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In January 1944, Tennessee Williams wrote 'Homage to Ophelia,' the foreword to his and Donald Windham's play, You Touched Me! Although the version published here was arguably Williams's final version, and it does bear a specific date, a brief look into the earlier versions of the draft tell a more complex story, not just about how Williams revised the foreword over several weeks, but also how he revised the play and, to a certain extent, himself. Comparing the earlier and later versions of the foreword demonstrates that the changes he made from the first to the final draft were influenced by certain professional and personal trials that Williams was experiencing at the time. Due to complications from the play's two imminent premieres and the deaths of his two beloved Roses (one symbolic, the other very real), the weeks closing 1943 and the days opening 1944 were traumatic enough for Williams to have him rethink entirely the content and tone of the foreword from earlier drafts, a reshaping that extended to the play itself and, with the current revisions of The Glass Menagerie, to his career in the theatre. Keywords: Tennessee Williams / D. H. Lawrence / You Touched Me! / The Glass Menagerie / the plastic theatre / writing process, HOMAGE TO OPHELIA (A PRETENTIOUS FOREWORD) Anyone conscious of heritage in the literature of the English speaking world must have observed the existence of a feminine archetype who has served [...]

In 2006, John Friedman published an article spurred by his own frustration with the poststructuralist takeover of development studies in anthropology. That frustration is to a large extent encapsulated by [...]

How can one read song? Reading is silent, introspective, singular; singing is audible, performative, plural. In his folksong collections, Johann Gottfried Herder acknowledges this dualism and favors song. Yet he [...]

One of the nodal moments of the 'time of theory' as it has been problematically baptized came with the publication of the suitably titled 'Programme' by Philippe Sollers in his [...]

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something--a form--in common with it. --Wittgenstein, Tractatus (2.022) Demeler les lignes d'un [...]

This paper presents Henry James's and Virginia Woolf's art of writing in terms of the relation between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism by analyzing the consciousness of two protagonists: Strether in James's The Ambassadors and Katharine in Woolf's Night and Day. I argue that James's Paris is an Impressionist painting in words: his character walks and observes the city, internalizing the external spheres into the mind. By contrast, Woolf's London indicates an expression from within, demonstrating the character's mood, emotion and feeling. James's writing highlights the Impressionist way of seeing, using visual sensations to depict 'the center of consciousness,' aiming to present the moment of revelation. The external world exists as one's own 'process of vision' and perception. Woolf's 'painting-in-writing' technique, on the other hand, externalizes her character's 'inner world' as the mood of the city. Using shapes, lines and colors in words, Woolf is able to bring out the sense of 'suggestiveness' in literature, in a way which James's writing does not show. Woolf's novel reveals a transformation of narrative style from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism. The viewer can see the parallel movement between visual and verbal arts, as Monet paints what he sees, and Cezanne portrays what he feels. KEYWORDS: Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Paris, London, In The Ambassadors (1903), Henry James illustrates a way of depicting visual impressions of a character, corresponding to his brother William James's concept of stream of consciousness. The observation of [...]

Portmanteau here refers to an unusual type of Chinese character: a composite of two or more graphs for living words, all of which are to be read (in order) to [...]

Graphic representation is linked to meaning at a number of levels, among them those of orthographic system, text, and individual character. This essay explores the range of possible meanings of 'the graphic' at these different levels, particularly in terms of political economy, language ideology, and multileveled semiotic functioning. As the illustrations discussed here suggest, writing and other forms of graphic representation powerfully connect the ideological and material cultural realms, and their patterns of use (including production, distribution, circulation, and consumption) reveal and enact social relationships and inequalities. The author reminds readers that to fully explore the rich implications of the graphic, scholars must expand their investigations beyond writing's capacity to represent spoken language and also investigate the iconic and indexical dimensions of graphic semiotic functioning. DOI 10.1215/00141801-2009-059

The first time I ever saw the words Littera scripta manet, they were inscribed on an exquisite little poster hanging beside the desk of a typographer employed by one of [...]

On 1 November 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre participated in a conference celebrating the inaugural session of the UNESCO. An irnportant argument in his presentation--'La responsabilite de l'ecrivain'--was that an author writes [...]

Stance in academic prose has been a major focus of research attention in the past decade. However, studies on stance in the soft sciences have been relatively scarce compared to [...]

Language, like all carnivores, lives by means of the corpse--the carcass of the sign, the mourning that lingers in the sounding of the depths of words. Writing, especially, participates in [...]

Automatic reading of numeric chains has been attempted in several application areas such as bank cheque processing, postal code recognition and form processing. Such applications have been very popular in handwriting recognition research, due to the possibility to reduce considerably the manual effort involved in these tasks. In this study we propose an off line system for the recognition of the handwritten numeric chains. Firstly, study was based mainly on the evaluation of neural network performances, trained with the gradient back propagation algorithm. Used parameters to form the input vector of the neural network are extracted on the binary images of the digits by several methods: distribution sequence, Barr features and centred moments of different projections and profiles. Secondly, study was extented for the reading of the handwritten numeric chains constituted of a variable number of digits. Vertical projection was used to segment the numeric chain at isolated digits and every digit (or segment) was presented separately to the entry of the system achieved in the first part (recognition system of the isolated handwritten digits). The performances of the proposed system for the used database attain a recognition rate equal to 91.3%. Keywords: Optical Characters Recognition, Neural networks, Barr features, Image processing, Pattern Recognition, Features extraction., INTRODUCTION Handwritten numerical string recognition has been a topic of intensive research in recent years due to its large number of potential applications. The recognition of numerical strings differs from [...]

