Meanings

By a circular reading of its components and circumstances, it was possible to form a coherent idea of the initiative as a whole and to offer answers to the intriguing questions that inspired this book. The interpretation of the corpus in its context allows this book to explain why the MRE, headed by Oswaldo Aranha, devoted uncommon efforts to promote the Exhibition. Thanks to a time horizons fusion that involved the cross-examination of past and present viewpoints, it was possible to build the understanding that the Exhibition was conceived as a Public Diplomacy initiative avant la lettre, aimed at transforming Brazil's international reputation and advancing broader diplomatic objectives. More specifically, it constituted an action of Cultural Diplomacy intended to create a better environment for operating inter-state relations. Thought by its governmental planners as an action of Propaganda – the current term at that time, but today not appropriate for analysing the initiative – the superlative efforts devoted to produce the Exhibition were motivated by the foreign policy goal of renewing Brazil's cultural image among the British and the Allies. The pursued enhancement of Brazilian prestige was perceived by President Vargas and Minister Aranha as a means of positioning the nation as a major player in the global order that would emerge from the War. Analogously, the British government, which had organised shows in Brazil in the preceding years, saw the Exhibition as a foreign policy endeavour, opportune in a period when the South American country was growingly under the United States’ sphere of influence. Magno's detailed 1936 diplomatic report about the intellectual environment in the United Kingdom and the hosting of British art shows in Brazil prior to the Exhibition show that it was, differently from what characterises the unidirectional Propaganda, a reciprocal action, which involved listening and understanding the host nation, so as to efficiently frame the Public Diplomacy enterprise. The message of solidarity in wartime was appealing for the British audience and succeeded in attracting its attention to a nation that was not especially memorable at that time.

The fifth edition of 1938 did not include a bibliography. The following has been prepared by the translator to assist the reader. This list includes all published sources cited in the text and footnotes. Following standard practice, it excludes most newspaper and magazine articles, statistical annuaries, most untitled or anonymous works and most encyclopaedia and dictionary entries, all of which are, whenever possible, given full references in the footnotes.

For the past twenty years, the problem of periodic crises has retained the special attention of economists. Many works have been published and official commissions named. A price research service – a kind of observatory for the economic world – has been created by the Statistique générale de France. Thanks to the concerted efforts of science and administration, the analysis of the curious periodic mechanism that characterizes our modern societies has gained in detail and precision.

From here on, the crisis appears as a point in the evolution of capitalist society. In order to understand it, one must study the period of growth that precedes it and the period of depression that follows. And the study of crises is concerned with alternating periods of prosperity and depression, with the crisis placed at the junction of the two – so much so that one speaks of economic cycles in the United States and of industrial fluctuations in England when identifying the phenomenon we seek to study here.

Points of view have changed, and horizons have broadened. The entire economic system is influenced by these pendulum swings [balancement]. During the growth period, the production of goods, consumption and credit develop; incomes (wages, dividends, interest) rise. Unemployment diminishes or even disappears. Savings increase. Prices rise. After a number of years (three to five), we note an inversion in the curves. It is a drop all down the line: production, consumption and incomes sag; unemployment reappears. Business prosperity is followed by stagnation.

Not only is the entire economic organism affected, but the crisis also reaches nearly every other country; an ever-closer economic interdependency [solidarité] unites the economic markets, transforming the crisis into an international or global phenomenon. The most recent crises, in 1907, 1913 and 1920, have been global. And now the observations are numerous and precise enough and cover a sufficiently long period of time (almost a century) for there to be no appreciable divergence of opinion among economists about the phenomenon itself or about its scope. This consensus allows us to affirm the scientific nature of these observations.

Yet, after having established the phenomenon, one is tempted to search for its causes. Herein lies the disagreement. For some economists, these cycles [alternatives] may occur because production is sometimes lower and sometimes greater in relation to demand. If supply falls below demand, prices rise and with them profits. New businesses are created.

In the midst of the Second World War (WW2), the Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings left Rio de Janeiro, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in London. This Exhibition, as it will be called throughout this book, consisted of 168 artworks donated by seventy of the most recognised Brazilian Modernist painters, including Candido Portinari, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Lasar Segall and Tarsila do Amaral. The largest collection sent abroad until that time, and still today the most remarkable show of Brazilian art ever displayed in the United Kingdom, it toured the country between October 1944 and September 1945. It was displayed firstly at the Royal Academy of Arts (RAA) in London and subsequently at the Castle Museum (Norwich), National Gallery (Edinburgh), Kelvingrove Gallery (Glasgow), Victoria Gallery (Bath), Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery (London) and Reading Museum and Art Gallery, as detailed in Table 1. As a contribution to the Allied War effort, the funds from its sales were given to the Royal Air Force (RAF) Benevolent Fund, at that time an organisation greatly admired by Brazilians.

