Attraction, Death, and Digital Jouissance in Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies
TL;DR: A Night at the Movies as mentioned in this paper is a collection of short fictions written by Robert Coover during the late seventies and early eighties and miscellaneously published in 1987.
Abstract: A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This (1987) is a collection of short fictions written by Robert Coover during the late seventies and early eighties and miscellaneously published in 1987.1 In comparison to Coover’s more overtly sociopolitical works—The Public Burning (1977), which denounces the social fascism of the American establishment through the narration of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s execution, and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), where the thirst for individual power leads to solipsism and demise—A Night at the Movies engages with a comprehensive media discourse that was redefining its theories and boundaries at the delicate crossroads of the Ford-Carter-beginning-of-Reagan’s eras, between 1974 and 1981—the years when Coover wrote his stories. This was a time when global communication networks were being shaped (Turner founded CNN in 1980) and the Federal Communications Commission had begun to implement programming on, and diffusion of, basic cable television via satellite, positing the basis for a (quasi-)deregulated media proliferation.2 In parallel, a growing use of computer graphics in film and photography introduced digital image processing into analog practices (materializing bodies and objects over a given filmed background), so that new notions of reproducibility and simulation were challenging traditional visual arts and modes of representation.3 Attuned to these transformations of the media scenario, Coover proposes in A Night at the Movies an ungovernable universe of simulacra, where the characters (and the reader) find themselves at a loss, facing the undecipherable nature of reality when massively transformed into “reel.”
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the relationship between classic narratives and experimental fiction, postmodern techniques and humanistic concerns, and political engagement in Coover's novel The Public Burning.
Abstract: On March 9-10,2009,the author interviewed Robert Coover,the distinguished contemporary American postmodern novelist,at Brown UniversityAmong other things,Coover elaborates on the relationship between classic narratives and experimental fiction,postmodern techniques and humanistic concerns,and political engagement in his novel The Public BurningDespite the fact that many critics tend to think of Coover's fiction as avant-garde,he considers it as mainstreamInfluenced by exemplary classic narratives and Samuel Beckett,Coover regards humanism as a kind of romantic attitude toward the worldWhat he decides to do in fiction is to get inside the story as an entertainer and work from the inside outAccording to Coover,in The Public Burning,the patriotic hysteria of the McCarthy era as exemplified by the Rosenberg executions became an entry point to talk about the national mindset
2 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2002
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a collection of fantasies of a man in Cinecity, where pornography is the basis of social norms and the mayoral motto is Pro Bono Pubis.
Abstract: Lucky Pierre is the most famous man in Cinecity, where pornography is the basis of social norms and the mayoral motto is Pro Bono Pubis. He walks to work (the studio where his films are made) in the winter cold, icicles tipping his constantly exposed and engorged penis, and every small interaction provides another opportunity for exercising his prurient art. This vision of a sexualized universe is unique in that social power (and the power to direct, rather than merely appear in, these sex-films) belongs entirely to women. Each chapter (or reel ) of the book is headed with the name of one of nine women (so, in reality, they are muses, but they are also the artists), and each bears her aesthetic stampwhether the dominatrix mayor, the experimental avant-garde filmmaker, the ribald cartoonist who reanimates him with her pen when he has been left by the mayor in a snowbank to freeze, the wife who makes tender home sex movies, etc. Lucky Pierre himself seems to have no free will, indeed, no existence outside his films. He is commanded by these women, and by the overwhelming impulses of his prodigiously endowed organ. The book is a collection of fantasiesa man entering his office instantly begins acrobatically copulating with the receptionist on her desk; a piano teacher administers discipline to his nubile young female students; a castaway discovered by the Nine Muses, who have never seen a man before and quickly begin to test his unfamiliar parts; an engagement party turns into a frenzied bacchanal; a wedding into a sadomasochistic ritual and then a chase scene. But satisfaction is complicated. Pierre is often made ridiculous, a clown as much as a leading man, and always, everything that happens to him is seen; there is no part of his life that is not, potentially, a film. Several times, he attempts to escape, but he is always recaptured and punishedor his escape is proven never to be real in the first place. For example, he joins up with the Extars, a guerrilla group of squatters who adopt him as Crazy Leg, their leader; with them, in particular Lottie, their young leading lady, he rediscovers the vivid joys of life as a sexual outlawincluding copulating with her on the trapeze of a circus. But he can never escape the tentacles of the mayor and the legit industry of Cinecity. Later he is offered the chance to rejoin the Extars, his internalization of his new status won t allow itif it was ever a real choice. Are these Pierre s fantasies? But in a world in which he does not own his own life or his body, where the past can be rewritten as easily as the dialogue can be faked in a redub of one of his scenes, his thoughts are not even his own. Even so, L.P. continues his perhaps futile attempts to define his own destiny. In the end, grown old and decrepit, he learns his next film is titled The Final Fuck i.e., it s the end of his career. Morose and attempting to avoid the inevitable, he flees to a showing of his own work, which ends up leading him, now resigned to his fate, back to the soundstagewhere, in the end, he rediscovers ecstasy, and the closure of his destiny."
