Journal articles on the topic 'Physiognomic theories'

Summary This article stages a confrontation between latent nominalist attitudes about inherent expression in perception—physiognomy—and new affective modes. In a classic analysis, Gombrich warned of the lack of veridicality of physiognomic perception, a sentiment endorsed by postmodern theories. At the same time, affect theory affirms a level of directly available intensities. Using the example of Rudolf Arnheim, it can be seen that the two are really specular opposites of each other, each merely valorizing different poles of the affect-cognition scale. Arnheim’s Gestalt theory shows how immediate percepts can have a generic structure, which is differentiated with further acquaintance. Arnheim, however, shows how perception can never account for all the power of expressive seeing. Perception and cognition is always embedded in a social matrix. Using an example of racist antisemitic propaganda used by Gombrich, the political implications of Arnheim’s position are demonstrated.

This article explores the intersections of physiognomic knowledge and drama in the works of Neapolitan naturalist and playwright Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1616). It first looks at references to theatre—classical drama in particular—in Della Porta’s writings on physiognomy, thus showing that Latin comic plays provided the naturalist with a gallery of stock characters able to summarize the alleged interdependence of physical and moral traits. The article then analyzes the various ways in which Della Porta—who was a prolific author of comedies—brought his physiognomic expertise into his own experience as a playwright. The study of these two different perspectives on the relation between physiognomy and drama reveals that, far from being a direct translation of physiognomic theories, Della Porta’s dramatic production deploys an ironic and almost paradoxical take on physiognomy that aims to challenge (if not actually subvert) the very principles of the discipline. Cet article explore les interactions entre la physionomie et le drame dans les oeuvres du naturaliste et dramaturge napolitain Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1616). On examine d’abord les références que fait Della Porta au théâtre — en particulier à la tragédie classique — dans ses écrits sur la physionomie, avant de montrer que le théâtre comique latin a fourni au naturaliste une panoplie de personnages stéréotypés lui permettant de mettre en avant l’interdépendance présumée entre traits physiques et traits moraux. L’article poursuit en analysant les diverses façons dont Della Porta, auteur prolifique de comédies, a exploité dans son travail ses connaissances en physionomie et son expérience de dramaturge. L’étude de ces deux aspects de la relation entre physionomie et théâtre montre que l’oeuvre dramatique de Della Porta déploie une approche ironique et presque paradoxale de la physionomie qui, bien loin d’être une traduction littérale des théories physionomiques, vise à remettre en question, voire à inverser, les principes fondamentaux de cette discipline.

The present research investigated an often presumed but rarely assessed construct named the physiognomic belief—a generic belief that various traits can be inferred from faces. Studies in Japan and the United States have demonstrated that this belief can be measured reliably and invariantly across cultures and that those having stronger beliefs make more extreme trait inferences from faces. Of note, in both countries, the physiognomic belief is positively associated with a biologically deterministic view of personality traits and a belief in a just world. These findings suggest two types of naive justifications for the physiognomic belief: faces and traits should be related because they are both manifestations of biological essences and because the world is an orderly place wherein people get faces they deserve. This highlights an understudied role of folk concepts involving faces and traits in the popularity of face-based trait inference among laypeople.

A distinctive feature of the biographies of Suetonius is his methodical and detailed description of the physical appearances of the emperors. This feature was adopted by two fourth-century Latin writers, Ammianus Marcellinus and the anonymous author of the Historia Augusta. This study will explore how ancient theories of the relationship between appearance and character intersect with the physical descriptions of emperors the authors provide. These authors reveal themselves to be engaged with contemporary approaches to the question without being bound by any one theory, and thus presuppose a readership for whom physiognomic questions were both interesting and debatable. The approaches of the authors to this minor feature in their work also offer broader insight into their biographical style and purpose.

The human species transforms the landscape to meet its needs, but landscape resources and valuable features at the same time affect wellbeing in the context of human activity. In these mutually conditioned interactions, two processes playing a key role are the so-called landscape perception and landscape projection. This article presents: (1) a review of theories playing a key role in the development of knowledge on landscape perception; (2) the basis for landscape projection as a logical and creative continuation of perception processes; (3) an outline of the theory of physiognomic landscape structure and of possibilities for it to gain practical application; (4) the results of the first Polish research into the public’s expectations where quality of the landscape is concerned. Perception of the landscape entails the receipt of stimuli from surrounding space with the help of the senses. It serves primarily in knowledge-based transformation of landscape systems, in a manner that meets ever-more exacting requirements on the part of society when it comes to living in an environment of the highest quality. Only a little scientific work has been devoted to the process of landscape projection. This is therefore a new research field, just opening up, which has the potential to give rise to a group of space-projection theories.

