If Dietterlin’s Architectura epitomized the empirical turn in architectural image-making, the preparatory drawings for the treatise’s etchings show how such firsthand research in art, architecture, and science coalesced in drawing as a context for managing visual research. The 164 surviving Architectura drawings constitute an ideal case study for this phenomenon, for they stand as one of the largest corpora of sixteenth-century architectural drawings made north of the Alps. Dietterlin’s Architectura drawings are compared with drawings from Bramante and Raphael’s St. Peter’s workshop as well as botanical and geological drawings by natural historians Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, and other natural philosophers. The comparison reveals that, during the sixteenth century, tactics for making images and managing information – such as cutting, collaging, annotation, folding and counterproofing – came to inform both architectural and scientific drawing. Indeed, artists, architects, printers, and natural philosophers began to trade tactics of drawing as a means for managing visual information, thereby codeveloping empirical artistic techniques for producing knowledge. Through its drawings, Dietterlin’s Architectura promoted the new, empirical methodology of architectural image-making.

Commodity items may be singularized and revalorized in markets for second-hand goods. The market for singular goods, often cultural or aesthetic items, depends upon collective assessments of value, where the nature of value is embedded in the cultural community. Exiting studies have concentrated on the work of experts and practitioners within markets as they construct goods as valuable. As research begins to see valuation as a nexus of social relations, so it becomes important to study how valuation practices organize markets that span countries and socio-economic categories. We examine the valorization practices of second-hand bicycle traders in Hungary. These market intermediaries salvage obsolete discarded steel bicycles and reconstitute them into fashionable vintage bicycles: sought-after subcultural fashion accessories and collectors’ prized items. We propose a theory of value bricolage to describe the process of constructing value through the skilful combination of matters at hand, material, social and imaginary: scrap frames, spare parts, online resources, fan websites, and valuation communities.

This chapter draws on experiences of mixing methods in the interdisciplinary research of dance, choreography, immersive performance/participatory performance, and fandom. Reflecting on the methods employed in the author’s book Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance, the chapter treats the research process as improvisational and compositional, emerging in tandem with the work being researched. These methods include audience research, choreographic analysis, participant observation, and analysing media content. The aim of the chapter is to make the research process explicit so other researchers might apply a similarly compositional approach in audience research in other performance contexts.

Modern constitutions are resembling one another more than ever before in history. Are they, indeed, converging? This chapter explores this controversial question. Some argue that constitutional borrowing and transplantation of constitutional norms, structures, doctrines and institutions is a fact of life, regardless of ideological or theoretical objections to these practices others deny this and oppose the very idea of the existence of a common constitutional gene pool, bricolage and borrowing. A constitution is and should be a unique reflection of a countrys constitutional identity the latter group believes. A comparative analysis of elements common to all modern constitutions however shows a sizeable kinship relationship between them, whatever the objections we may have to that.

1986 marked a fresh departure in W.G. Sebald’s literary œuvre. Having written poetry for decades and, for a short time, worked on experimental scripts, Sebald reinvented himself as a prose writer and concentrated on fashioning an innovative form of highly stylized, illustrated docufiction. From approximately July 1986 to early 1988, he worked on a first collection of literary prose that had no official working title and was usually referred to simply as the Prose Project. An unsuccessful funding application provides a detailed insight into what the overall project was supposed to look like, but while Sebald worked on it, the project underwent adaptations and was never published in the originally envisaged form. This essay considers archival material relating to the Prose Project, which reveals the common origins of Vertigo and The Emigrants, and assesses the development of Sebald’s ground-breaking intermedial process and the poetological implications of his turn towards narrative prose.

This essay explores the philosophical texts and ideas that exerted an influence on Sebald. His personal library was highly selective, containing the works of unconventional thinkers such as Elias Canetti, but omitting most of the major figures of German philosophy along with post-structuralist writers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, inspired Sebald’s early film scripts and his life provided biographical details in Austerlitz and Die Ausgewanderten. Sebald expressed an affinity for, and his literary style evidenced, the pre-rational assemblage of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘system of bricolage’, in the way that his works can resemble a scrapbook of clippings, personal recollections, visual images, etc. Although he detested Heidegger, phenomenology pervaded Sebald’s work. For example, the Liverpool Street Station episode in Austerlitz evidenced Bachelard’s ‘theatre of the past’, and he made use of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘pre-human gaze’ in his essay on Jan Peter Tripp. Sebald’s liking for the pre-rational extended to an interest in Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, superstition and other overlooked schools of thought and philosophy. Zoroastrianism, for example, influenced his early poetry. This essay concludes that Sebald’s deep interest in metaphysics is key for a full understanding of his critical and literary writings.

