and Modernismo. There is a feminine tradition of the genre, which includes such authors as Sor Juana and Delmira Agustini. In this article, I propose an interpretation of three poems by Amanda Berenguer (Montevideo, 1921-2010) in which the poet describes herself in different periods of her life: during her forties, her sixties and her eighties. The aim is to confront the various strategies of self-figuration in these texts taking into account the topics, isotopies, and procedures derived from the technologies of the image that they include.

This study aims to carry out an initial analysis of how the Brazilian woman image is shaped by a discourse that is historically constructed and reinforced by colonial photography. This visuality has endured through the ages and represents a form of contemporary colonialism, as it is characterized by an identity reductionism disguised as a global ideology. The possibility of paradox prevalence in these speeches is analyzed through a critical view of the work of André Cepeda and Miguel Valle de Figueiredo, Portuguese photographers who has produced photography artwork about the Brazilian woman. In these images, the construction of a visual concept of Brazilian women revealed underlying statements supported by their perceptions and experiences, as well as in generalized beliefs. Thus, it was concluded that the understanding of the image of Brazilian women as portrayed by those photographers shows itself covered of brand new colonizing processes in which the Brazilian woman’s image is linked with a sense of an available and sensual body, imbued with the concept of a colonial body that still persists in contemporary imagery.

Japan's modernization entailed, amongst other things, a new distribution of the sensible and the privileging of visuality by the state’s regimes of power and knowledge. Larger historical and technological forces demanded the specialization and commodification of the senses: photography and film froze sight and detached it from the totality of experience, while the radio, the phonograph and the telephone separated hearing from seeing. It is tempting to see literature and especially the modernist movement of Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari and Kataoka Teppei from the 1920s as a site of resistance against these historical processes and the gradual specularization of experience: after all, they called themselves “shinkankaku-ha”, “New Perceptionists”. Close readings of their fictional and critical texts, however, reveal a much more ambiguous stance. Kankaku (“sensation”, “perception”, “sense impression”) emerges as purified from the fleshy materiality of the body and reduced to the visual only. Regardless of whether they wrote on literature or on film, the modernists emphasized a new sensation that was free from the mediations of the writer’s psyche, in the case of literature, and purged from intertitles and the narration of the benshi, as far as cinema was concerned. Their ideas about sensation and perception resonated with the so-called “pure film movement” (jun’eigageki undō) from the 1910s and with later debates on “absolute cinema” (zettai eiga), which argued for a disembodied, intensely absorbed spectatorship that focused on the visual. The fragmented syntax, distorted temporalities and deinteriorized characters of Kawabata and Yokomitsu owe a lot to technologized visuality. This alienation of the self and its split into pure consciousness and objectified body, motifs that we find in both writers, could be ideologically problematic.

In the mid-19th century, John Ruskin, apologist for the poetics of the innocent eye, advocated a break with academic Realism. A century later, Gombrich and Goodman criticized Ruskin's Romantic subjectivism from the position of High Modernism. Consequently, the "Enlightenment" approach in teaching visual arts became stronger. Recently, some teaching specialists have been trying to inaugurate the term, immersiveness, in place of visual arts language for the purpose of introducing contemporary art into the syllabus. This paper examines the relation between "the innocent eye myth" and topical approach of "immersiveness" within the framework of educational objectives and methods in contemporary teaching.

On the example of the ethically controversial photographs made by Zbigniew Zielonacki from the public trial and execution of Arthur Greiser, the Nazi deputy in the Wartheland, the author demonstrates the visuality of local memory at the intersection of the narrative and non-narrative, private and public, individual and collective sphere. The photographs have become an inherent element of Poznań inhabitants’ memory of World War II and its outcomes, although they did not fit any of the emerging main war narratives.

The early Soviet picturebook arose in an age of propaganda that conceived of children’s literature as a “forgotten weapon” in the battle to train a new populace to inhabit the new post-revolutionary world. For this reason, one can detect a variety of rhetorical aims in early Soviet picturebooks. This article examines visual and verbal self-referentiality in Russian avant-garde picturebooks along aesthetic, educational, and political axes, focusing first on avant-garde self-referentiality evident in works by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Daniil Kharms that typify the avant-garde movement and then turning to picturebook self-referentiality exemplified in works by Samuil Marshak and Ilya Ionov, which reflect increasing consciousness of the picturebook as genre. It argues that avant-garde self-referentiality must be considered within a broader avant-garde context, while the peculiarities of picturebook self-referentiality in this period illustrate the establishment of the early Soviet picturebook as a new branch of culture, as well as material conditions, cultural shifts, and power consolidation after the revolution. Early Soviet picturebooks employ the child reader in building a vision of the future, although the nature of that world and of the child fit to be its citizen diverges widely, showing how this time period represented a significant aesthetic and political crossroads.