В статье проводится анализ нарративного потенциала царского монетного портрета эпохи эллинизма. В отличие от портретов в скульптуре, на мозаиках и фресках, монетный портрет занимает в системе классического искусствоведения подчиненное положение и чаще служит в качестве вспомогательного средства для идентификации портретов в других изобразительных жанрах. Между тем появление и тиражирование монетного портрета, снабженного индивидуальными чертами, в период раннего эллинизма свидетельствует о переходе от коллективного (полисного) сознания к индивидуальному (монархическому). Для эллинистических государств портрет правителя на монете являлся не просто главным средством политической пропаганды, но и визуальным воплощением царской власти. Особое значение при исследовании царского монетного портрета имеет анализ эстетических и физиогномических теорий Аристотеля и перипатетиков, оказавших большое влияние на философию искусства эпохи эллинизма. Тело как единая знаковая система становится важным инструментом визуального нарратива, использовавшегося государством в целях репрезентации образа правителя и власти. Трактат «Физиогномика», написанный неизвестным последователем Аристотеля, демонстрирует яркие параллели с некоторым художественными приемами, широко использовавшимися художниками периода эллинизма: «томный» взгляд Александра, вьющиеся волосы царей, анастоле. Одним из центральных мотивов «Физиогномики» является так называемый «львиный стиль», подчеркивающий мужество и благородство. Элементы «львиного стиля» можно обнаружить в портретах Александра, а затем и в монетных изображениях многочисленных эллинистических правителей, подражавших образу Александра. Царский монетный портрет выполнялся в соответствии со строгим иконографическим каноном, где важное место занимал декорум. Так, известны несколько вариантов царского портрета (в диадеме, кавсии, шлеме, шкуре льва, лучистой короне и головном уборе в виде головы слона), каждый из которых обладал собственным символизмом. Весьма важным аспектом изучения нарративности монетного портрета является соотношение текста легенды и изображения. В монетном деле восточно-эллинистических монархий в период эллинизма происходит одновременно процесс художественной деградации портрета и увеличение текста легенды за счет включения божественных эпитетов правителя. Данный процесс демонстрирует смещение визуально-текстовых приоритетов: от имплицитного характера изобразительного нарратива к эксплицитному. Еще одним элементом художественного нарратива является изображение правителя в образе божества. Эта тенденция является отражением развивавшегося в эллинистическом мире культа правителя. Визуализированный вариант образа обожествленного монарха широко тиражировался на монетах. The present paper focuses on analysis of narrative of the Hellenistic royal portraits depicted on coins. Unlike most of the portraits in sculpture, mosaics and frescoes, coin portrait has traditionally received only an additional scholarly attention. Coin portraits were usually integrated into research as an optional means to identify portraits of other visual genres. However, the representation and replication of coin portrait with individual traits in the Early Hellenistic period shows the shift from the collective (polis) mind to the individual (monarchy). For Hellenistic kingdoms, the royal coin portrait was not only a key tool of the political propaganda, but also a visual representation of the kingship. For the study of royal coin portrait, the analysis of aesthetics and physiognomic theories of Aristotle and Peripatetics is of a great importance. The Aristotelian heritage highly influenced the Hellenistic art and was of a great importance for all artists. The body as a single sign system becomes an important means of visual narrative exploited by the power for creating positive image of the king and kingship. The ‘Physiognomy’, attributed to unknown follower of Aristotle, reveals some striking parallels with artistic devices, widely used by Hellenistic artists - ‘melting’ eye of Alexander, curly hairstyle of kings, anastole. One of the key motifs of ‘Physiognomy’ was a so-called ‘lion’ style, which indicated virtue and generosity. Some traits of this ‘lion’ style could be found in the Alexander’s portraits and then in the coin portraits of many Hellenistic kings, who to some extend imitated the image of Alexander. The royal coin portrait was made under a strict iconographic canon, where the decorum was important. Thus, it is well known some variations of royal coin portrait – in a diadem, in a helmet, in a kausia, in lion and elephant skin and in a radiate crown. Each of this headwear has its own symbolism. An important aspect of the study is a correlation between legend and image. For the Eastern Hellenistic coinage the process of artistic degradation of coin portrait and simultaneous process of growth of the legend occurs. This process shows a shift of visual and textual priorities from implicit nature of visual narrative to explicit one. Another component of the artistic narrative is a presentation of a ruler as a goddess. This tendency represents a ruler cult, which was widely developed in Hellenism. The visualized image of deified king was widely depicted on coins.

