Sexing up the city in the international beauty contest: the performative nature of spatial planning and the fictive spectacle of place branding

This paper responds to recent calls for more academic research and critical discussion on the relationship between spatial planning and city branding. Through the lens of Liverpool, the article analyses how key planning projects have delivered major transformations in the city's built environment and cultural landscape. More specifically, in concentrating on the performative nature of spatial planning it reveals the physical, symbolic and discursive re-imaging of Liverpool into a 'world class city'. Another aspect of the paper presents important socioeconomic datasets and offers a critical reading of the re-branding in showing how it presents an inaccurate representation of Liverpool. The evidence provided indicates that a more accurate label for Liverpool is a polarised and divided city, thereby questioning the fictive spectacle of city branding. Finally, the paper ends with some critical commentary on the role of spatial planning as an accessory to the sophistry of city branding.

La zone fictive de l'infra-droit : l'intégration des règles administratives dans la catégories des textes réglementaires

Un résumé en anglais est également disponible.

L'oeuvre d'art fictive dans le roman contemporain : immersion, intermédialité et interaction.

Ce mémoire s’intéresse à la présence des œuvres d’art fictives dans le roman contemporain. Leur description précise remet en question les codes de la représentation et soumet le lecteur à une autre forme d’expérience face à l’œuvre d’art. C’est à travers les concepts d’immersion, d’intermédialité et d’interaction que la fiction de l’œuvre d’art dans le texte sera ici abordée à travers trois différents romans, soit The Body Artist de Don DeLillo, La Carte et le territoire de Michel Houellebecq et Œuvres d’Édouard Levé. La transformation de l’expérience de lecture suggère un renouvellement de l’esthétique littéraire, accentuant l’importance de la participation du lecteur dans la démarche créatrice, et ouvrant les possibilités de la transmission de l’art contemporain. Les dispositifs propres au récit sont mis de l’avant pour intégrer le médium visuel, et ainsi questionner le rapport à l’attribution du sens de l’œuvre d’art, à son interprétation et à sa perception. Le présent mémoire tentera de proposer des possibilités pour l’art contemporain de se manifester à l’extérieur des institutions muséales traditionnelles, permettant ainsi de considérer l’immersion littéraire comme étant non seulement une expérience de lecture, mais aussi une approche face à l’art visuel.

The integration of figurative language and static depictions: an eye movement study of fictive motion

Do we view the world differently if it is described to us in figurative rather than literal terms? An answer to this question would reveal something about both the conceptual representation of figurative language and the scope of top-down influences oil scene perception. Previous work has shown that participants will look longer at a path region of a picture when it is described with a type of figurative language called fictive motion (The road goes through the desert) rather than without (The road is in the desert). The current experiment provided evidence that such fictive motion descriptions affect eye movements by evoking mental representations of motion. If participants heard contextual information that would hinder actual motion, it influenced how they viewed a picture when it was described with fictive motion. Inspection times and eye movements scanning along the path increased during fictive motion descriptions when the terrain was first described as difficult (The desert is hilly) as compared to easy (The desert is flat); there were no such effects for descriptions without fictive motion. It is argued that fictive motion evokes a mental simulation of motion that is immediately integrated with visual processing, and hence figurative language can have a distinct effect on perception. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Jogging alongside or bumping off? oral history and fiction in dialogue

This paper emerges from my practice-led PhD thesis investigating the ways fiction writers can enter a dialogue with the project of oral history in Australia. In this paper, I survey the current literature in order to identify the status of fiction within the practice of oral history in Australia. I argue that oral historians and fiction writers are, among other things, both concerned with understanding subjectivity. I consider how one of the specific qualities of fiction, that of character, can provide a space to explore subjectivity, and rely on my own writing practice in order to demonstrate how oral history theory can enrich fictive writings. This paper, while positioned in the field of oral history, exists within a wider debate around how the past can legitimately be represented; I argue oral historians and fiction writers can enter a dialogue around shared concerns.

Marking out the pitch : Defining the soccer fiction genre

The fiction of football, or soccer as it is commonly known in both the US and Australia, has a long and deep history. Despite this, there is still academic uncertainty as to whether it qualifies description as a distinct fictive genre. This paper seeks to address this question. It brings a genre analysis approach to the football fiction canon. Starting with definitions of what constitutes football fiction and genre, the paper goes on to distinguish and aggregate common trends, tensions and divergences and identify emerging and popular movements within football fiction. The paper will then assess football fiction’s status as a discrete genre.