Despite its relevance, the Exhibition has long been erased from Brazil's diplomatic and art history. This book reconstructs this little-known wartime initiative and raises two main questions. Initially, it seeks to understand why this unprecedented – and unique to this day – endeavour was enthusiastically championed by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MRE), precisely during a most complicated period of War. Secondly, it evaluates whether the Exhibition attained its goals, by studying its outcomes and shortcomings. By questioning what led the MRE to support the unlikely action, this book demonstrates that the Exhibition was a Public Diplomacy component of a wider foreign policy designed during wartime. It was shown that the Exhibition pertained to a broad diplomatic drive launched by Brazil during WW2, aimed at enhancing its prestige and international status in the wake of the global conflict. It may thus contribute not only to showcasing an unheard-of example of a successful and sophisticated Public Diplomacy initiative, but also to recover hints of a national legacy in a field scarcely studied in Brazilian historiography.

At a critical time of war, massive efforts were required to organise a largescale show of Brazilian Modern Art in the United Kingdom, and the virtual absence of historical records is stunning.

To think of AHS (2011–present), Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's internationally acclaimed horror anthology television series, is to think of a cultural manifestation with deep and complex political, economic and sociocultural ramifications. Accordingly, these ramifications take explicit shape in the series in terms of the conscious articulation of fear, sexuality and violence. By channeling widespread sociocultural fears and anxieties, AHS explicitly depicts contemporary issues and concerns in terms of the dynamic relationship between horror and desire. Nevertheless, as with the relational boundaries linking horror and desire, the political and sociocultural implications of this cultural manifestation reach far beyond their conscious and explicit deployment. Furthermore, horror and desire designate a complex and dynamic circuit of unconscious tensions and attractions intricately linked to sociocultural intelligibility by which the subject is constituted on individual and collective levels – that is, they designate those intrapsychic and intersubjective dynamics through which subjects come to understand themselves and their relationship to the world. In turn, this relationship between processes of subject constitution and sociocultural intelligibility cannot be detached from the profound political, economic and technological transformations of the last three-to-four decades. And it is in light of this relationship that the ninth season of Murphy and Falchuk's series, AHS: ‘1984’ (2019), becomes a critical tool for the analysis of the contemporary re-articulation of sociocultural intelligibility. With its participation in the current trend of revisiting and rememorizing the social and cultural settings of the 1980s and 1990s, this cultural manifestation provokes a contextual disruption; it slashes apart past and present issues and concerns, providing a critical entry point for the examination of the sociocultural transformation of the last forty years. But how does AHS, and this season in particular, constitute such a relevant slashing tool of sociocultural analysis? And what are the contemporary dynamics and transformations it reveals?

In this chapter, I will address these questions by, first, approaching those elements that, from its particular focus on pop culture and the slasher horror subgenre to the sociopolitical context it portrays, make ‘1984’ stand in a position that differentiates it from other seasons of AHS. Second, I will analyse this season's positioning in relation to sexuality by tackling its narrative deployment in terms of both the sociohistorical contexts it portrays and the political, economic and sociocultural ramifications that derive from its mainstream production and distribution.

Can you put into words your experiences while you sit on a couch and move your eyes smoothly across a piece of paper or a screen, which – as the only sensory input your brain has to process – provides some ink blobs or pixels you have learned to identify as letters after years of training? The following two quotes nicely summarize what I think is essential about this, in terms of evolution, most unnatural daily activity of the mind. They reveal two different aspects or functions that you perhaps are also familiar with. One evokes experiences of immersing oneself in a textual world; the other stirs up emotions and feelings of beauty. Both, the immersive and the aesthetic experiences, so well described in these citations, emerge from an interaction between the contents of the texts they read and the associative semantic networks in their brains.

Throughout this book, I will treat these two aspects apart: immersion, mainly associated with the reading of prose, and aesthetic feelings, most often associated with the reading of poetry. This does not mean, however, that people cannot have aesthetic feelings when reading a novel or immersive experiences during the reception of poetry.

What gets readers to be ‘on loan’ to an author, thinking, feeling, suffering and acting within them? Why did Sappho and Homer know so well how to move, surprise and please their readers so that they want to read on? The first step when trying to predict how readers’ thoughts and feelings are con-trolled by what they read is to analyze the tools of the trade. Since Aristotle's days, uncountable books and articles from numerous scientific disciplines have been devoted to the issue of revealing the secrets of the power of verbal art. My approach is a ‘from simple to complex’ one. In the previous chapter, I talked about textual back- and foreground features that co-determine reading acts. Here, I will show examples of such features, and in Chapters 5 and 6, I will explain how these features can be quantified via current methods of distant reading and computational stylistics. These include novel techniques of machine learning and attempt to answer questions that are of interest to literary scholars and critics, reading psychologists or people working in education or the book industry. Combining quantitative text and reader analyses with my NCPM will allow me to predict effects of these features on reader responses at all levels of psychological enquiry: neuronal, behavioural and experiential.

