Book•
The Politics of Postmodernism
01 Jan 1989-
TL;DR: In this article, the postmodernist representation is de-naturalized the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history, Re-presenting the past: 'total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text.
Abstract: General editor's preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Representing the postmodern: What is postmodernism? Representation and its politics, Whose postmodernism? Postmodernity, postmodernism, and modernism. 2. Postmodernist representation: De-naturalizing the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history. 3. Re-presenting the past: 'Total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text. 4. The politics of parody: Parodic postmodern representation, Double-coded politics, Postmodern film? 5. Text/image border tensions: The paradoxes of photography, The ideological arena of photo-graphy, The politics of address 6. Postmodernism and feminisms: Politicizing desire, Feminist postmodernist parody, The private and the public. Concluding note: some directed reading. Bibliography. Index.
Citations
More filters
03 Jun 2005
TL;DR: The Digital Affect as mentioned in this paper is an exploration of ways to improve the teaching of reading and writing using digital media and technology, which is best undertaken from the perspective of literacy studies, not literary theory.
Abstract: The Digital Affect is an exploration of ways to improve the teaching of reading and writing using digital media and technology. This requires a fundamental reexamination of digital narratives, building on and updating Espen Aarseth's seminal work in Cybertext and N. Katherine Hayles' recent work in Writing Machines. It also requires a critical appraisal of the technology of the personal computer as an environment in which writers compose - an environment that introduces possibilities while imposing constraints that materially influence the writer's efforts. This exploration is best undertaken, I argue, from the perspective of literacy studies, not literary theory. Rather than assuming the literary nature of digital narratives, my examination of the literacy requirements and effects of digital media and digital environments allows for the construction of a more nuanced and precise typology and genealogy of digital narrative. Focusing on the hermeneutical demands of digital media and environments reveals a narrative tradition that extends back to the earliest days of oral storytelling and that manifests itself not as a generic or historical formation, but rather as a poetical and rhetorical mode in which the narrative material is fragmented and distributed across media and throughout the virtual space of the story. Probing the hermeneutical act of interpreting digital narratives suggests the operation of what I term the "distributed mode" of composing narrative, an authorial mode I examine in works as varied as Stuart Moulthrop's hypermedia story Reagan Library, Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler, Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi, and Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. This attention to the hermeneutical requirements of works composed in the distributed mode reveals two important features: first, the inadequacy of the widely-used term "digital literacy" to describe the range of activities undertaken by the interpreter of such works; and second, the inextricability and simultaneity of "reading" and "writing" during the interpretation of digital and non-digital works alike. Throughout The Digital Affect, I argue that digital media disrupts and reconfigures our standard literacy practices, presenting an invaluable opportunity to make those practices visible and teachable in literature and composition classrooms.
11 citations
TL;DR: The Trujillo Monument to the glorious heroes of May 30,1961 as mentioned in this paper stands exactly where the man died and its placement there was very much a part?the final part?of the history it succinctly records.
Abstract: "Monument to the glorious heroes of May 30,1961. Men of steel, who that bright night executed in this place the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, putting an end to the most horrible tyranny in all Latin American history. Honoring those who fought for liberty will keep us from forgetting their ideals." The sign stands exactly where the man died, and its placement there was very much a part?the final part?of the history it succinctly records. Its inscription is the seminal Trujillo text (even if not chronologically the initial one) because it is both the last artifact of the Trujillo Era and the iconic beginning of Trujillo's resurrection in narrative. In Edward Said's sense of a beginning as "the first step in the intentional production of meaning"(5), the plaque marks the start of a particular process of interpretation that has become a small but persistent current in the long tradition of Caribbean storytelling. And if the storyteller is, as Edouard Glissant maintains, the "handyman, the djobbeur of the collective soul"(Poetics 69), the transformative production of meaning through narrative must be essential in societies where that soul has been withered by the dead hand of totalitarianism. In her postscript to In the Time ofthe Butterflies (1994), Julia Alvarez remarks that the period of Trujillo's rule "can only finally be understood by fiction, only finally be redeemed by the imagination"(324). During the past few years three
11 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the creative use of parody and sense-nonsense-making visible in the Swedish football scene by looking into football chants through the lens of parody, and three examples selected (a song, a chant, and a music video) give a glimpse of possible folkloristic investigations in that context.
Abstract: This article’s aim is to investigate the creative use of parody and sense-/nonsense-making visible in the Swedish football scene by looking into football chants through the lens of parody. The three examples selected (a song, a chant, and a music video) give a glimpse of possible folkloristic investigations in that context, as possibilities to work on varied and extensive material are profound. Theoretically, the article’s argument builds on Susan Stewart’s notion of sense and nonsense as connected, ongoing practices that structure our understanding of the world. The intertextual maze of chants is exemplified by musical creations from Swedish football clubs.
