Inge Hinterwaldner on visualizing turbulance with parallel lines; David Bates on robotics according to Descartes; Hall Bjørnstad on Pascal’s Mémorial; Paula Varsano on mirrors in Chinese poetry; Virgil’s Eclogue V translated by Paul Alpers, along with a remembrance of Alpers by four of Representations‘ founding editors; and FIELD NOTES, featuring a column by Japan scholar Carol Gluck on fiction and reality in contemporary history and literature.
Coming in November 2013.
Paul Alpers, a founding member of the Representations editorial board and a broadly influential scholar who changed how a generation of readers thought about pastoral poetry, passed away on May 19, 2013. In his honor, Representations 124 features a collective remembrance by four of the original members of the editorial board and reprints Alpers’s fine translation of Virgil’s Eclogue V.
Resemblance did not come naturally to photography. Soon after it became a public medium in 1839, photography’s ability to produce resemblant images—and therefore portraits—was widely challenged. Proponents of photography quickly responded to those challenges by developing more complex concepts of the new medium. Jan Von Brevern, in his “Resemblance After Photography” (Number 123, Summer 2013), argues that photography played an important part in evolving debates on resemblance.
Charles Nègre, self-portrait in a miroir de sorcière, c. 1845-50 (details). Copyright Sammlung Herzog, Basel, Switzerland.