Paris 1947 : The woman of fashion

Paris 1947 is the site of one of twentieth century fashion’s fictive highpoints. The New Look combined drama and poetics through an abiding rhetoric of elegance. In doing so it employed traditional modes of femininity, casting the woman of fashion in the guise of an ambiguous ‘new’ figure: half fairytale princess, half evil witch. This fashionable ideal was widely disseminated through key photographic representations, Willy Maywald’s 1947 image of the Bar Suit being a case in point. It was precisely such mythic formulations of ‘woman’ which Simone de Beauvoir was to take to task just two years later with the publication of The Second Sex. Driven by frustration with the status quo of real women, de Beauvoir recognised the role of fictive representations, both textual and visual in defining women. This paper reads key sections of The Second Sex through a comparative analysis of two iconic images of French women from 1947; Cartier-Bresson’s classic portrait of de Beauvoir and Willy Mayhold’s spectacular evocation of Christian Dior’s New Look. Cued by a compelling range of similarities between these images this paper explores links between fashion, feminism and fiction in mid-century French culture.

Photography & Fictions: Locating Dynamics of Practice

What happens to photographic truth when it is thwarted, subverted, stretched and even outwitted? The photography presented in this book provides a range of responses and practices- from the blatant to the exquisitely subtle- and all in the name of fiction. With full-colour images, Photography & Fiction: locating dynamics of practice illustrates and explains the latest issues and ingenious creativity involved in making pictures. The book is the consequence of a significant gathering of photographers, curators, and academics during the 5th Queensland Festival of Photography. Its themes include Fiction-as-Truth, deceptive photography, technology’s fictive potential, as well as the highly personal and inner worlds of human experience.

Les formes d’adresse dans un corpus de films français et leur traduction en finnois

The use of forms of address in French films and their Finnish translations The use of forms of address constitutes an integral part of speakers’ communicative competence. In fact, they are not only used to assign to whom the speech is addressed, but also to construct the relationship between speakers. However, the choice of a suitable form is not necessarily evident in modern, pluralistic society. By the notion form of address, I refer to pronouns of address (tu vs. vous) and different nouns of address like names, titles (Monsieur, Madame, Mademoiselle), kinship terms, occupational terms, terms of endearment and insults. The purpose of the present thesis is, first, to study the semantic and pragmatic values of forms of address in dialogues of modern French films, and, second, their translation in Finnish subtitles. It is evident that film language is not spontaneous, but only a representation of authentic speech, and that subtitles are a written version of the original spoken language. Consequently, this thesis studies spoken fictive dialogues and their written translations. The methods applied in the study are the Interactional and Pragmatic Approach as well as Translatology. The role of forms of address in an interpersonal relationship is studied with dimensions of distance and power (Brown and Gilman 1960, Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1992), whereas the pragmatic dimension permits studying in particular the use of forms of address in speech acts (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2001). The translation strategies are studied with the help of Venuti’s (1995) notions of foreignizing and domesticating strategies. The results of the thesis suggest that the pronoun use in the studied films is usually reciprocal. However, the relations of power have not disappeared, but are expressed in a more discrete manner with nouns of address (for instance vous + Docteur vs. vous + Anita). The use of the pronoun of address vous seems still to be common, but increased intimacy is expressed by accompanying familiar nouns of address like first names. The nominal forms of address accompany different speech acts, but not in a systematic manner. In a dialogue they appear usually in the first speech act, and more rarely in the response, but not in both. In addition, they have an important role in the mechanics of conversation. The translators here face multiple demands, and their translations seem mostly to be a compromise between foreignizing and domesticating strategies.

