Samuel Butler's fantastic maps: Erewhon,the ‘sNew Jerusalem’, and the peri plus of Odysseus

‘In maps and scientific theories we presuppose that we have two logically independent factors, on the one hand the objects in the world and on the other our maps or theories which describe those objects. Without that distinction we would lose our notion of treating something as a map or treating something as a scientific theory. In contrast to this we would lose our sense of treating something as a work of literature or of the art of painting if we kept the object and its representation separate ...’ This very clear distinction, which usefully serves Padro's purpose of disputing Gombrich's opposition between seeing the represented object, and seeing the paint, nevertheless does not deal with the way maps may actually be used in works of art and literature. Svetlana Alpers, arguing that mapping belongs to the distinctively Northern or Dutch way of ‘describing’ in painting, has shown the complexity of the way maps may be inscribed in paintings: as maps-as-objects painted in detail, as part of the interior depicted, etc. They themselves may then be looked at as maps- or as represented objects or as paint.     

Copied with a difference: Ekphrasis in William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel

Abstract

It is no accident that most of the important critical literature on William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel appeared in the mid-1980s, the exact historical moment when critical theory finally converged with Williams' poetics. Following the lead of pioneering work by Joel Conarroe and John Dixon Hunt in the early 1970s, critics such as Mary Ann Caws, Marjorie Perloff, Henry M. Sayre, Wendy Steiner and Ulrich Weisstein were instrumental in developing a methodology for reading the intricate visual surfaces of Williams' poems. They saw the poems as verbal icons, theorizing a system of structural correspondences between poem and picture, and attending carefully to the syntactical complexity of the poems. In the heyday of structuralism and semiotics, critics focused almost exclusively on the poems as ahistorical linguistic structures, as highly patterned ‘visual texts.’     

Proxemics as a Reflection of Psychological Terror in Madame Bovary

The article's main thrust is to demonstrate how Flaubert's Madame Bovary is an outstanding illustration of how anthropological issues can readily lend themselves to artistic use. Setting out from a brief discussion of proxemics according to the anthropologist Edward T. Hall, the paper explores Emma's proxemic behaviour toward her environment and those she comes in contact with, in order to demonstrate that this behaviour in a form of psychological terror, leads the protagonist to her death.     

The Military Language Tutor (MILT) Program: An Advanced Authoring System

The Military Language Tutor (MILT) is a language tutor authoring system developed by the U.S. Army Research Institute (ARI). MILT gives authors the ability to develop tutoring programs with various functional capabilities, including natural language processing (NLP), two-dimensional, animated, microworld simulation, performance-based, instructional branching, presentation of most conventional types of questions and feedback, etc. Currently it contains two relatively elaborate and usable examples of lessonware on which authors can build — one in Arabic and the other in Spanish. Based on the interest of the Special Operations forces (SOF), we developed a proof of principal version of MILT's two-dimensional Arabic microworld which uses speech rather than keyboard input to control an animated agent in solving an authored problem. The speech is recognized using a Dragon discrete speech recognizer utilizing a relatively small modern standard Arabic speech model. It is this speech-driven microworld that was the primary focus of an evaluation performed at Fort Campbell, KY. This version of the MILT microworld is controlled by 70 spoken Arabic sentences. The limitations of discrete speech recognition means that spontaneous speech recognition is impossible and the expected utterances must be presented for reading. As a result, three of the Arabic sentences are written at a time on the bottom of the microworld screen and students read aloud the sentence that they wish to see executed. When such a command is recognized and executed, the system automatically replaces the sentences with another set of three, and so forth. The evaluation produced significant, positive learning effects and useful attitudinal information from students. As a result, the discrete speech recognizer in MILT is being replaced by a continuous recognizer, and the two-dimensional microworld is being replaced by a three-dimensional one.