This study aims to determine the relationship between facial physiognomy, body shape, and visualization of animated film character designs. Characterization in an animated film is inseparable from the characters who are placed to fulfill the film’s role. In the creation of physiognomy and body shapes can be combined as an approach to design. The characters are modified through simplifications in the form of cartoons. This is done so that the visualization of the character gets closer to the role added, in addition to emphasizing the characteristics of one character to another. Even in animated films, characters become important elements to direct the understanding of stories. The approach used is interdisciplinary, given that in characters there is a merging of visual elements that need to be approached using different theories. The combination of theories used is personality theory through somatotype to find characters through body shapes, physiognomy from Ar-Razi and ming xiang to obtain character traits and the theory of simplifying shapes into cartoons. The result is a match between the characters played by the three reference elements. The interesting thing that was found was the application of different physiognomy between one character and another to reinforce the characteristics. So that in the film, these figures can represent roles, which are human presentations in real life.

The taste for classical art that induced museums in the West to acquire masterpieces from ancient Greece and Rome for their collections was stimulated largely by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In the past decade, a number of articles have claimed that Winckelmann’s glorification of marble statues representing the white, male body promotes notions of white supremacy. The present article challenges this view by examining theories prevalent in the eighteenth century (especially climate theory) that affected Winckelmann’s views on race. Through an examination of different types of classicism, the article also seeks to demonstrate that Winckelmann’s aesthetics were opposed to the eclectic use of ancient models typical of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

During the 1860s, Berlin’s exterior physiognomy transformed radically. The city eroded the surrounding rural areas, and the frontiers of the old city centre were abolished. These transformations led to the disappearance of the visible frontiers that once demarcated the limits of the old residential Prussian city. In this context, the description of the clinical picture of agoraphobia by the Berlin psychiatrist Carl Westphal in 1872 marked a turning point, not only in psychiatric theories on anxiety but also in the conceptualization of our experience of space. In this paper, the authors trace the emergence of a new psychology-neurology episteme during the last third of the nineteenth century; and they argue that such an episteme became possible once the relations between anxiety and modern city-scape had been clearly articulated.

The international debate on the physiognomy of higher education started more than twenty years ago, between reforms of organizational and didactic models and profound reflections on the epistemological statutes of every single discipline. However, at the threshold of 2020, the contours of the tertiary training cycle are still blurred. Is university following the rules of markets, in an attempt to keep up with globalization and the frenetic pace of the new economy, or is the homo oeconomicus who carefully observes, with an eye to the future, the changes in knowledge production approaches that are more functional to his interests? The article, starting from the current socio-economic framework, proposes a reading of some of the possible disciplinary approaches dedicated to the planning, production and transmission of knowledge. It also touches the theme of transdisciplinarity, observing it from a constructivist perspective and also semiological, taking up Lotman's theories on the semiosphere. Finally, it suggests the potential traits of a new physiognomy of the tertiary training cycle

Abstract This article analyses legal texts written by Nikolaos Koumaros that were foundational to the 4th of August regime in Greece. It demonstrates the regime possessed an ideology that did not differ substantially from other authoritarian regimes of the period. In particular, the choice of Koumaros as the central legal theorist of the regime can be explained by his familiarity with anti-liberal theories of the time. His engagement with these theories was linked with his studies in France and Italy during the interwar period, exposing him to fascist ideals. A detailed examination of the conceptual transfers that informed the main legal texts of the regime demonstrated their reasoning followed closely the theoretical developments of the time. Mussolini’s doctrine of fascism and a specific reading of Rousseau functioned as the basis for the legitimisation of a new, anti-liberal political order. These ideas became key analytical pillars of the legal texts that gave shape to the regime’s normative and political foundation, demonstrating that explicit fascist theories informed the political physiognomy of the regime.

Oscar Wilde's face was simultaneously maligned and celebrated by the “sciences” of physiognomy in the nineteenth century and, after the trials of 1895, in depictions that link Wilde to a pathologically expressive personality type. Personality and modern vision converge in the subject of Wilde's face, and their relation is illuminated by recent debates about affects and the emotions as well as by the theories of visual modernity advanced by Charles Baudelaire, Max Beerbohm, and E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris . Whereas early caricatures of Wilde invest the image with a readable psychology or interior, later depictions maintain a fiction of readability linked to a purely physiological notion of abnormal personality.