Rauta ja Ristilukki : Vilho Helasen salapoliisiromaanisarja

Vilho Helanen (1899 1952) was a right-wing opinion leader in interwar Finland. But following the Second World War, the political situation in the country changed dramatically, and Helanen lost his job as well as his influential social station. He began to write detective fiction, and between 1946 and 1952 published seven novels (one had already been published in 1941). The novels protagonist is Kaarlo Rauta, a lawyer who acts as a private investigator. This doctoral dissertation analyzes the Rauta series from three different points of view. It investigates the extent to which the author s life and his strong political background appears in the series. The study also situates the series within Finnish society during and after the war. Finally, the study examines the Rauta series in terms of the genre conventions of detective fiction, that is, the study compares the Rauta series with other Finnish crime fiction and international crime fiction written during the 1940s. The Iron and The Cross Spider uses the term citizenship education when analyzing how Helanen implicitly continued his political teaching when writing crime fiction. The series includes a didactic register, which instructs the middle class in appropriate behaviour and manners, and the social roles entailed by gender. A special area of focus in this didacticism are norms of correct masculinity and femininity. The study devotes specific attention to the status of character in the series. The masculine detective and his beautiful wife are prominent, as is the fictive community and the tensions that criss-cross it. After the war, the Rauta series takes on a positive tone. Men can earn their place in society by fighting at the front, and after the war a homosocial bond exists between all the former soldiers. Women are shut out of the war experience. The detective hero has served in the war, but he is physically and psychologically untouched by it. The community is threatened by artists and immoral bohemians, but not the working class. Artists have affairs outside of marriage and abnormal sexual habits. The members of the upper class are also described as immoral in the series. Sadistic sexuality is often characteristic of the criminals, who are mostly femme fatales in the fashion of hard-boiled detective stories and film noir. Also, strong feelings have a negative connotation in the series, and showing them is forbidden behaviour. Men become criminals when they are insufficiently masculine or when they have not carried out their duty by fighting in the war. Helanen portrayed the communists, his political opponents from the 1930s, as criminals in his post-war series, but they were not openly represented as Russians or communists. Instead, Helanen used the cross spider as their symbol, a symbol which the readers of the time would recognize.

Lionhearts of the Playworld : An ethnographic case study of the development of agency in play pedagogy

This is an ethnographic case study of the creation and emergence of a playworld – a pedagogical approach aimed at promoting children’s development and learning in early education settings through the use of play and drama. The data was collected in a Finnish experimental mixed-age elementary school classroom in the school year 2003-2004. In the playworld students and teachers explore different social and cultural phenomena through taking on the roles of characters from a story or a piece of literature and acting inside the frames of an improvised plot. The thesis takes under scrutiny the notion of agency in education. It produces theoretically grounded empirical knowledge of the ways in which children struggle to become recognized and agentive actors in early education settings and how their agency develops in their interaction with adults. The study builds on the activity theoretical and sociocultural tradition and develops a methodological framework called video-based narrative interaction analysis for studying student agency as developing over time but manifesting through the situational material and discursive local interactions. The research questions are: 1. What are the children’s ways of enacting their agency in the playworld? 2. How do the children’s agentive actions change and develop over the spring? 3. What are the potentials and challenges of the playworld for promoting student agency? 4. How do the teachers and the children deal with the contradiction between control and agency in the playworld? The study consists of a summary part and four empirical articles which each have a particular viewpoint. Articles I and II deal with individual students’ paths to agency. In Article I the focus is on the role of resistance and questioning in enabling important spaces for agency. Article II takes a critical gender perspective and analyzes how two girls struggled towards recognition in the playworld. It also illuminates the role of imagination in developing a sense of agency. Article III examines how the open-ended and improvisational nature of the playworld interaction provided experiences and a sense of ‘shared agency’ for the students and teachers in the class. Article IV turns the focus on the teachers and analyzes how their role actions in the playworld helped the children to enact agency. It also discusses the challenges that the teachers faced in this work and asks what makes the playworld activity sustainable in the class. The summary part provides a critical literature review on the concept of agency and argues that the inherently contradictory nature of the phenomenon of agency has not been sufficiently theorized. The summary part also locates the playworld intervention in a historical frame by discussing the changing conceptions of adulthood and childhood in the West. By focusing on the changing role of play and art in both adults’ and children’s contemporary lives, the thesis opens up an important but often neglected perspective on the problem of promoting student agency in education. The results illustrate how engaging in a collectively imagined and dramatized pretend play space together with the children enabled the teachers to momentarily put aside their “knower” positions in the classroom. The fictive roles and the narrative plot helped them to create a necessary incompleteness and open-endedness in the activity that stimulated the children’s initiatives. This meant that the children too could momentarily step out of their traditional classroom positions as pupils and initiate action to further the collective play. Engaging in this kind of unconventional activity and taking up and enacting agency was, however, very challenging for the participating children and teachers. It often contradicted the need to sustain control and order in the classroom. The study concludes that play- and drama-based pedagogies offer a unique but undeveloped potential for developing educational spaces that help teachers and children deal with the often contradictory requirements of schooling.