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Andrew W. Mellon Penn Faculty Fellows
in the Humanities,
Julie Nelson Davis
Associate Professor, History of Art
Producing the “Floating World”:
Publishers, Artists, the Market and Ukiyo-e Print Culture
The city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) in late eighteenth-century Japan was strictly
regulated by the shogunate in a system where status informed social roles. For those with capital
and expertise, escape from the shogunate’s political reality was available in the “floating world”
(ukiyo), as it was known, in the pleasures of the theater, licensed pleasure quarters, and city
entertainments. Ukiyo-e, the “pictures of the floating world,” represented those diversions and
illustrated the fantasies of that alternate reality to a broad audience. Through five case studies
my project examines how that sphere was represented in print, demonstrating how the floating
world — by definition and in practice an alternate and virtual reality — was produced for profit
by artists, writers, and publishers for an increasingly urban audience.
Tsitsi Jaji
Assistant Professor, English
Downloadable Diasporas
“Downloadable Diasporas” considers how continental Africans’ use digital media to access popular music and other content, allowing them to engage with multiple black diasporas. I draw on Édouard Glissant metaphor of viruses as both endemic and external impulses in the unpredictable cultural flows among a range of global black communities. The recognition of this multi-directional improvisatory dynamic highlights the imagined, which is to say virtual, nature of the relation between black diasporans and Africa. However, contemporary means of participating in this dynamic are increasingly digital, relying on virtual flows of information that appear to privilege globalization as consumerism over trans-national political solidarity. I am particularly interested in how such instances of virtuality shape the literature, films and hypertexts of pan-Africanism’s afterlives.
Catriona MacLeod
Associate Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures
All That is Solid Melts Into Air: Virtual Sculpture in
German Romanticism
What light can Romantic aesthetics and literatures shed on our current understanding of “virtuality” and vice versa? The research project I am pursuing, on the “disappearance” of sculpture into literature in the nineteenth century, hopes to illuminate contemporary thinking about virtuality by considering an earlier artistic phenomenon that caused its public to detach itself from the material realm and to enter into subjectivistic, detached states.
Justin Thomas McDaniel
Associate Professor, Religious Studies
The Thai Virtual Monastery: Creating Sacred Space On-Line
The TDM (Thai Digital Monastery Project--tdm.sas.upenn.edu) is an interactive, immersive, 3D site which seeks to offer visitors a virtual view of Thai Buddhist monastic life. I am seeking to expand the TDM site so that it will allow visitors to virtually experience monastic life, as well as link to bibliographies, full text articles, manuscripts, and secondary sources, along with imbedded audio-recordings, expert commentary, ethnographic notes, comparative evidence, and historical primary and secondary sources. As Penn Mellon Research Fellow, I will explore theoretical and technical issues connected to creating virtual “religious sites.” I also want to open up discussions with other fellows about the “ethics” of virtuality when scholars attempt to (re)present the sacred on-line.
Deven M. Patel
Assistant Professor, South Asia Studies
Dream, Error, and Self-ing: Virtuality and “Flashy Poetry”
in Sanskrit
I propose to identify and theoretically explore virtuality in a specific sub-genre of Sanskrit poetry known as the citrabandha (“picture-poetry” or “flashy poetry”). The citrabandha follows a “poetics of restraint” (much like Oulipo) whereby particular arrangements of sounds lend themselves to pictorial presentations and syllables of a verse are configured to represent physical items. Through various “special effects,” such as palindromes and bi-textual sonic and semantic patterns, virtual world upon virtual world unfolds over “real” phenomena and “natural” expression. My presentation will treat our theme around several remarkable examples from the literature that construct vivid dreamscapes, explore the nature of erroneous perception, and disturb notions of stable identity. A preliminary theory of virtuality emerges which includes, among other things, the compression and expansion of spatial and temporal dimensions, the production of loci for defiance to (or reinforcement of) normative patterns, the prominence of form in relationship with theme, and the requirement of mediation and initiation for understanding and appreciation.
Emily Wilson
Associate Professor, Classical Studies
Reality and Representation in the Ancient Novel
My focus is on the intersection of two different senses of “virtuality”: virtuality as the vivid imagination of an unreal world (approaching the concept of fiction, but with more sense of active participation on the part of the person experiencing the fantasy); and virtuality as the presence of “virtue”, or moral excellence. At the most basic level: is fantasy corrupting? The question, for us, is framed in terms of specifically modern technologies and genres: television, movies, video games, and so on. But did a similar set of anxieties also exist in antiquity? How does the genre make a difference? I hope to address this issue by looking at one particular ancient genre: the Greek "novel", which I will juxtapose with ancient rhetorical theory and ancient discussions of education, to try to analyse ancient feelings about the dangers and temptations of being lost in a work of art.
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