Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks: Creative and Critical Responses to Visual Texts. Ed. Janet Evans

In her contemporaries’ imaginations Clara Schumann transcended aesthetic pitfalls endemic to virtuosity. Scholars have stressed her performance of canonic repertory as a practice through which she established this image. In this study I argue that her concerts of the 1830s and 1840s also staged an elevated form of virtuosity through showpieces that inhabited the flagship genres of popular pianism and that, for contemporary critics, possessed qualities of interiority that allowed them to transcend merely physical or “mechanical” engagement with virtuosity. They include Henselt's études and variation sets, Chopin's “Là ci darem” Variations, op. 2, and Clara's own Romance variée, op. 3, Piano Concerto, op. 7, and Pirate Variations, op. 8. Her 1830s and early 1840s programming offers a window onto a rich intertwining of critical discourse, her own and her peers’ compositions, and her strategies as a pianist-composer. This context reveals that aspirations about elevating virtuosity shaped a broader, more varied field of repertory, compositional strategies, and critical responses than we have recognized. It was a capacious, flexible ideology and category whose discourses pervaded the sheet music market, the stage, and the drawing room and embraced not only a venerated, canonic tradition but also the latest popularly styled virtuosic vehicles. In the final stages of the article I propose that Clara Schumann's 1853 Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 20, alludes to her work of the 1830s and 1840s, evoking the range of guises this pianist-composer gave to her virtuosity in what was already a wide-ranging career.

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Critical Responses, Early

Jane Austen in Context ◽

10.1017/9781316036525.011 ◽

2005 ◽

pp. 83-91

Author(s):

Mary Waldron

Keyword(s):

Critical Responses

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Liquid power: reading the infinity pool as a global semioscape

Visual Communication ◽

10.1177/1470357220984823 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 147035722098482

Author(s):

Crispin Thurlow

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

Cultural Politics ◽

Primary Objective ◽

Analytic Structure ◽

Visual Texts ◽

Visual Material ◽

The World

The analytic focus of this article is the highly fashionable ‘infinity pool’, treated here as a visual-material realization of the cultural politics of super-elite mobility. The article is organized around a three-step analytic structure. First, I demonstrate how the infinity pool is mediatized as a status marker, and thus circulated and normalized. Second, I pinpoint the semiotic and ideological ways the infinity pool emerges as a mediated practice. Third, I examines how the infinity pool is also remediated on Instagram and thereby broadcast anew. Throughout, I evidence my analysis with visual texts drawn from a range of commercial, situated and digital media sources. My primary objective is to show how the infinity pool, as a mediatized, mediated and remediated practice, feeds the global semioscape, that more informal, often banal plane of cultural circulation where images, ideas and aesthetic ideals seed themselves all over the place. In this way, and however frivolous or innocuous infinity pools may seem, they also spread a particularly privileged way of looking at, and being in, the world.

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Molecular functions of ASK family in diseases caused by stress-induced inflammation and apoptosis

The Journal of Biochemistry ◽

10.1093/jb/mvaa145 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Kazuki Kojima ◽

Hidenori Ichijo ◽

Isao Naguro

Keyword(s):

Oxidative Stress ◽

Endoplasmic Reticulum ◽

Adverse Effects ◽

Er Stress ◽

Inflammatory Diseases ◽

Family Members ◽

Disease States ◽

Molecular Functions ◽

Critical Responses ◽

Proper Response

Summary VCells are constantly exposed to various types of stress, and disruption of the proper response lead to a variety of diseases. Among them, inflammation and apoptosis are important examples of critical responses and should be tightly regulated, as inappropriate control of these responses is detrimental to the organism. In several disease states, these responses are abnormally regulated, with adverse effects. Apoptosis signal-regulating kinase (ASK) family members are stress-responsive kinases that regulate inflammation and apoptosis after a variety of stimuli, such as oxidative stress and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. In this review, we summarize recent reports on the ASK family in terms of their involvement in inflammatory diseases, focusing on upstream stimuli that regulate ASK family members.

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