Previous studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), the most well-known marketplace for microtasks, show that the largest population of workers on AMT is U.S. based, while the second largest is based in India. In this paper, we present insights from an ethnographic study conducted in India to introduce some of these workers or "Turkers" -- who they are, how they work and what turking means to them. We examine the work they do to maintain their reputations and their work-life balance. In doing this, we illustrate how AMT's design practically impacts on turk-work. Understanding the "lived work" of crowdwork is a valuable first step for technology design.

Turk-Life in India

Autofiction has been central to the proliferation of self-narrative experiment in France for over thirty years, burgeoning from debates about the impossibility of autobiography as traditionally conceived, dissolving generic boundaries, and reaching across contexts and media. By definition unstable, prospective rather than retrospective, autofiction is appropriate to the unsettled post-Freudian subject whose confidence is placed in the ‘act-value’ rather than the ‘truth-value’ of narrative. Despite some consensus that selves are most productively explored when distinctions between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ are shattered, autofiction’s validity has been hotly debated since the neologism was first proposed in Serge Doubrovsky’s 1977 work Fils. Critics and practitioners have theorized the slippery hybrid; major colloquia and related publications have interrogated its

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Autofiction in the Feminine

Introduction 1. Balzac, Meyerbeer and science 2. 'Tout entier?': scenes from grand opera in Dumas and Balzac 3. The novel in opera: residues of reading in Flaubert 4. Knowing what happens next: opera in Verne 5. 'Vous qui faites l'endormie': the Phantom and the buried voices of the Paris Opera 6. Proust and the soiree ... l'Opera chez soi Envoi Bibliography.

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Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust

Citizenship scholars in Europe often focus on the institutional factors that influence naturalisation, but a less explored topic in the literature is the role of politics and group belonging in naturalisation behaviour—factors that have been proven to influence immigrants' behaviour in the North American context. Through analysis of the extensive Trajectories and Origins (2008) data-set, I find that interest in politics shapes naturalisation behaviour and outcomes, and living in an anti-immigrant climate, identifying as Muslim and feeling otherised is negatively correlated with naturalisation behaviour. Lastly, Arab immigrants are more likely to seek French naturalisation and have this status than White, non-EU immigrants. This paper sets a quantitative foundation for the role of political orientation and context, and ethnic group belonging in shaping immigrants' naturalisation behaviour in France. It ends with proposals for a future research agenda on studying the political integration of different ethni...

Politics and Group Belonging: Predictors of Naturalisation Behaviour in France

Une chose etonne le lecteur de La Recherche de l’Absolu d’Honore de Balzac: les deux principaux protagonistes y vivent une transfiguration. Le premier, Balthazar Claes, chimiste fou, s’enlaidit a m...

Balthazar Claës, l’anti-Balzac: La Recherche de l’Absolu ou la poétique de l’imperfection

The cover page of Armine Kotin Mortimer’s study identifies two points of entry into the Balzacian corpus. The (slightly misleading) title presents the book as a thematic analysis, focusing on the themes of love and money, or the ‘Prime Movers’ of Balzac’s fictional universe. The (more accurate) subtitle reveals the wider scope of the work: Mortimer seeks to explore the ways in which Balzac ‘builds his particular brand of realism’ (p. 5), by examining an array of texts from La Comédie humaine and by demonstrating Balzac’s use of a series of rhetorical devices. While her analysis moves freely from ‘content’ to ‘form’, the principal premise on which her argument rests is that ‘content’, in Balzac, always speaks about ‘form’, or, in her preferred terms, ‘mimesis’ figures ‘semiosis’: ‘Balzac show[s] his hand [. . .] by embedding in his narratives the explanation of how they come to us’ (p. 73), and his texts include in their stories ‘the structures of [their] own semiotic processes’ (p. 61). Mortimer explores the multifarious ways in which representational and reflexive concerns are combined in Balzac’s œuvre, with several chapters of the book tracing rhetorical or semiotic strategies across La Comédie humaine and focusing on topics such as the parallels between selfnarration, ‘phoniness’, and the ‘fakery of imitation’ (Chapter 5); Balzac’s tendency to conclude his texts with present-tense narration (Chapter 19); or to subvert narrative closure in revising his works (Chapter 20). The principal virtue of Mortimer’s approach lies in the fact that reflexivity is presented as an integral part or a built-in feature of realism, rather than as an element that undermines representation and creates tensions within the realist text, as is often the case with studies of realism. In examining Balzac’s realism, Mortimer chooses to describe its operations rather than attempt to provide a restricted definition of what realism is. However, the fact that Balzac is a ‘realistic’ writer seems to be taken as a given; the term is often used in a loose way and is identified with Balzac’s writing practice in general. Balzac’s ‘particular brand of realism’ is not linked to its context as a period term or to the practice of other nineteenth-century realists (references to other authors, such as Poe, Stendhal, or Shelley, are made on the basis of intertextual affinities). The exploration of Balzac’s realism in isolation can be seen to weaken some of Mortimer’s claims: for instance, the nuanced analysis of the language of sex in La Comédie humaine (Chapter 18) fails to convince the reader that Balzac has ‘invented’ it, since no evidence is adduced that the allusive diction examined is specific to Balzac. These reservations aside, For Love or for Money is an important contribution to Balzacian studies, and the meticulous close readings it contains bring out the reflexive implications of all elements of Balzac’s writing, from the plot and the fictional characters to textual variants and Balzac’s revisions of his earlier works.

For Love or for Money: Balzac's Rhetorical Realism

The concept of “allofiction” contributes to the definition of the hybrid, multiple genre of autofiction. In L’Apres-vivre , the autofictional narrative is applied to Henri Weitzmann, uncle of the narrator; the role of the other provides a constituent of the autofictive account of the self.

Autofiction as Allofiction: Doubrovsky's L'Après-vivre

Marcel Proust speaks to us today as a contemporary and a classic. His great novel resonates across languages and time, summing up the past, interpreting the present, and envisioning the future. For "Proust in Perspective", scholars from France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Canada, and the United States have drawn on rich new editions of Proust's novel and correspondence to bring us fresh views of his work. In 19 original essays, a foreword by Jean-Yves Tadi, and an introduction by editors Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb, this volume guides readers through the dense weave of Proust's fiction and correspondence. The essays take us into the realm of Proustian language-as quotation, metaphor, and memory-and into art history and musical ideology, connecting the art of words with the words of art. They explore the interface of history and fiction, the mysteries of the text's evolution, and the dilemmas of its publication. They present the revelations of genetic criticism and the surprises of gender analysis. Taken together, these essays conjure a multifaceted profile of Proust--his work, life, character, and influence--and of new directions in Proust scholarship today. With compelling rigor and infectious enthusiasm, "Proust in Perspective" conveys the magnitude of Proust's continuing appeal.

Proust in perspective : visions and revisions

Since 1983, beginning with Femmes, Philippe Sollers has published nine novels of which the last, Passion fixe, appeared in March 2000 (I am not including the experimental novel Paradis in this group). Emerging from common characteristics in all these novels is a narrator persona with a consistent identity, an omnipresent first-person speaker, the focal point from which everything is seen and to which everything returns. All action centers on this narrator and main character; he is the perspective, the filter, the recorder of all events. Most often he is a writer of keen intelligence and a marginalized social critic–very much like the view Sollers has of himself as a writer.

Armine Kotin Mortimer

Papers

For Love or for Money: Balzac's Rhetorical Realism

Autofiction as Allofiction: Doubrovsky's L'Après-vivre

Proust in perspective : visions and revisions

The MRIs of Sollers's Fictions

The Essay According to Sollers: A Personal and Parabolic Genre