This article examines the representation of the poet and novelist Amy Levy (1861–89) after her death, focusing on how her photographic portrait becomes the foundation for her posthumous celebrity. Following her suicide at the age of twenty-seven, Levy's life became surrounded by rumour, as commentators sought to explain why a talented young writer would take her life. While reviewers and memoirists interpret her poetry autobiographically, they also turn to her face as key to her character, following theories of physiognomy. In the process, Levy's image, enshrined in a frontispiece photograph by Montabone, becomes a battleground for various ideological interpretations, as writers including Harry Quilter, Katharine Tynan, and Grant Allen set to work reanimating Levy in order to support their own ideas about female education, genius and ‘madness’, degeneration, and Jewish identity. Allen in particular draws on eugenic theories to transform Levy into a damaging fictional portrait in Under Sealed Orders (1894). This novel, combined with various poetic elegies, co-opts Levy's image in ways that resonate with long-standing notions of doomed Romantic genius and the tragic ‘poetess’, a legacy that has implications not only for Levy's enduring reputation, but also for other late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century women poets that followed in her wake.

<p>The aim of this research is to describe and analyze the character of gerak gecul performed by Sumar Bagyo in expressing Gareng. This is considered unique since Sumar Bagyo developed his own version of the movement. Qualitative research by using ethnochoreology approach is used in this research. It is done by using some concepts and theories to support the research. Those theories included social changing theory by A. Boskoff, concept of solah ebrah by Slamet, that is combined with effort-shape by Ann Hutchinson, physiognomy concept by Prasetnyono, mimic and expressive gestures by Morris. Gecul movement which is performed, has its own characteristic that makes it different from other Gareng characters. Based on its wanda (Gareng in Purwa puppet), Sumar Bagyo belongs to wanda kancil since it has the characters of: praupan tengadah, medium face, round head, thin lips, wide forehead/ manyul (Javanese), ovoid nose, up lips, gondhok neck, flat stomach, small slouch body, ndetheng body. Gecul Gareng movement in Sumar Bagyo has the movement motives of gejig, mlaku ceko, sikil mingkup buka, seleh asta, nyorok, nikelwarti, besut alusan, besut gagahan, uncal sikil, geol, and srisig. Those movements always appear in the three types of Sumar Bagyo, either in puppet stage with Gareng identity, or outside of the puppet stage by taking off the Gareng identity.</p>

Theories that attempt to explain the origin of the cerrado biome are mostly based on the isolated action of three major factors: climate, fire and soil. Another factor that has been mentioned is that of human interference. We hypothesise that the evolutionary origin of this biome resulted from the complex interaction of climate, fire and soil, with climate being the triggering agent of this assumed interaction. Fire, as well as acid and dystrophic soils, would be factors involved in the selection of savanna species throughout climatic events, during the Tertiary and the Quaternary, e.g. Pliocene and Pleistocene. The genesis of the physiognomies that would give rise to cerrado sensu lato, rather than forest formations, could have occurred due to the strong pressure exerted by the reduction in water availability, and the selection of the species adapted to the new conditions imposed by the environment. The characteristics of cerrado sensu lato soil, originated from edaphic impoverishment caused by lixiviation and successive past fires, would remain, even after hydric availability increased following the Pleistocene glaciations.

Abstract Military art is the fundamental component of military science and has as its object the war as a whole and the armed struggle. Over the years, military art has seen spectacular evolutions and mutations in strategy, operative art and tactics, by assimilating and integrating the achievements of the technical-scientific revolution. From this perspective, we aim to highlight the main conceptual landmarks in which military art evolved also targeting the high technology, network-based warfare, the planned operation on the effects of using ISTAR systems and the hybrid operation that integrates and associates several military and non-military components. This comprehensive approach to the evolution of military art gives us the possibility to evaluate the multidimensional operational environment, to highlight the characteristics and physiognomy of the future military operations through the integration of new technological and information systems and equipment. In this context, we state that the success in planning, training, execution and evaluation of military operation in the future will depend on the professionalism of the human resource and the degree of assimilation of technologies and intelligent systems within the management and execution structures.In recent years, the art of war has undergone major changes at all levels (strategic, operational and tactical). Due to the new information phase of the scientific and technological revolution, in the near future, several theories of armed struggle will arise influencing the social and economic life of all states.

