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"Head Fiction."
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The man who lost his head
When a man discovers he has lost his head he tries several substitutes, but none is satisfactory.
Book
Walking with head-mounted virtual and augmented reality devices: Effects on position control and gait biomechanics
What was once a science fiction fantasy, virtual reality (VR) technology has evolved and come a long way. Together with augmented reality (AR) technology, these simulations of an alternative environment have been incorporated into rehabilitation treatments. The introduction of head-mounted displays has made VR/AR devices more intuitive and compact, and no longer limited to upper-limb rehabilitation. However, there is still limited evidence supporting the use of VR and AR technology during locomotion, especially regarding the safety and efficacy relating to walking biomechanics. Therefore, the objective of this study is to explore the limitations of such technology through gait analysis. In this study, thirteen participants walked on a treadmill in normal, virtual and augmented versions of the laboratory environment. A series of spatiotemporal parameters and lower-limb joint angles were compared between conditions. The center of pressure (CoP) ellipse area (95% confidence ellipse) was significantly different between conditions (p = 0.002). Pairwise comparisons indicated a significantly greater CoP ellipse area for both the AR (p = 0.002) and VR (p = 0.005) conditions when compared to the normal laboratory condition. Furthermore, there was a significant difference in stride length (p<0.001) and cadence (p<0.001) between conditions. No statistically significant difference was found in the hip, knee and ankle joint kinematics between the three conditions (p>0.082), except for maximum ankle plantarflexion (p = 0.001). These differences in CoP ellipse area indicate that users of head-mounted VR/AR devices had difficulty maintaining a stable position on the treadmill. Also, differences in the gait parameters suggest that users walked with an unusual gait pattern which could potentially affect the effectiveness of gait rehabilitation treatments. Based on these results, position guidance in the form of feedback and the use of specialized treadmills should be considered when using head-mounted VR/AR devices.
Journal Article
Memoria y posmemoria en El taller de Nona Fernández: la representación de la dictadura a través de la metaficción y la autoficción
Nona Fernandez (1971) is a well-known Chilean writer associated with the generation \"de los hijos\" [literature of sons and daughters]: writers born and/or raised during the dictatorship years, who started publishing in the post-dictatorship era. Most of their production is about the historical memory of their country's recent past. In the play El taller (2012), Fernandez reflects a particular chapter of the relationship between art, dictatorship, and memory in Chile: the case of writer and agent Mariana Callejas and the literary workshop she directed in her home/intelligence headquarters-torture center. This paper presents an interpretative analysis of how this episode –previously visited by a Pedro Lemebel's chronicle and by a Roberto Bolaño's novel– is revisited by playwright Nona Fernandez, who uses strategies such as metafiction, autofiction and literary hybrid genres to discuss memory from the contemporary scenic art.
Journal Article
Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction
Represents an attempt to apply the techniques of modern literary criticism to the fiction of the Elizabethan period. The author tries \"to determine what Elizabethan fiction writers were trying to do and how they did it.\"
Originally published in 1969.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
eBook
Beyond the Dutch Quota: Media Policy and Cultural Diversity in Local Video-on-Demand Production (2013–2023)
Starting January 1, 2024, a new Dutch investment obligation requires that streaming services with annual revenues exceeding 10 million euros allocate 5% of their turnover to Dutch content production. This policy aligns with similar obligations in countries like France, Germany, and Italy, which introduced tax-based investment obligations for streaming platforms before the 2018 revision of the EU’s Audiovisual Media Service Directive (AVMSD). The AVMSD established a 30% European content quota for subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms and permitted member states to implement revenue-based investment obligations to support local industries. Our article situates the Netherlands as a small-screen media industry and the base of Netflix’s first European headquarters. We contextualise the Dutch investment obligation within the evolving European media landscape, examining shifts in diversity and inclusion in Dutch VoD fiction productions from 2013 to 2023. We assess production trends by type and genre by critically analysing policy frameworks and production data from international SVoD platforms (e.g., Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+) and domestic steaming services (Videoland, NPO Start/Plus). Our findings reveal significant gaps in genre diversity and underinvestment in high-cost historical dramas and fantasy/horror/sci-fi series, highlighting a decade-long reliance on mainstream-oriented genres, including drama and crime series. This context underscores the importance of the new regulation in addressing these disparities and critically examines the requirements of the new regulation. Our article contributes to understanding the state of Dutch VoD production and evaluates the potential of the investment obligation to foster cultural and genre diversity in Dutch VoD fiction.
Journal Article
The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler
A concise and timely account of Hitler's—and fascism's—rise to power and ultimate defeat, from one of America's most famous journalists.
American journalist and author William L. Shirer was a correspondent for six years in Nazi Germany—and had a front-row seat to Hitler's mounting influence. His most definitive work on the subject, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is a riveting account defined by first-person experience interviewing Hitler, watching his impassioned speeches, and living in a country transformed by war and dictatorship.
