Did George Berkeley think about the sounds of words? In his extraordinary 1912 work A History of English Prose Rhythm, the literary critic and prosodist George Saintsbury implies that such was indeed the case.1 Berkeley, more familiar to us as an idealist philosopher and as Bishop of Cloyne from 1734 to 1753, was also the author of a number of strange and often surprising texts. Saintsbury quotes, and metrically scans, one such work in his History.Saintsbury’s approach here, as elsewhere in (...) the book, is to impose on the fluidities of prose the kind of structured scansion usually reserved for poetry—by arranging sentences into “feet” and marking whether a syllable carries a stress or goes unstressed. As... (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 1, Page 1-3, 01Mar2011.

This paper uses the locale theory approach to topology. Two descriptions are given of all locale limits, the first description using suplattice constructions and the second preframe constructions. The symmetries between these two approaches to locale theory are explored. Given an informal assumption that open locale maps are parallel to proper maps we argue that various pairs of locale theory results are ‘parallel’, that is, identical in structure but prove facts about proper maps on one side of the pair and (...) about open maps on the other. The pairs of results are: pullback stability of proper/open maps, regularity of the category of compact Hausdorff/discrete locales, and theorems on information systems. Some remarks are included on a possible formalization of this parallel as a duality. (shrink)

Neoclassical and Romantic verse cultures are often assumed to sit in an oppositional relationship to one another, with the latter amounting to a hostile reaction against the former. But there are in fact a good deal of continuities between the two movements, ones that strike at the heart of the evolution of verse forms in the period. This Element proposes that the mid-eighteenth-century poet Mark Akenside, and his hugely influential Pleasures of Imagination, represent a case study in the deep connections (...) between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Akenside's poem offers a vital illustration of how verse was a rival to philosophy in the period, offering a new perspective on philosophic problems of appearance, or how the world 'seems to be'. What results from this is a poetic form of knowing: one that foregrounds feeling over fact, that connects Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and that Akenside called the imagination's 'pleasures'. (shrink)

This paper examines the apparent contradictions between the use of the fragmented close-up in Fernand Léger's film Ballet mécanique and his depiction of the cohesive face in his painting in the early 1920s. I argue that this paradox stems from Léger's seeing, in certain pre-war movements whose aesthetics were premised on fragmentation, an endorsement of the supreme value of technology and modernity to the human subject, and of the suborning of that subject to industrial modernity, with all the catastrophic human (...) consequences that were then witnessed in the First World War. These “aesthetics of fragmentation” are then compared and contrasted with Purism's post-war reconciliation of “man” as a cohesive being, achieved through its conservative revision of modernist aesthetics. This critique is effected through the “portmanteau” of Ballet mécanique, which is effectively an assemblage of different pre-war modernist aesthetics contrasted with Purist depictions of cohesive form. (shrink)