A common aphorism in the halls of education is that the writing skills of Americans decline over time. Compared to the 'golden age of letters,' so the argument goes, each subsequent generation of writers is worse than the last. Although contemporary readers and educators commiserate over encounters with bad writing, a fair comparison of 18th century American exemplars to modern American exemplars reveals a significant advance in clarity, an advance that technical communicators can be proud of. To demonstrate the advances in expository writing over the past two centuries, the author compares what the authors of the U.S. Constitution did with their limited resources to what modern professional communicators do with their abundance of resources. Many of the communication problems that were pervasive when the U.S. Constitution was created have since been remedied by insights emerging from the fields of linguistics, human factors, and cognitive psychology, among others.

The central themes of the popular and scholarly literature of language endangerment are linked broadly to the European concepts of Wonder and Sublime and specifically to an American indecisiveness about 'progress' and environmental destruction. The central role of Harrington's Nachlass in language revitalization and tribal recognition efforts by modern Native Californians as its compilers and contents are partly lodged in those same Romantic tropes of the Sublime.

An analysis of the term 'glottography' from a specific viewpoint of archaic or proto-cuneiform is done and four symptoms of glottographic writing are presented. The correlation between glottographic and non-glottographic writing associate the former with reading and the latter with verbalizing. Results suggest that glottography should be regarded as a single subsystem of written language.

A study argues that traditions both inside and outside an academy sometimes lead professors to devalue students' experiments with visual rhetoric and multimedia composition. It reveals connections between how the ideological apparatuses of writing instruction and legal statutes of US culture at large combine to restrict the production and circulation of students' multimedia texts and, hence, inhibit their power as writers.

'I do enjoy reading your columns,' a person told me at a conference. 'Though I'm not so sure that an academic journal should be focusing so much on identity when [...]

Abstract This essay presents theory and field investigation that supports the argument for more collaborative learning in writing instruction. The authors claim that although collaborative learning occurs frequently in the [...]

The features of collaborative tools that support enhanced coordination and group awareness are compared to existing writing tools. It is concluded that Internet-based CW teams can benefit from specialized collaborative technologies that provide enhanced coordination, group awareness, and CW activity support.

An assessment of student perceptions of collaborative writing practices before and after taking an upper division professional writing class is presented. Findings indicate that engineering and technology students are already predisposed to value peer review and collaborative writing practices, regardless of whether they have taken a professional writing course or have been exposed to these practices in the classroom.

Reading prison writing must ... demand a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of consumption that are traditionally sanctioned by the academic disciplining of [...]

From the beginning of the twentieth century until World War II, first and second generation European immigrants to the United States wrote about their experiences primarily in semi-autobiographical novels rather [...]

Et pourquoi souhaiterait-on entrer dans un livre comme dans je ne sais quel appartement obscur ou quel secret labyrinthe: a tatons et tenu par la main, comme un enfant ou [...]

The product of experts learning procedure [1] can discover a set of stochastic binary features that constitute a nonlinear generative model of handwritten images of digits. The quality of generative models learned in this way can be assessed by learning a separate model for each class of digit and then comparing the unnormalized probabilities of test images under the 10 different class-specific models. To improve discriminative performance, a hierarchy of separate models can be learned for each digit class. Each model in the hierarchy learns a layer of binary feature detectors that model the probability distribution of vectors of activity of feature detectors in the layer below. The models in the hierarchy are trained sequentially and each model uses a layer of binary feature detectors to learn a generative model of the patterns of feature activities in the preceding layer. After training, each layer of feature dectectors produces a separate, unnormalized log probabilty score. With three layers of feature detectors for each of the 10 digit classes, a test image produces 30 scores which can be used as inputs to a supervised, logistic classification network that is trained on separate data. On the MNIST database, our system is comparable with current state-of-the-art discriminative methods, demonstrating that the product of experts learning procedure can produce effective hierarchies of generative models of high-dimensional data. Index Terms--Neural networks, products of experts, handwriting recognition, feature extraction, shape recognition, Boltzmann machines, model-based recognition, generative models.

In this paper, we describe a new approach to conjointly locate and recognize a street name within a street line. The system developed is based on a probabilistic framework that naturally integrates various knowledge sources to emit a final decision. At the handwriting signal level, hidden Markov models are extensively used to provide the needed matching scores. Several optimization techniques are employed to speed up the processing time. Experiments carried out on large data sets of street line images, automatically extracted from real French mail envelope images, show very promising results. Index Terms--Phrase detection and recognition, handwriting recognition, statistical modeling, hidden Markov models.

A discussion of plagiarism in English Studies is presented, focusing on sexuality and textuality. Topics include gender, authorship and feminism.