1 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the leper moves in a crazy helix because the narrator moves us in a ''precise, governed\" pattern, regulating our own velocity as to schedule his [the leper's] arrival at our starting point.
Abstract: \"At first,\" once upon no time, \"in an instant half-real half-remembered, the leper is at rest; then he begins his approach.\"1 But no: \"he has always been beginning, always approaching.\" The landscape is mythic, perhaps allegorical: the \"sun at its zenith .... dazzling white this figure crossing the molten red flats, his outline blurred by the savage glare\" (179). A medieval Totentanz \"He merely dances on, arms and legs outflung, . . . scratching his helix across the desert floor, . . . his steaming white helix on the burnt red plane. His robe seems not so much a robe as a . . . winding sheet! Death!\" (180). But, no, the echo is complicated and crossed by the incursions of other echoes which are also to be denied priority. The leper moves in a crazy helix because the narrator, \"we,\" moves us in a \"precise, governed\" pattern \"so regulating our own velocity as to schedule his [the leper's] arrival ... at our starting point\" (180). It is a game, hunt in which the leper is only an object on the geometrical psyche of the hunted nar rator. But as the physical distance closes (\"Down the last arc segment we glide, closing it now .... he is close enough now for us to see his eager smile\" [181] ) the narrator's cool voice becomes less objectively distanced, nervously observant of detail which he tries to dismiss: \"tattered ends of his white flesh confusing themselves with ... his fluttering robe, flake off in a scaly dust .... translucent layers of dead scaly material, here and there hardened into shiny nodules, here and there disturbed by deep cavities. In the beds of these cavities: a dark sub stance, resembling blood not so much as ... as: excrement. Well, simple illusion, blood mixed with pus and baked in the sun, that's what it is\" (181). And then the voice becomes hysterical, the voice of Faustus and Everyman: \"But now? oh my god!?as a mere few paces separate us, our point of origin?and end!?just visible before us, the brute reality slams through the barriers of our senses: the encounter is now imminent!\" (181). \"The leper, tongue dangling . . . whole wretched body oozing a kind of milky sweat, hurls himself into our arms, smother ing us, pitching us to the red clay, his sticky cold flesh fastening to us, me, his black tongue licking my face\" (182). One recalls the folk terror, the frequent legends of curse from the leper's kiss. And yet, the narrator seems to seek his destiny even after he has recognized its inevitability and its horror: \"Our hands, my hands, appear before us . . . extended now for the embrace\" (181); \"I lie helpless under the sickening weight of his perishing flesh. Then, in the same instant, it is over. Purged of all revulsions ... we lay him gently on the red
References
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Book•
01 Jan 1967
TL;DR: The Society of the Spectacle as mentioned in this paper is one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s, and it has been widely used in the literature since.
Abstract: For the first time, Guy Debord's pivotal work Society of the Spectacle appears in a definitive and authoritative English translation. Originally published in France in 1967, Society of the Spectacle offered a set of radically new propositions about the nature of contemporary capitalism and modern culture. At the same time it was one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s. Today, Debord's work continues to be in the forefront of debates about the fate of consumer society and the operation of modern social power. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies.Guy Debord was one of the most important participants in the activities associated with the Situationist International in the 1960s. Also an artist and filmmaker, he is the author of Memoires and Commentaires sur la societe du spectacle. A Swerve Edition, distributed for Zone Books.
3,391 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age, and relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist subject in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the ''posthuman''.
Abstract: From the Publisher:
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the \"bodies\" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans \"beamed\" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.
Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist \"subject\" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the \"posthuman.\"
Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.
Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.
2,603 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1983
TL;DR: The Society of the Spectacle as mentioned in this paper is one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s, and it has been widely used in the literature since.
Abstract: For the first time, Guy Debord's pivotal work Society of the Spectacle appears in a definitive and authoritative English translation. Originally published in France in 1967, Society of the Spectacle offered a set of radically new propositions about the nature of contemporary capitalism and modern culture. At the same time it was one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s. Today, Debord's work continues to be in the forefront of debates about the fate of consumer society and the operation of modern social power. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies.Guy Debord was one of the most important participants in the activities associated with the Situationist International in the 1960s. Also an artist and filmmaker, he is the author of Memoires and Commentaires sur la societe du spectacle. A Swerve Edition, distributed for Zone Books.
1,344 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1985
TL;DR: In Huxley's Brave New World, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history as mentioned in this paper, and people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Abstract: But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
891 citations