Fractales identitaires et narratives

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2010

Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift 72: 38–66, 2022

Fractal recursivity describes the fractal-like projection of a pattern and associated evaluative framework on different orders of scope. The concept has been developed for the analysis of semiotic ideologies, but is here applied to mythology as a sign system. It provides a new tool for approaching echoes of cosmogonic events on a localized scope. The phenomenon is illustrated through cases in both narrative and ritual from non-Christian Scandinavian religion. The study reveals that fractal recursivity operates in relation to conceptions of time as organized into periods or temporalities. These are ideologically structured as governed by different ranges of what is possible, approached through Bakhtin's concept of chronotope. Fractal recursivity's transpositions can interfere with the chronotope in which they occur. Comparison with Finno-Karelian and Christian traditions shows that the phenomenon is shaped by ideologies through which the complexity and organization of temporalities are organized. Fraktal rekursivitet beskriver en semiotisk proces, hvorigennem et betydningsmønster og dets rammer for evaluering projiceres over på forskellige anvendelsesområder. Begrebet er udviklet til analyse af semiotiske ideologier, men anvendes her til analyse af mytologi forstået som et tegnsystem. Det udgør et nyt værktøj til at analysere ekkoer af kosmogoniske begivenheder på forskellige lokale niveauer. Fænomenet illustreres gennem en række casestudier med fokus på narrativer såvel som ritualer fra ikke-kristen skandinavisk religion. Undersøgelsen viser, at fraktal rekursivitet optræder i relation til bestemte opfattelser af tid, hvor forskellige perioder er ideologisk struktureret. Disse perioder (eller temporaliteter) beskrives med henvisning til Bakhtins begreb om kronotoper. Overførelsen af et betydningsmønster fra én temporalitet til en anden kan forstyrre den kronotop, som det overføres til. Sammenligning med finsk-karelske og kristne traditioner viser, at fænomenet er ideologisk formet med hensyn til den måde, hvorpå temporaliteter er organiseret.

2015

The articles in this section draw on the texts of plenary lectures presented at the seventh Narrative Matters Conference, Narrative Knowing/Recit et Savoir, organized at the Universite Paris Diderot, in partnership with the American University of Paris, from June 23-27, 2014. Philippe Carrard’s article, “History and Narrative: An Overview,” is a sequel to his latest book, Le Passe mis en texte: Poetique de l’historiographie francaise contemporaine [The Past in Textual Form: A Poetics of Contemporary French Historiography]. In this work, Carrard (2014) sets himself the task of examining, as a scholar of poetics, the writing protocols and conventions used by historians when they finally present the data they have gathered in textual form. One of the major questions of the work concerns to what extent the authors resort to narrative form: does the discourse of the historian always take the form of a narrative and, if not, under what non-narrative forms can it be structured? In the arti...

2005

I am also very grateful to all the helpful staff at the KTH School of Architecture, whose efforts range from administrational support to serving capricious computers. In the last few weeks of intense work, Staffan Lundgren at Axl Books made an offer as unexpected as it was welcome, to publish this thesis. I very much appreciate his brave enterprise and immense patience and support in this project. I am grateful to Alan Gibson who has been very helpful with last minute proofreading. My most beloved ones; my beautiful sister Tomasine, my mother Kim, my father Bengt and my grandmother Karin, are never far away and always helpful, supportive, full of energy and joy, in anything from accommodating the cats to stirring up a good stew and a good laugh, thank you for everything. Lastly; closest to my heart, Peter, for your brightness and glow, where I always want to be, and Joel, my best co-driver and most trusted swordsman. Finally, my greatest debt of gratitude is to Peter who has put so much skill, time and energy into the graphic design of this thesis, in the process of shaping it into the book in your hand. Here is where all the work put into this work, by all contributors, really matters-as it materialises. Enjoy! The plot is an invitation into a story. The plot offers entry to narrative space, structuring desire into a forward motion through the text. The plot is the instrument for navigation and organisation of any linear storytelling. As architecture aspires to organise space in time, the plot seeks to create meaning and order in narrative space and time. A significant semantic leap unites the dictionary definition of the modest bean plot to the great machinery of conspiracy. The ontological range from the cemetery plot to the control-instrument of the map is tantalising. It provides structure and progression in fiction, enabling the author to weave a web of intrigues and the reader to navigate the network of a story. In physical reality, the plot is a virtual instrument that brings together the field and its governing plan. To plot is to make a plan, map, or diagram of an existing object, as a portion of the earth's surface, or a building. 1 The plot signifies the measured piece of land, the planning or drawing to lay this down on a map, and