Reflecting, sharing, and producing knowledge about the process of writing and collaboration in a writing group is the focus of this qualitative project, in which we explore a complex weaving of knowledge, subjectivity, and representation. In this group are eight women faculty, all of whom are individually working on writing projects in their own areas of expertise. Using a method of writing as inquiry, each person was asked to keep a reflective journal; an autoethnographic account of their experiences of writing during a three-month period. The group met weekly and each individual shared their reflections and writing experiences. In this project, our intention is to decentre notions of the alienated, isolated academic by writing and constructing knowledge as a collective. Using the metaphor of here and there, we ask how can a relational culture grow out of writing? How can competitive, hidden barriers be broken down and replaced by open, encouraging spaces? Keywords: research stories, post-structuralist writing, writing groups, faculty writing, collaborative writing, writing process, academic writing, writing narratives Cette recherche qualitative porte essentiellement sur le processus d'ecriture et la collaboration dans un groupe d'ecriture, notamment sur le maillage complexe entre savoir, subjectivite et representation. Le groupe reunit huit femmes universitaires, chacune menant a bien un projet d'ecriture dans son champ de competence. Ayant recours a une methode d'ecriture exploratoire, chaque membre du groupe a tenu un journal, sorte de compte rendu autoethographique de ses experiences d'ecriture, au cours d'une periode de trois mois. Le groupe s'est reuni une fois par semaine afin que chacune puisse partager ses reflexions et ses experiences quant a l'ecriture. Dans ce projet, notre intention est de decentrer la notion de l'universitaire isole en ecrivant et en construisant un savoir en tant que groupe. En utilisant la metaphore de l'ici et la, nous nous demandons comment une culture relationnelle peut surgir de l'ecriture? Comment des barrieres cachees, engendrees par la competitivite, peuvent-elles etre abattues et remplacees par des espaces ouverts et stimulants? Mots-cles : recits de recherche, ecriture poststructuraliste, groupes d'ecriture, ecriture chez des universitaires, ecriture en collaboration, processus d'ecriture, ecrits universitaires, recits sur l'ecriture, Introduction The metaphor of there and here emerged from two contextual occurrences. First, a large group of new faculty were hired into the Faculty of Education at Memorial University over [...]

An archeologist studying claims of potential transfer of information pertaining to calendar and writing systems which involves the Americas focuses on two sources of American inscriptions, of which one originates from Brazil and the other from selected source from North and South America. A scrutiny of these studies, which is discussed, has led the archeologist to conclude that the material is worth careful examination but no part of it should be accepted without careful, detailed examination.

The emergence of the apparent criticisms directed towards the writing used by historians during the last four decades is assessed in this presidential address. Historians' writing is integral in evaluating the intensity and meaning of human experience.

As much as I push against the notion of being labeled a Detroit poet, I have to admit that I don't really think of myself as a Michigan writer, either. [...]

We introduce a very large family of binary features for two-dimensional shapes. The salient ones for separating particular shapes are determined by inductive learning during the construction of classification trees. There is a feature for every possible geometric arrangement of local topographic codes. The arrangements express coarse constraints on relative angles and distances among the code locations and are nearly invariant to substantial affine and nonlinear deformations. They are also partially ordered, which makes it possible to narrow the search for informative ones at each node of the tree. Different trees correspond to different aspects of shape. They are statistically weakly dependent due to randomization and are aggregated in a simple way. Adapting the algorithm to a shape family is then fully automatic once training samples are provided. As an illustration, we classify handwritten digits from the NIST database; the error rate is .7 percent. Index Terms - Shape quantization, feature induction, invariant arrangements, multiple decision trees, randomization, digit recognition, local topographic codes.

My rubric may be thought to cover at least three different questions, each of them vast and complex. The first concerns the technologies contributing to and shaping the formation of [...]

Machines have problems recognizing words in documents if they have interference marks and strokes. A new algorithm is given which tackles this problem by using multiple directional projection planes and skeleton images. The interference strokes were classified into four groupings. Details of the method are given. Tests have shown that the method is able to detect and remove straight lines on both a vertical and horizontal plane. It can also remove curved lines. The method has some limitations but it is still useful.

This paper presents a new approach to off-line, handwritten numeral recognition. From the concept of perturbation due to writing habits and instruments, we propose a recognition method which is able to account for a variety of distortions due to eccentric handwriting. We tested our method on two worldwide standard databases of isolated numerals, namely, CEDAR and NIST, and obtained 99.09 percent and 99.54 percent correct recognition rates at no-rejection level, respectively. The latter result was obtained by testing on more than 170,000 numerals. Index Terms - Writing habits and styles, writing instruments, reversing process, perturbation method, decision combination, k-nearest neighbor rule, neural networks.

Interactive writing, which includes the teacher as the respondent, offers a revealing account of a student-teacher communication. Students should be in the forefront of this interactive process. Students' agenda of communication should get the preference, rather than the teacher's. Teachers need to be honest in their suggestions, and should treat students' problems with seriousness. Mutual reciprocity and experience should guide teachers in their interaction with students. Institutional power wielded by the teacher should be curbed.