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Attending to Media (New Literary History, Autumn 2006)

Attending to Media (New Literary History, Autumn 2006)

Publié le par Julien Desrochers

 

New Literary History focuses on theory and interpretation-the reasons for literary change, the definitions of periods, and the evolution of styles, conventions, and genres. Throughout its history, NLH has always resisted short-lived trends and subsuming ideologies. By delving into the theoretical bases of practical criticism, the journal reexamines the relation between past works and present critical and theoretical needs.

 

Volume 37, Number 4, Autumn 2006

Special Issue : Attending to Media

 

CONTENTS :

 

Chodat, Robert  : Naturalism and Narrative, Or, What Computers and Human Beings Can't Do

Abstract: Recent efforts to merge literary studies and cognitive science are insufficiently cognizant of important philosophical critiques of AI. Philosophers such as Dreyfus, Haugeland, and Taylor expose the naturalistic and atomistic biases of cognitivist research through their holistic emphasis on context and situated understanding. Yet these philosophical arguments are themselves haunted by important questions, which come to light in Powers’s Galatea 2.2. Powers’s novel dramatizes the philosophical criticisms of cognitivist theory, yet it undermines the strong connection that AI’s critics often posit between narrative and moral identity. It questions not only the epistemological assumptions of computational models, but also the ethical presuppositions informing cognitivism’s philosophical opponents.

 

Choi, Julie : The Metropolis and Mental Life in the Novel

Abstract: The work of the early sociologist Georg Simmel provides unparalleled insight into the complex subjective consequences of the growth of an increasingly objective modern culture. This article provides a close reading of Simmel’s famous essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” to argue that the novel is the sustained realistic treatment of mental life in the large context of the money economy encapsulated in the idea of the metropolis. Simmel’s multi-faceted reading of “mental life” in the metropolis—its intellectualistic quality, calculating and precise nature, the inability to feel, investment in intensity and uniqueness, freedom and attendant loneliness in the face of impersonal distance—permits us to read the diverse novel experiences of subjective life we begin to see represented in the new genre we call the novel as manifestations of the deeply contradictory experience of a metropolitan modernity.

 

Griffin, Benjamin, 1968-  : Moving Tales: Narrative Drift in Oral Culture and Scripted Theater

Abstract:  In folklore and literature, plots and deeds can move around amongst historical protagonists--being attributed to one figure at one time, and to another later on. Beginning with accounts of “Jack Tales” and singing-games transmitted (and transmuted) through oral culture, I then discuss the (literate and oral) text of the slaying of Goliath in Hebrew Scripture. Having discussed the oral-memorial handy-dandy these traditions play with nouns and names, I examine certain aspects of George Peele’s play of King Edward I (c. 1593), showing how the text’s manifold confusions can be seen as resulting from the interface of the written and the oral. Throughout the essay, there recurs the figure (meaning both “character” and “cipher”) of Jack: as a name, as a fortuitous syllable, and as a trickster hero whose ingenuity and uncanny ubiquity finally puncture the explanatory character of the essay itself.

 

Muller, Adam, 1968- : Notes Toward a Theory of Nostalgia: Childhood and the Evocation of the Past in Two European "Heritage" Films

Abstract: This essay centers on the moral and socio-political dimensions of the European colonial experience as represented in its historical aspect in two so-called “heritage” films, Claire Denis’ Chocolat (France, 1988) and Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa (Germany, 2002). The real weight of this argument, however, falls on the specification of nostalgia, on accounting for its conceptual history and diagnosing its somatic effects in these works and elsewhere in literature, history, philosophy, and film. Contra Emmanuel Kant, Linda Hutcheon, Svetlana Boym, and others, nostalgia is here understood as comprised of a unique combination of utopianism, “temporal ambivalence,” and conduciveness to translation. The operation and interaction of these constitutive properties is then explored alongside a nuanced reading of the beliefs, desires, and actions of France and Regina, the two girl protagonists at the narrative and moral-philosophical centers of, respectively, Denis’s and Link’s films.

 

Hurd, Robert :Taking Seinfeld Seriously: Modernism in Popular Culture

Abstract: The strategies employed by the creators of the critically-acclaimed show Seinfeld to reinvent the American television sitcom bear a striking resemblance to those that Gustave Flaubert devised to reinvent the French novel in the mid-nineteenth century, following late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s account. Far from being some transnational, transmedial, and transepochal coincidence, the similarity of Flaubert’s and Seinfeld’s “refusals” of pre-existing and contemporary models of their respective genres points to the universality of the mechanisms by which certain cultural producers effect a “modernist” revolution in disparate popular cultural “fields” in modern capitalist societies. The eruption of modernist transvaluations in mass cultural genres serves not only to legitimate specific cultural producers against others within these genres, but raises these media-bound genres to a more legitimate status within the field of cultural production at large. Modernism is not, then, tied to any specific historical period, national culture, or medium; it is rather a recurrent and repeatable event occurring non-synchronously across diverse national, historical, and media contexts. Such a definition opens up new possibilities in cultural studies for examining the “production” side of popular culture, which traditionally has received less attention than its “consumption” counterpart.

 

Punday, Daniel : The Black Arts Movement and the Genealogy of Multimedia

Abstract: The American Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s used experience as a critical term by which to challenge existing paradigms of literary value. This essay examines Amiri Baraka’s history of Blues as a model for how the Black Arts Movement also links experience and media. It then applies that model to his poetry, as well as other Black Arts Movement work, including the writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. It concludes that the Black Arts Movement’s definition of “multimedia” is not concerned with laying claim to the fullness of experience but instead of guarding against the evacuation of experience by institutional and technical expertise.

 

Price, Rachel : Animal, Magnetism, Theatricality in Ibsen's The Wild Duck

Abstract: This article contends that it is necessary to go beyond the reductionism of certain investments in Ibsen criticism?either feminism or theater history—to perceive that in The Wild Duck it is through his treatment of the animal that Ibsen is able to address, with elegant economy, both an ethics of alterity and aesthetic concerns with theatricality and mediation. Ibsen achieves this through an exploration of the ways that different forms of mediation—theatrical, technological, intersubjective, and occult?all pivot about the same aesthetic questions that plague discussions of animality. In so doing, The Wild Duck also critiques period notions of “the human.”

 

Lorentzen, Jørgen: Commentary: Ibsen and Fatherhood

Abstract: Fatherhood is a pervasive motif throughout the works of the Norwegian play writer Henrik Ibsen. The article “Ibsen and Fatherhood” is exploring the meaning of fatherhood in Ibsen’s works with a special attention to the The Wild Duck. This play present three different forms of fatherhood: the patriarchal father, the fallen father, and the loving, but helpless father. They are significant forms of fatherhood in Ibsen’s drama that correspond to actual father roles in Ibsen’s time. One key aspect of Ibsen’s dramas is the manner in which he weaves together these father roles. He does not separate them as three distinct forms of fatherhood, but instead demonstrates how they are interconnected through relationships, dissolutions and continuity/discontinuity.

 

Price, Rachel : Family Analysis

 

Lorentzen, Jørgen : Commentary: Animalism and Fatherhood