Shirer was originally commissioned to write The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler for a young adult audience. This account loses none of the immediacy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich—capturing Hitler's ascendence from obscurity, the horror of Nazi Germany's mass killings, and the paranoia and insanity that marked the führer's downfall. This book is by no means simplified—and is sure to appeal to adults as well as young people with an interest in World War II history.
\"For nearly 100 years William L Shirer has spoken to us of fascism, Nazis, and Hitler . . . [He] tells the unvarnished truth as he experienced it . . . I figured this school-type book wasn't going to tell me anything new. But when I started reading, I realized that I wasn't reading for the facts anymore. I listened to his story and heard the urgency in his voice: a voice from nearly 60 years ago telling us the truth about today.\" — Daily Kos
eBook
Dusklands and the postcolonial turn
Anticipating Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) by four years, J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974) activated many of the intellectual currents that later developed into the transnational intellectual movement of postcolonial critique. Both works were aimed at deconstructing the intimate connections between colonial and discursive power, but while Orientalism declared a principal indebtedness to Michel Foucault, Coetzee’s critique was eclectic, including elements of post-Hegelianism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and the existentialist insurgent work of anticolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi. The fact that Coetzee distilled these currents into autobiographically-inflected fiction rather than theoretical critique, and its initial publication by Ravan Press in Johannesburg, might have limited the work’s international reach until it was republished by Secker and Warburg in 1982, but it was clearly ahead of its time. This paper argues that it is precisely the fictional enactment of this text that gives it power and lasting relevance in its acknowledgement of positionality, identity, and their relation to form.
Journal Article
'The Dancing Women Move Forward': Embodied Agency and Black Feminist Solidarity in Tsitsi Dangarembga's This Mournable Body
Black feminists, both in Africa and the Diaspora, have always used fiction as a tool for imagining agential subjectivity. Tsitsi Dangarembga is one such author utilizing both fiction and activism to reimagine agency and solidarity for Zimbabwean women. This Mournable Body (2018) centralizes protagonist's Tambudzai Sigauke's embodied reality through the skewed lens of poor mental health whilst also foregrounding the women of her community's struggle for agency. Through Tambu's body, misogynoir and neoliberal individualism are laid bare; yet her complicity with neoliberal regimes reveals an ethical struggle that contemporary feminism grapples with. This article reads This Mournable Body in Black feminist terms, attuned to neoliberal privations (Emejulu and Sobande 2019; Olufemi 2020), transnational solidarities (Mohanty 2003), and contingent agency in African contexts (Diabate 2020). I read for agential moments and tentative solidarities, in particular Nyasha's feminist workshop and the dancing women in the climactic scene (read as a moment of \"naked agency\" à la Diabate 2020), to show how Dangarembga's novel locates agential subjectivity within embodied acts. This article argues that the novel's embodied moments of Black feminist resistance mobilize a communal, radical Black feminism attuned to uneven global power structures and localized forms of resistance in African contexts.
Journal Article
Truth and Wonder in Richard Head’s Geographical Fictions
In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel writing, Richard Head explored the limits of verisimilitude associated with geographical discourse in his three fictions The Floating Island (1673), The Western Wonder (1674) and O-Brazile (1675). In them he argues in favor of the existence of the mysterious Brazile island and uses the factual discourse of the travel diarist to present a semi-mythical place whose very notion stretches the limits of believability. In line with recent critical interpretations of late seventeenth-century fiction as deceptive, and setting the reading of Head’s narrations in connection with other types of travel writing, I argue that Head’s fictions are a means of testing the readers’ gullibility at a time when the status of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, is subject to debate.
Journal Article
The Story of a Widowed Mother: The Mother–Son Relationship in The Record of So Hyŏnsŏng
This article explores the widowed mother figures in So Hyŏnsŏng rok 蘇賢聖錄 (The Record of So Hyŏnsŏng), particularly how a widowed mother successfully distinguishes herself as the head of the household through her relationship with her son. The story deals with the aspirations of mothers of elite yangban families who dream of achieving power despite the social limitations placed upon them. The Record presents the ideal mother–son relationship as both close and hierarchical. The closeness of their relationship enables the mother and son to achieve emotional unity when the boy is young. However, by demonstrating that she is more capable and has better judgment than her son, the mother ensures that their relationship remains hierarchical, enabling her to retain a superior position in the relationship into the boy’s adulthood. The story portrays the complicated relationship between a controlling mother and submissive son in a positive light, despite it being in sharp contrast to the compassionate mother and heroic son of earlier literary works. This article argues that Madame Yang, the widowed mother and main protagonist, reflects both the anxiety and aspirations of contemporaneous Korean women facing the major social changes of the 17th century.
Journal Article