In a 1990 review of Jenny Bourne Taylor's In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988), Lawrence Rothfield commented that the book explores what “until recently might have seemed a bizarrely specialized cultural context and an equally obscure literary phenomenon” (97). Rothfield argued that Taylor's study was representative of the recent move to new historicist methodologies, which made contexts and authors once considered to be historical footnotes important to scholarship. Prior to that shift, “[n]ineteenth-century English psychology, a mishmash of scientifically dubious theories and practices such as phrenology, physiognomy, moral management, and mesmerism, hardly seemed key to understanding the broad cultural issues of concern as traditionally construed in Victorian studies” (97). Strikingly, now some twenty-five years later, knowledge of nineteenth-century psychology seems essential to the field. Presses, alert to that shift, have republished out-of-print literary studies that explored Victorian literature in relation to psychology in the years preceding the current surge of interest in the subject. (Faas's 1989 Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry was reissued by Princeton University Press in a 2016 hardcover edition. Kearns's 1987 Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology was reissued in 2014 by the University of Kentucky Press.) Judging by the number of publications in the area, as well as by titles on the programs of recent conferences, the sciences of the mind have become one of the central topics in Victorian studies.

The study was aimed to examine the impact of stock market-specific variables and macro-economic variables on stock return. It has analyzed the data of 25 countries for a period of 22 years from 1995 to 2016. The major three tests; regression analysis, co-integration analysis, and causality have been examined. The results have shown from the evidence of regression analysis and causality that the impact of the stock market-specific and macro-economic variables have been varied as per the different situation and country. Whereas, the impact of stock market-specific and macro-economic variables have been found to be consistent in the long run. Therefore, the conclusion was drawn that in the long run the relationship between stock return and stock market-specific, as well as macro-economic variables can be generalized but in the short run better not to generalize. The findings have shown that stock market-specific variables have better explaining and predicting power than macro-economic variables. In the case of stock market-specific variables, size and stock traded turnover ratio have found equally important to understand the behavior of sock return. In the case of macro-economic variables, GDPGR has found the most important variable followed by money supply, exchange rate, interest rate, trade openness, and inflation rate respectively. Finally, it has been concluded that the behavioral aspects of the investors have been missing. So, the financial theories incorporating the behavioral aspects would explain and predict better rather than economic physiognomy only.

Abstract Fire became a defining feature of the Earth's processes as soon as land plants evolved 420 million years ago and has played a major role in shaping the composition and physiognomy of many ecosystems ever since. However, there remains a general lack of appreciation of the place of fire in the origin, evolution, ecology and conservation of the Earth's biodiversity. We review the literature on the presence of fire throughout the Earth's history following the evolution of land plants and examine the evidence for the origin and evolution of adaptive functional traits, biomes and major plant groups in relation to fire. We show that: (1) fire activities have fluctuated throughout geological time due to variations in climate, and more importantly in atmospheric oxygen, as these affected fuel levels and flammability; (2) fire promoted the early evolution and spread of major terrestrial plant groups; (3) fire has shaped the floristics, structure and function of major global biomes; and (4) fire has initiated and maintained the evolution of a wide array of fire-adapted functional traits since the evolution of land plants. We conclude that fire has been a fundamental agent of natural selection on terrestrial plants throughout the history of life on the Earth's land surface. We suggest that a paradigm shift is required to reassess ecological and evolutionary theories that exclude a role for fire, and also there is a need to review fire-suppression policies on ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation in global fire-prone regions.

The overall goal of this research is to investigate Integrated Financial Management Information Systems as well as procurement performance of Taita Taveta County Government. The research sought to evaluate the effect of electronic service delivery, information sharing, supplier involvement as well as e-budget allocation at Taita Taveta County Government. The research was underpinned by the following theories, the instrumental theory, resource-based theory, diffusion of innovations theory as well as system theory. The research adopted an evocative research design since it gives a perfect result as well as the physiognomies allied with it at an explicit point in time. The target population for the research was 97 respondents that gave the sample size of 78 respondents. The research adopted census method to select the respondents from the population. The study obtained primary data through a structured questionnaire. The researcher gave out the questionnaires and pick them later as a data gathering method. The study revealed that electronic service delivery has a significant influence on procurement performance (β=0.544; p<0.05). Similarly, it was established that information sharing significantly predict procurement performance (β=0.181; p<0.05). The study notably established that supplier involvement and e-budget allocation significantly predict procurement performance (β=0.176; and β=0.295) respectively. The study concludes that by boosting electronic service elements including service speed, efficacy, and financial reporting time, procurement performance would be improved. Moreover, by enhancing factors like information security, fraud detection, and reaction time, IMFIS sharing information enhances the delivery of products and results and significantly boosts the effectiveness of the procurement process. Besides, accountability and effectiveness are promoted at the county governments through the implementation of the IFMIS project, which involves suppliers in all