In 1962 Umberto Eco published his Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, in which he dealt with the televised space and its influence on the development of plot in contemporary narratives. The analysis of the aesthetic of television led him to highlight the exclusive capacity of television to transmit events in real time: Live TV.Eco affirms in particular that through the editing in Live TV, the role of choice completely changes in comparison to what happens in the editing phase within the cinematographic narrative. In Live TV, choice becomes a proper composition, a form of narrative, a means of unifying in a discursive way a set of isolated images within the framework of a wider set of events taking place at the same time and intersecting one another. This impromptu narrative brings with it the use of some recursive forms, which represent an important narrative tool enabling a weaving of the narrative space. Eco identified those recursive forms in some jazz figures such as the riff, the recursive form of which allows for the creation of an organic composition full of improvisation. A few years later, the importance of figures of this kindwas also noted by Deleuze-Guattari (1980), who posited that ritornello has an important function of organizing the exterior space, or chaotic space. Based on these considerations, this paper deals with the phenomenon of repetition, recursivity, and patterns, to bring these concepts into the construction of narrative spaces. The central point of the paper is that the birth of Live TV started a phenomenon of exteriorization of the inner data

2012

Écrire n'a rien à voir avec signifier, mais avec arpenter, cartographier, même des contrées à venir [1]

2020

This article presents and discusses João Guimarães Rosa as an outstanding Brazilian author whose literary work, especially Sagarana, expresses aesthetically different ways of lifeforms between human beings, animals, plants, and landscapes. Movement and transformations are the basic principles in which the melody of prose expresses itself as a language in and as motion. Although based in Brazilian culture, Rosa shows the conviviality of different logics which are not reduced to one myth of the Brazilian people, but produce multiple ways of coexistence between different life-forms and culture narratives. The translingual title "Sagarana" already alludes to the transitions between two languages, regions, and cultures: the Icelandic "saga-" and the Tupic-Word "rana" which means "similar" or "alike." The interpretation figures out the correlation of different provenances ("Herkünfte") which emerge from Rosa's craft of storytelling. In its center, the Sertão arises as a region of nature whose forces are connected with the life of human beings. As fractal of the world, it symbolizes Brazilian relations as a world of its own and at the same time as a part of the world of others. From this point of view the essay turns world literature upside down: it emphasizes on the one hand that the epoch of world literature since Goethe has come to an end and that the meridian has shifted to Latin America. On the other hand it can be observed that the lusophonic world between Brazil and Angola, Portugal and Kap Verde develops new perspectives on literatures of the world beyond the fixed coordinations of periphery and center. Rosa's ways of world making already shift the perspective from the local to the global as a miniatured model of a universe which reveals interpretations of a better understanding of the world as world fractals.

History and Theory Vol. 39, No. 3 (Oct., 2000)

A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, 2008

Peru, wrote the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, is nothing but "an artifi cial gathering of men from different languages, customs and traditions whose only common denominator was having been condemned by history to live together without knowing or loving each other" (1991: 35). Despite the many projects for political and social unity, abiding fault lines still cross Peru as well as many of the other postcolonial nationstates of Latin America. Legacies of the encounter of Amerindian, European, and African peoples under 300 years of colonial rule, these fault lines take the shape of ethnic, linguistic, material, social, political, and other differences. Sometimes they can run deep enough to put into question the very viability of the project of the nation-state. Can a nation be created out of men (and women) with nothing in common but an unhappy accident of history? Can the very political structure of the nation-state substitute for missing common denominators? Or can history itself, despite accidental beginnings, forge common denominators as forces of synthesis take place over time? What the four writers discussed here share is a common preoccupation with the internal differences of each of their respective nations. José María Arguedas and Augusto Roa Bastos grapple with an Amerindian society and worldview (or what is left with it), while Juan Rulfo addresses isolated rural spaces and Gilberto Freyre takes on the impact of African slaves and their descendants. If these differences emerge from deep histories, as the title of this chapter suggests, this is both because they are products of old and lasting structures dating back to the colonial moment and because they have not been on the surface, not immediately visible, to intellectual sectors rooted in the main urban centers in Latin America. For these intellectuals-preoccupied above all with participating in modernizing, cosmopolitan currents-the culture of the Amerindian, of the descendants of Africans, or the inhabitant of the hinterlands exist only as a relic of the past to be eliminated on the way to the future. Freyre, Arguedas, Roa Bastos, and Rulfo, on the other hand, linger precisely in those spaces that are heterogeneous to modernity and attempt, in their own ways, to rescue those c27.indd 461 c27.indd 461

Mémoires et patrimoines: Des revendications aux conflits, 2017

Commemorating the place between land and paper: a creative method for engaging with heritage objects [150 word summary: If we see heritage as a moment of action that is vital and alive (Laurajane Smith, 2006), how can we engage with it without fixing it in place or freezing it in time? Drawing on research from a range of disciplines including ethnography, architecture and geography, I propose a creative method for engaging with heritage objects that is generative and open-ended. To illustrate the method, which I call 'commemorative-writing', I will engage in an experiment with a heritage object that has personal significance to me: a collection of repetitive and fragmented writings by my Russian Jewish grandfather that were found at the back of a filing cabinet in 2008.]