Twilight Sleep: Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics
ENERATiONS of critics have claimed that Edith Wharton liked both her gardens and her society well-pruned. In her late fictions, however, Wharton addresses the politics of intimate experience in the context of social debates. To that end, her characters often echo social policy, transformed as it is by Wharton's own bias against legislation of private morality. Although her late fictions have been read conservatively, they are not written in isolation from larger political issues. Instead, they insist on the relation between private and public rather than on a divorce between the two. In challenging her class's (as well as her culture's) gender ideology, Wharton manipulates the conventions of the realist novel to reconcile popular fiction with cultural criticism. My aim is not to reduce the ambivalence with which Wharton writes about anti-Semitism, nor her hatred of black culture, especially as Carl van Vechten describes it in his 1926 Nigger Heaven. I do, however, want to show how writing literature and writing culture, for Wharton, draws on a cultural unconscious, one associated for her with fascism. In Nancy Armstrong's terms, "individual works and kinds of writing gather force, not as they exemplify [an] individual imagination, genre, or tradition of ideas, but as they enter into an unwitting conspiracy that extends throughout the figurative operations of cultural production to shape the lives of real people" (357). I do not so much want to place Wharton's Twilight Sleep in the "context" of history, thereby writing a new historicism, as
Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women A Study in Social Myth
The psychology of women is acquiring the character of an academic entity as witnessed by the proliferation of research on sex differences, the appearance of textbooks devoted to the psychology of women, and the formation of a separate APA division, Psychology of Women. Nevertheless, there is almost universal ignorance of the psychology of women as it existed prior to its incorporation into psychoanalytic theory. If the maxim "A nation without a history is like a man without a memory" can be applied, then it would behoove the amnesiacs interested in female psychology to investigate its pre-Freudian past. This article focuses on one period of that past (from the latter half of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th) in order to clarify the important issues of the time and trace their development to the position they occupy in current psychological theory. Even a limited overview leads the reader to appreciate Helen Thompson Woolley's (1910) early appraisal of the quality of the research on sex differences:
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.