Relevance of the study is predetermined by total visualization of modern cultural space that leads to emotional alienation from the majority of visual objects, including art facilities. Being in this context, museums have to adapt new visual strategies to interest a viewer and to build a new interaction space. It was ascertained (through the example of Yad Vashem) that the use of interactive tools provided by Internet technology promotes this goal implementation. In addition, you can see how museum architecture affects and determines to a great extent the concept of museum space, which is also an additional means to update a viewer's attention. It is evident that the very nature of exposing objects is transformed - a monologue structure is replaced by a dialogue and linear object representation is replaced by non!linear concept.

Relevance of the study is predetermined by total visualization of modern cultural space that leads to emotional alienation from the majority of visual objects, including art facilities. Being in this context, museums have to adapt new visual strategies to interest a viewer and to build a new interaction space. It was ascertained (through the example of Yad Vashem) that the use of interactive tools provided by Internet technology promotes this goal implementation. In addition, you can see how museum architecture affects and determines to a great extent the concept of museum space, which is also an additional means to update a viewer's attention. It is evident that the very nature of exposing objects is transformed - a monologue structure is replaced by a dialogue and linear object representation is replaced by non!linear concept.

In this article, I analyze the 2013 video game BioShock Infinite as a popular site for the visual display of (in)justice and (im)morality. I contend that it is not so much the game’s ludic elements but its visuality that most forcefully makes a compelling argument against the oppression and discrimination found in the game’s fictional world, the city of Columbia. The game’s visual elements—as part of its larger plot, its narrative background, and the way history is depicted—particularly work to highlight racial and social injustice at the core of Columbia’s society. In turn, the game suggests to draw parallels between these fictional representations and actual US society at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This theoretical-conceptual study highlights issues and debates related to food under a socio-political and cultural perspective, from different audiovisual media - cinema, TV, reality shows and Internet videos. The article focuses particularly on movies that mobilize the food as a transversal axis of the plots. The idea is to complexify food as a visual theme and as a sensorial strategy.

This essay addresses the philosophical and epistemological aspects of spatialization of the field of vision as manifested in two of the most cutting-edge innovations in the field of head-mounted displays (HMDs): Birdly and EyeSect. The notion of space in both installations is problematized. Birdly re-enacts the familiar ways of envisaging the Cartesian model of space: a point of origin is determined and, hence, the construction of space itself with its three redefined dimensions is established—the (anchor point of) certainty is given by the apparatus itself. With EyeSect, however, the field of vision disintegrates. This paper asserts that there is no fixed point of origin from which space can be constituted. Using a Deleuzian analysis of “nomad sciences,” this point is exposed—through the unconstrained operation of the cameras in perpetual motion—as an imaginary, unstable point of reference. While Birdly recreates a unified space through an apparatus that affords certainty, EyeSect disintegrates both the body, as the point of origin, and the “natural” perception of space, suggesting that a complete integration of these two notions is illusory at best.

In this paper a review of two basic concepts is carried out: scenery and landscape integration, proposing a new concept: “visuality”, alternative to the classical “visibility” used in landscape studies related to mining activity, which explores the qualitative aspects that define the visual relationships between observer and environment. In relation to landscape integration studies, some reflections on substantive issues are made which induce certain prejudices at the time of addressing the issue of mining operations landscape integration, and some guidance and integration strategies are formulated. In the second part of the text, a new approach to the landscape integration of mines and quarries is raised, closely linked to the concept of visuality which are based on a basic goal: the re-qualification of the place, and give innovative answers to re-qualify the place and show how to catch the opportunity in the deep transformation generated by the development of mining activities. As a conclusion, a case study is presented in the last section, the landscape integration study conducted on marble exploitations Coto Pinos (Alicante, Spain), considered the largest ornamental rock quarry in Europe.