Since the beginning, the first Albanian school had the physiognomy of a school with a contemporary tendency. It is well known that the creators and founders were the Renaissance man, who praised and supported the ideas of the new pedagogy. This mindset set the Albanian school free from the mentality of didactic practices, which were commonly used by the old school. Over the years, Albanian education has tried to follow the footsteps of the European education. The object of this study is to recognize the attitude that Albanian school has held towards new pedagogical theories and developments of Western schools, as well as its tendency to embrace and adapt them to the political, economic, social and cultural situation of Albania. Here, I want to present this important phenomenon of the development of Albanian education and our pedagogical thought during the '20s and '30s of the 20th century. The purpose of this study is to give a scientific synthesis of the history of the development of education and pedagogical ideas in Albania, from 1920 until 1939. Within the limits allowed in a research paper, the reader can draw certain conclusions and experiences. If we look back and see how this progressive trend, turned into a movement that was becoming more powerful day by day and if we take a look at the past and all the other developments during 1920-1939, it is not difficult to understand that this trend would also appear in the Albanian school system. The basic legitimacy is that all dimensions of time - past, present and future are directly reflected in the fact that during all these years the Albanian education has tried to follow the footsteps of the European education. Received: 2 February 2021 / Accepted: 19 March 2021 / Published: 10 May 2021

Although Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly has always been an enemy of Naturalism and its theoretical assumptions, he had to deal with the presentation rules of the ‘clinical’ romance while describing his characters’ suffering bodies. On the one hand, the physiognomy theories, very dear to Balzac, enrich Barbey’s modes of expression and justify the analogy between body and soul; on the other, it is not possible to describe the characters’ bodies and to reveal the mystery behind them. Despite this, the lack of psychological analysis in the récit is compensated by metaphorical characterisation: indeed, similes, metaphors, antithesis and oxymorons enrich the description of characters revealing their main passions and features. The aim of this article is to show, by means of the text analysis of some passages, that the realistic details of descriptions are not vain if related to their metaphorical meaning and that, in so doing, the author overcomes the impasse of the rational scientific observation and the physiognomic interpretation.

Abstract Scientific ideologies swirl throughout Stoker’s two most gothic novels, Dracula (1897) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and this essay will address those ideologies as literary manifestations of just some of the “weird science” that was permeating late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. Specifically, the essay examines racial theories, physiognomy, criminology, brain science, and sexology as they appear in Stoker’s two novels. Stoker owned a copy Johann Caspar Lavater’s five-volume edition of Essays on Physiognomy (1789), and declared himself to be a “believer of the science” of physiognomy. The second major “weird science” infecting the gothic works of Stoker is the new field of criminology, or the bourgeois attempt to codify, control, and exterminate criminal elements in the human population. Stoker drew on both Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal, published in 1890, and the Italian Cesare Lombroso’s work, Uomo Delinquente (1876), a book that was available to Stoker in a two volume French translation published as L’Homme Criminel (1895). Stoker derived a number of his passages about the workings of the brain from the theories of the well-known professor of physiology, W. B. Carpenter, founder of the notion of “unconscious cerebration,” a concept developed in his book Principles of Mental Physiology (1874). Finally, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his pioneering text on sexuality in 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, and invented the scientific study of sex. Of a piece with criminology, sexology attempted to categorize and medicalize human behaviors in such a way that all would become clear to the informed and enlightened bourgeois consciousness. As another weirdly scientific effort to “discipline and punish,” sexology sought to transform crime into perversion, and the man or woman suffering from vampiric tendencies became just another case study of sexual deviancy.

The presentation of portraits of emperors and saints in Byzantine art can be compared to theories of physiognomy and logic put forward by Aristotle and his Byzantine followers. Similar observations have been made about the portal sculptures of High Gothic cathedrals, but although the ordering of images in the two cases reflected similar patterns of thought, the particular forms of the portraits differed in each milieu, responding to a different relationship between images and the faithful in each society.

