Academic literature on the topic 'Metaphorical mirror'

This essay examines fictional representations of sex crime, focusing on the construction of the paedophile in contemporary popular culture. Representations of sex crime and criminals in film and television have tended to mirror broader societal and social scientific assumptions about the nature of the crime, the consequences for victims, and appropriate reactions to offending behavior. Moreover, cinematic explorations of child sexual abuse can offer metaphorical sites to critique contemporary understandings of the causes, consequence, and reactions to the behavior. This essay situates the repr

French film critic Bazin takes the ‘myth of total cinema’ to reveal a picture of its real history and sketches phases of a dialectical history based on it. Bazin’s conceptual framework gives rise to a fruitful metaphorical world. This essay uses Bazin’s ‘total cinema’ as a productive analogy through which to understand Mahler’s well-known comment: ‘The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ With Bazin’s framework in mind, Mahler’s statement seems to express a will to the total symphony. By analogy, I ask what in Mahler’s art might correspond to the long take and deep-foc

This chapter argues that contemporary representations of border crossing on screen engage with a specifically 21st-century U.S. manifestation of what Lora Wildenthal in following Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar calls “imperial feminism.” It examines how the most recent product of the Star Trek franchise, the TV series Star Trek: Discovery (2017–ongoing), interrogates the legacies of U.S. imperialism and, less overtly so, of U.S. imperial feminism. The analysis focuses on the geographical as well as the metaphorical border crossings that occur in the series when the crew of the Federation starship Discovery jumps to an alternative universe which is dominated by the fascist Terran Empire. It argues that Star Trek: Discovery can be read as a feminist text that exposes the limits of two very different kinds of post-sexist futures: one, the Mirror Universe, in which the empowerment of women depends on openly imperialist and racist ideologies and another, the Prime Universe, in which these ideologies threaten to make a comeback in the context of violent conflict. By contrasting these two possible futures and by connecting them through instances of border crossing, Star Trek: Discovery not only speaks to issues of intersectional feminist critique, it also responds to the political, social, and cultural changes in the United States leading up to and associated with the Trump administration.

This text deals with the interpretation of the comic character Crni Popaj (Black Popeye) written and drawn by Štef Bartolić. We find the controversial personality of this fictional abuser as somewhat of a metaphor for the extreme conception of freedom, which, despite its disgusting nature, speaks more to our moral rules than laws and ethical principles. Phenomena such as drugs, sexual abuse and violence within our metaphorical thinking are understood as a distorted mirror that, directed toward our daily lives, reveals the true nature of man who has not yet emerged from the animal universe.

This chapter considers the psychological mechanism known as visual imagery. Visual imagery is defined as a process whereby an emotion is evoked in the listener because he or she conjures up inner images while listening to the music. Images might come about in three ways. First, mental imagery may occur when listeners conceptualize the musical structure through a nonverbal mapping between the metaphorical ‘affordances’ of the music and image-schemata grounded in bodily experience. A second type of imagery might occur when a listener brings to a listening experience certain types of knowledge or myths about the circumstances surrounding the creation of the piece or about the artist in question. Thirdly, a music listener can create images based on how certain aspects of the music mirror aspects of the listener's current life experience.

As we experience a paradigm shift into a media age, ICTs are altering the psychological parameters of human reality. The premise of this chapter is that the psychological dynamics of interactive images projected as Media Dreams correspond with the psychological dynamics of dream images as defined by Carl G. Jung. (Jacobi, 1973). If this is true, images in media dreams mirror patterns of energy and information in what Jung called the collective unconscious. Jung calls images archetypal representations or projections of archetypal energy patterns that are structured as metaphorical narrative. The most recent cognitive research (Lakoff, 2008) verifies that—indeed—the cognitive unconscious has the framework of metaphorical narrative and that these story patterns correlate with energy patterns in the nervous system. Jung also knew that dreams “have a purpose,” and that the purpose is “compensation” or harmonization of conscious and unconscious psyche. Jungian compensation is essentially the same thing as coherence, and recent research on coherence confirms that coherent states can be evoked with specific feedback technologies. Moreover, coherent psychological states increase emotional and perceptual stability as well as alignment among the physical, cognitive, and emotional systems. The authors’ hypothesis is that the images projected by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)—the media dreams of a population—are subject to psychological analysis in order to disclose unconscious sources of psychological stress in contextual collectives.