This essay looks at the function of photography in Sebald’s literary and critical work. It focuses on the collaborative relationship between Sebald and the photographer Michael Brandon-Jones at the University of East Anglia and details the initial phase of their creative partnership from 1982. With particular attention given to the role photography in his published poetry and literary criticism published prior to Schwindel. Gefühle. (Vertigo) in 1990 it provides an account of the development of Sebald’s early image / text montages and the role of Brandon-Jones in their creation. By documenting Sebald’s interest in collecting images of ‘Art Brut’ during the 1980s, this essay argues that rather than being something the writer incorporates into his texts, the photographic image is the creative pivot around which Sebald reorientates his entire creative practice.

Revolutionary developments along the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez border during the turn of the twentieth century created a cultural renaissance that resulted in scores of literary works, memoirs, films, and other artistic productions that rearticulated the experiences of living in a liminal border zone. This chapter explores serialized literature published by El Paso Spanish-language newspapers during the Mexican Revolution, including Tomóchic (1896) by Lauro Aguirre and Teresa Urrea, Los de abajo (1915) by Mariano Azuela, Memorias de mi viaje (1914) by Olga Beatriz Torres, The Wise Man of the Land of Moctezuma (ca. 1925) by Victor L. Ochoa, and the bilingual film by Félix and Edmundo Padilla, La Venganza de Pancho Villa (ca. 1930). I argue that the literature and film produced in these two cities along the international dividing line reveal the liminality of frontera itself produced much of the affective charge of fronterizo cultural productions.

This chapter starts by observing that public responsibility is still understood in very different ways throughout the world, depending largely on the political, social and cultural background of each State. The Chinese, Middle Eastern, African and Central European examples presented bear witness to this reality, and in particular to the close link between the development of public responsibility and the emancipation of the individual from the State and the collectivity. The great diversity of national and supranational practices on a world-wide scale – in a context marked by global challenges and by the still essential role of the Nation-State framework – makes a comparative legal approach essential, not only to prevent unwarranted standardization, but also to bridge differences and ‘further compatibility’.

We live in a post-translation world in which we are learning to extend our perception of what constitutes translational activity and its consequences. This chapter explores two aspects of the translational practice of poets of the 1890s: its suffusive nature and its prosodic experimentalism. By suffusive translation is meant a translation sourced in a roundabout way, relying on different kinds of formal and multi-sensory bricolage and filtering, such that the poems translated are re-metabolized, infused with new expressive colourings, as much as they are simply assimilated. At the same time, these translations explore a new prosodic range in their sensitivity to phrasal rhythms or cadence, to tonal shaping and to vocal inhabitation. Verlaine is the principal but by no means only French presence in this loosening and developing range of expression, and the examples discussed are drawn from the work of, among others, Lord Alfred Douglas, Arthur Symons, John Gray and Theodore Wratislaw. The chapter argues that the translations these poets undertook made a significant difference to the ways in which verse might be envisaged by the following generation of English-speaking poets.

Chapter 1 “Inception (1962–1979)” outlines the developments that led to RJ’s establishment as a popular movement and its grassroots mobilization to the provinces and villages. This chapter takes us back to the transformative years before and after the fall of the shah. Beginning in 1962, the shah’s White Revolution and Land Reform narrowed the urban-rural divide and unleashed and accelerated other structural forces of modernization that contributed to the revolution as well as RJ’s subsequent establishment and mobilization. Through bricolage and boundary activation, RJ members and IRP officials appropriated the shah’s Literacy, Health, and Extension Corps (Sipah-i Danish, Bihdasht va Tarvij), and attempted to validate the IRI and differentiate RJ by framing its mission as repairing the alleged destruction that the shah had caused the provinces and villages.