Simple Text Features, Tropologies, Close, Distant and Middle Reading

My Ph.D. advisor Kevin O’Regan always told me that reading is just visual perception and thus obeys basic laws of pattern recognition. With one crucial difference: unlike most other visual stimuli, such as visual scenes, texts have a clear advantage for quantitative analyses, because they represent highly structured material, just as with the rule-determined languages they are written in. In general, their elements – letters, words, sentences – are compositional: simple units are combined to form larger, more complex ones, thus allowing an ‘infinite use with finite means’ as Wilhelm von Humboldt put it. And many of these units can be quantitatively described and analyzed into even simpler basic features via statistical and computational methods.

In tackling the central question of how writers can act on my sweat glands, limbic system or feelings through stringing together syllables and words, it is useful to have a close look at their verbal toolbox.

A Company Convenes

During the opening, pre-title sequence of ‘Apocalypse’, the US anthology television series American Horror Story (AHS)'s first episode of its eighth season (ironically titled ‘The End’), we see the world all but destroyed by nuclear missiles. Only a select few are able to sequester themselves to a secret underground bunker, Outpost 3, to live out their remaining days under a bizarre rulesbased system that is both demanding and terrifying. On the first evening of their stay, the occupants of Outpost 3 sit down to a Gothic-banquet-inspired dinner where a company of familiar faces is brought together in this eighth act of television horror. Looking around the dinner table, we see actor Sarah Paulson playing the role of Wilhemina Venable, matriarch of the bunker. Up to this point, Paulson had appeared in every season of AHS, each time playing a different character. Evan Peters is also there – playing Mr Gallant (also in his eighth season). Kathy Bates plays Miriam Mead (in her sixth season and sixth role). Adina Porter plays the role of Dinah Stevens and Billie Lourd plays Mallory (both in their fourth season at that time). Leslie Grossman takes on the role of Coco (her second season), while there are AHS newcomers Kyle Allen and Ash Santos playing Timothy and Emily, respectively, Jeffery Bowyer- Chapman and Chad James Buchanan as lovers Andre and Stu, and, most surprisingly of all perhaps, Hollywood veteran Joan Collins playing the role of Mr Gallant's grandmother, Evie Gallant.

While these actors inhabit their characters consistently and singularly within the world of ‘Apocalypse’, the AHS audience who has travelled through its different seasons and stories inevitably frame a perception of each character through the journey of previous roles, generating multifaceted linkages which themselves resonate with the linkages afforded by the richly woven narratological lines that run vertically through the seemingly discrete seasons in the anthology. It is within these matrices of intertextual weaving encompassing actor and character, and character and past-and-future characters, that the AHS company has evolved. And it is also one that carries with it an important legacy from American television that dates back to the early beginnings of serialized drama – one that engages with the social and the political in ways that signal its antecedents both formally and thematically.

The start of every act of reading a story, poem or book is a decision: the decision to go someplace else. This place can be a world we have not been to before and it can lead to forgotten memories or dreams, suppressed desires or emotions or to novel ideas that change one's life. There may be many hidden motivations or explicit reasons leading to this decision. The consequence is always the same: one abandons control of one's mind and lends it – for some time – to a writer. This is a risky business, for one is now loaned out to another who thinks, feels, suffers and acts within one. It is like a blend of two minds or consciousnesses. To a certain extent, reading removes the subject–object division that constitutes all perception. If the conditions are right, readers of verbal art will immerse into that other place, that other reality and forget the world around them. This immersive experience is one of two primary reasons why we buy and read stories and novels; the other being the aesthetic experience often reported when reading lyrics and poetry. A psychiatrist friend of mine once compared immersion with a psychopathological state. And indeed, reading can become an addiction. But even if engaged reading was a mild form of psychosomatic disease, the disease seems often better than the cure: being immune to the immersive and aesthetic effects of reading fiction, being indifferent to or unmoved by the actions or feelings of a protagonist would mean that one misses out on one of the greatest pleasures of the mind; but also, that one lacks empathy, which is fundamental for our social life. Indeed, moving your mind through the text worlds of fiction is good training for both cognitive and social-emotional skills. Both your IQ and EQ can only benefit – if you read the right stuff.

What makes literary reading such a captivating experience despite its rapidity is based on the fact that associative semantic networks are activated in the brain. These put in train thoughts and feelings as well as unconscious motion sequences. Semantic networks is a handy metaphor to describe how our brains organize information about the world in the form of a net of concept nodes linked by connections.