It should go without saying that in the twentieth-century history of American higher education, each significant curricular reform movement has had a distinct political agenda. This is particularly true for initiatives designed to create decisive changes in the shape of the undergraduate curriculum. In those circumstances in which a political movement and an institutional initiative have coincided, a distinct political purpose can be discerned in what the institution required of its students and how the program was articulated. The historical moment was certainly at issue in the case of the reforms of the 1930s. Men such as Robert Hutchins, Stringfellow Barr, and Scott Buchanan saw in the idea of a core curriculum a way to realize their ideal construct of democracy. The Great Books concept and the variants of the core at Chicago had at their root a notion of natural rights and the social contract. Inherent in that framing of the body politic were concepts of freedom and civic responsibility. The objective was clear: one needed to educate young Americans—the elite of the nation—to steer the country away from the extremes of fascism and communism. Radical reform was imperative, since during the Great Depression both of these alternatives appeared politically viable. In the post-World War II era, the Cold War framed most of the discussion about the curriculum. This claim may seem odd, but on closer inspection, beginning with Harvard's general education reform from the early 1950s, the concept of the university, until the late 1980s, was substantially defined by a consciousness of how much the United States constituted an alternative to political unfreedom. The elective-course system in its new Harvard form, combined with distribution requirements and an enormous premium on undergraduate specialization, was a kind of metaphorical mirror of the idealized free marketplace of ideas. We were convinced that we were training young people to cherish the advantages of free choice and liberty in a world in which the grim alternative of totalitarianism was not a mirage but a present danger.

This chapter explores the various representations of Europe found in English and other languages. Euroscepticism is taken into account, and the waning of the French ideal of Europe is contrasted with the relative indifference or antipathy for Europe expressed by various English authors over the centuries. In addition to the corpus-based research, this chapter aims to outline the way attitudes to Europe are tied up in metaphorical narratives of Europe as an unstable building or sinking ship. Attacks on Europe in the English press are considered and contrasted with the press of other European nations. As the Brexit crisis continues, the authors explain the way the French President, Emmanuel Macron, positions himself in the face of rising Euroscepticism in France and the threat of the Far Right, hostile to the European Union. In contrast to this, Scottish and American authors who love and celebrate Europe are quoted. The authors consider the idealism that has often focused on Europe with a broad long-term perspective, quoting French authors such as Victor Hugo and Charles de Gaulle. American ambivalence concerning Europe as both an ally and a rival is taken into account, but the authors choose to focus on the American Sociologist, Jeremy Rifkin, who affirms that the American Dream is less suited to the 21st century than ‘the European Dream’. Europe is thus considered from within and from without. From within, the Europa website is studied to explain how Europe presents itself to the citizens of the Member States. In the Chinese section, the authors outline the way Chinese authors weigh up Europe as one of the possible models of Westernization, stressing the way Europe has created a sustainable multi-nation, multilingual economic and social zone. In the context of the European migration crisis, Brexit crisis, and other difficulties closely followed by the Chinese press, the authors contend that the Chinese Dream is positioning itself as an ideal in relation to Westernization and Europeanization as possible policies. The complex and changing attitudes of the Chinese to Europe as a colonial power, as a rival, and as a trading partner are considered in order to show what China understands by Europe, and what kind of mirror it holds up to Europeans from the Chinese perspective.

In his 1559 commentary on Isaiah, John Calvin as refugee pastor ventures a largely ecclesiastical rather than christological reading of this book, written at a time when Geneva experienced a large influx of religious exiles. For Calvin, the majority of Isaiah’s prophecies reference in the first instance the experience of the people of Israel and their future return from Babylon. Biblical history at the time of Isaiah then becomes a mirror for the contemporary experience of exile. Calvin explores the true church throughout the ages as a refugee community, literally and metaphorically. The image of the past as mirror—common in Calvin’s other exegetical works—is here particularly well-developed to maintain the integrity of Israel’s history and allow sixteenth-century Christians to make sense of their own experience and to foster trust in divine providence for the restoration of the church.

Chapter 1 deals with two types of metaphors: those that liken the prison to the (or a) world, seeing the prison as a microcosm, and those that project an inverse scenario, in which the world is metaphorically depicted as a prison. After pointing out how prison, as a heterotopia (like hell) is conceived both as lying outside the world and as sharing numerous structural features with it, Section 1.2 moves on to a consideration of early modern similitudes in the ‘character’ literature of Overbury, Dekker, Mynshul, and Fennor. An analysis of two city comedies, Eastward Ho (1605) and The City Gallant (1614) illustrates how prisons were perceived to mirror early modern society. From these instances of the PRISON AS WORLD metaphor, the chapter turns to the WORLD AS PRISON trope, which is exemplified by The Beggar’s Opera as well as in Samuel Beckett’s prose and Edward Bond’s play Olly’s Prison.