In the mid-eighteenth century in Halle the so-called doctors-philosophers tried to develop a scientifically-based map of emotions, which included their causes and their manifestations on the body. Thanks to their scientific rigour, to the literary quality of those studies and to the growing circulation of the journals of the time – above all Unzer’s famous Der Arzt – the subject was so popular that it became central in the debate on physiognomy and pathognomics which was so vivid in the second half of the century. These theories had a powerful import on literature, contributing to the birth of the new ‘character’ in novels as different from the traditional and stereotypical sense of the term as ‘temper’ or ‘nature’. In the field of aesthetics, the effect of these studies had important repercussions on Winckelmann’s revolutionary theories related to the representation and interpretation of emotions in art.

The lexeme Schattenriss (silhouette) refers to an object that is suggestive of why materiality matters to Goethe’s philosophical thought. It touches on several intellectual and aesthetic areas, including semiotics (natural versus arbitrary signs), art, physiognomy, anthropology, color theory, and epistemology. A popular reproductive artform of the late eighteenth century, the silhouette entered into Goethe’s own collecting and artistic practices already in the 1770s. Collaboration with Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) extended the significance of the silhouette profile into the scientific arena and built on Enlightenment visual agendas. The Schattenriss is also connected with eighteenth-century theories of mimesis and representation that concern related terms like Umriss (outline, contour) and also appear in Goethe’s aesthetic writings. In his later work on color theory and the art-making activities of the Johanna Schopenhauer salon, however, Goethe focuses on the shadowy interior and the colorful shades of the shadow rather than the static line of the Umriss to take the silhouette into striking new scientific and aesthetic territory.

Premised on the pervasiveness of generic categories within literary historiography, the present analysis attempts to delineate the generic idioms present within three histories of Romanian literature (authored by G. Călinescu, Nicolae Manolescu and Mihai Iovănel, respectively). Engaging a descriptively historical, rather than theoretical, approach to genre and its metadiscourses, the paper begins with an abridged version of the cardinal disputes of genre criticism. Subsequently, it comparatively addresses the presence of genre within the three volumes, aiming to locate them within recognizable frameworks of genericity and to establish the overlapping territories of their generic landscapes. Thus, it distinguishes G. Călinescu as a practitioner of post-Romantic genre theory, further showcasing how some of his central aestheticist positions survive in Nicolae Manolescu’s moderately formalist account of the issue. Against the backdrop of their more conservative, teleological historiographical projects, Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 Istoria Literaturii Române Contemporane 1990-2020 [The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature 1990-2020] displays a distinct methodological apparatus, predicated on the author’s rejection of the paradigmatic autonomy of the aesthetic. His employment of materialist theories of art is corelative to a conception of genre as a contingent, empirically determined instrument of analysis, which, far from being a rhetorically stable, abstract category, actively mediates the relationship between social and aesthetic history. This shift engenders substantial amendments to the physiognomy of literary history as genre, enabling it to encompass extra-literary (and noncanonical) phenomena. Keywords: literary genres, literary history, Romanian literature, Mihai Iovănel.

The development of our theme for this issue of M/C was guided in part by our respective interests in 'texts' as both literary artifacts and formally designed entities. That said, in the usual spirit of M/C, the issue's ultimate editorial direction was cemented based on the range of submissions we received and selected. It is a particular challenge to distill key elements of an ongoing research project into an informative and credible textual package of just 1500 words. That said, we're delighted to present eight original short essays, along with an extended feature article; between them they cover a variety of 'textual' media such as graffiti, visiting cards, experimental film, and money. They also present a degree of breadth in the manner of their subjects' textuality. This includes: handwriting; printing (of ink on paper and the chemical processing of celluloid); typing in/to cyberspace; and engraving into metal and plastic. This issue’s feature article, Esther Milne’s “Magic Bits of Paste-board: Texting in the Nineteenth Century”, explores the notion of telepresence—substitution of the text for the corporeal body—through a consideration of nineteenth-century visiting cards, those “complex cultural avatars” that “conveyed the desires of class and gender in the construction of identity”. Through her discussion of the “complex language system” represented by the visiting card, Milne argues for an understanding of telepresence that extends beyond modern electronic media. In contrast to Milne’s analysis of visiting cards as nineteenth-century text messages is Gerard Goggin’s “mobile text”, a genealogy of the spectacularly successful short text messaging on mobile phones. Emphasising the fact that the popularity of SMS derives from its use by consumers, not its development by phone companies, Goggin explores the origins of SMS, the associated “elision, great compression, and open-endedness” of the short text messages, and the increasing commodification of the process of texting. This is an engagement with the textual artifact at the centre of “open-source, open-architecture, publicly usable nodes of connection”. Exploring in part a similar notion to that raised in Milne’s concluding analysis of the carte-de-visite, Sheryl Brahnam’s “Type/Face: The Missing Face of Writing” considers the human face as a text, from Socrates’s notion that writing’s inferiority to speech lies in the former’s lack of a human face, through the post-Renaissance obsession with physiognomy, through the modern mass consumption of the human face on television and in print. All this, Brahnam argues, leads to the modern interest in virtual faces, specifically the self-modelling “smart faces”. The smart face is a text that not only invites reading, but constantly rewrites itself. "Reading in the Dark: Michael Snow’s So Is This" offers a thoroughly engaging exploration of a piece of work by the Canadian experimental filmmaker (and jazz musician) Michael Snow. In Jane Simon's short essay we learn that So Is This was created in part as a response to the censoring of one of his existing films, and to the political objections raised by the imagery in yet another Snow film. So Is This is entirely devoid of images; indeed, its special relevance to this issue of M/C is its sole reliance on typeset words, producing what Simon calls a "supervised reading" that is unavoidable and "frustrating—some words are held on the screen for nearly a minute, causing all kinds of bodily aches and irritations—and also very entertaining". For Simon, then, "a whole discussion about critical writing practices seems to vibrate within the humorous and ‘light’ text of So Is This. It could be read as a film on film criticism, or at least a response to the methods of film writing, but it is about a lot of other things as well." In Jordan Williams’s “The Stigmata or the Tattoo: Eternity and the National Museum of Australia”, the notion of text under consideration is both narrowed and expanded. Williams considers not only the Museum as a readable text, but also engages with the building’s association with the more specific textual artifact that is Arthur Stace’s “Eternity” script, tracing the evocation of this text both inside and outside the building in terms of theories of tattoo versus stigmata. The fictional piece for this issue is Janet Jones’s “Interactive Essay Simulation”, in which dreams and reality, handwriting and electronic text, fuse to form a coherent but nightmarish textual world in which “the real world threatens back at gigabyte speed with Search Engine headlines proclaiming WAR, DISEASE, FAMINE, TERROR and AIDS”. In a piece that shares some of the same concerns as our feature article, Donna Lee Brien provides some fascinating insights into the nuanced process of "ventriloquizing": the invention of a pseudo-autobiographical account of certain aspects of an Australian woman's life using extensive archival research as a point of departure. "Imagining Mary Dean: Representing Another’s Life in Text" discusses the literary and ethical implications of this act, and Brien's attempts to develop a suitably authentic voice. This is made all the more compelling given the harrowing circumstances of Dean's early life in nineteenth-century Sydney, Australia, and the questions that remain about her ultimate fate. In “'Aren’t You Cool, You can Scribble Illegibly on Toilet Walls': Some Reflections on Graffiti in the Academy", Toby Ganley parses the representational codes of two pieces of related graffiti he once encountered in a university washroom. The first he identifies as a distinctive signature or ‘tag'; the second, reproduced in the title of his paper, is a entirely legible response to the tag. For Ganley, then, the result is a public dialogue of sorts that brings into question the intentionality of the graffiti's authors, and "exposes the gap between representation and the represented". "'Show Me the Money!': The Ideological Evolution of Monetary Form" explores the physical manifestations of currency - from silver to copper, paper and, ultimately, to plastic. In this paper, Sergio Rizzo discusses the graphical ephemera - symbols, mottos, even holograms - that adorn money in all its forms, in order to trace some of its semantic contours. As he says: "the different materials and their specific textual forms become the dominant, if not always preferred, means of transferring and storing value or wealth in their respective capitalist phases". Finally, we present an article that engages with a less fluid notion of “text” and its social significance. Simone Pettigrew's contribution is an informed, highly pragmatic discussion regarding the physical appearance and legibility of the printed word. In "Creating Text for Older Audiences" she argues that "the physical changes associated with aging have significant implications for the design and presentation of text". Scientific evidence points to the necessity for certain design features that can anticipate the inevitable changes in physiology and cognitive capacity that accompany aging. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mills, Catriona & Soar, Matt. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Mills, C. & Soar, M. (2004, Jan 12). Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/01-editorial.php>