10 citations
01 Oct 2015
TL;DR: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) as discussed by the authors is a satire of the movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank (1952) adapted for the silver screen by George Stevens and George Stevens.
Abstract: I think America is one of the only countries that has not been forced . . . to look [its] own past sins in the face. And it's only by looking them in the face that you can possibly work past them.1-Quentin TarantinoDespite the fact that the Holocaust took place on another continent and directly involved few Americans, this event has become integrated into the fabric of the American story. The trauma of the Holocaust entered American mainstream consciousness with the publication in English of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952, which met with wild success when it was adapted for the silver screen in 1959 as The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, USA). American awareness of the Final Solution was reinforced for later generations with the premiere of the television miniseries Holocaust (Marvin J. Chomsky, USA, NBC) in 1978 and again with the release of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (USA) and the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. With the proliferation of Holocaust memorials and representations in the American arts since the landmark date of 1993, the Holocaust has been transformed in the United States from a specifically Jewish trauma into a broadly defined mainstream American experience.2 America's adoption of European Jewish history is part of a process by which the story of the Holocaust-and America's presumed role in ending it-is incorporated into "the fundamental tale of pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and human rights that America tells about itself."3 Peter Novick confirms this trend in his study The Holocaust in American Life, observing that "the Holocaust has come to be presented-come to be thought of-as not just a Jewish memory but an American memory."4In its use of postmodern parody, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (USA, 2009) calls attention to American culture's appropriation of Holocaust memory through its conflation of Jewish and American identities in the elite fighting unit that gives the film its title. The film's self-conscious Americaniza-tion of the Holocaust functions as a critique of American popular culture's tendency to adopt Holocaust trauma as a screen memory, a means of displacing or repressing its own historical guilt-traumas. Rather than participating in this phenomenon, however, Inglourious Basterds uses parody to lay bare the ways in which American film representations of the Holocaust have shaped, and in some cases have distorted, public cultural memory of the event. Unlike earlier Holocaust films that endeavored to seamlessly integrate a specifically Jewish history into the broader fabric of the American story, Inglourious Basterds calls attention to its Americanization of the Holocaust through its ironic revision of history. Tarantino confirms this reading, explaining that the film broadly examines "the tragedy of genocide. I'm dealing with the Jewish genocide in Europe, but my Jews are going native and taking the roles of American Indians-another genocide. Then there's a King Kong metaphor about the slave trade, that's another genocide."5 Through this revision the film challenges the primacy of the Holocaust as an American memory and consequently draws attention to America's reluctance to confront its own legacy of racial prejudice.Moreover, the film unsettles received representations of America as the liberator of Europe's Jews from their Nazi oppressors, and in this way acts in a manner similar to what Linda Hutcheon has called historiographic metafiction-what I term "historiographic metacinema"-which locates in popular film representations of the Holocaust a complicated intertextual relationship between history and fiction.6 As historiographic metacinema-the film clearly "situate[s] itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction"7-Inglourious Basterds prompts us to question the reliability of films as instruments of public memory by calling attention to the cinematic strategies by which they represent the Holocaust. …
10 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a retelling of Ethelthryth's life that reveals the way in which powerful elites attempt to control history and culture, by elevating her through her virginity and perfect service role, but suppressing her by denying her active role and by silencing her voice.
Abstract: Although it might scarcely surprise that in his hagiography of Ethelthryth, jElfric should present her as a w o m a n most worthy to be called a saint one might not anticipate that his retelling of her story would also reveal something of the way in which powerful elites attempt to control history and culture. Written in the tenth century, when women's authority and position in the Anglo-Saxon monastery were being eroded and confined, this version of the seventh-century saint's life reflects such a context representing her as dependent and passive rather than as autonomous and active. From this perspective, vElfric's discourse provides an effective literary illustration of Catharine R. Stimpson's claim: [Men] have decided w h o will have power, and w h o will not; which realities will be represented and taught, and which will not. In so doing, m e n have relegated women, as women, to the margins of culture, if not to silence and invisibility. Since, in AElfric's version of her story, Ethelthryth is not endowed with a voice which constitutes her own subjectivity, she becomes marginalized, visible only as object to be gazed upon and used by others to the extent that her body itself ultimately functions as text So effectively has vElfric relegated Ethelthryth to the margins of his discourse that to recuperate a central position for this woman, it is necessary to read against his text's dominant ideology by refusing to accept the reader position created through nanator control of the discourse, thereby emulating jEthelthryth's example of subversive resistance to dominant powerful elites. Through techniques of elevation and suppression, vElfric constitutes ^Ethelthryth as submissive to the authority of that ideology—as a 'subjected being'. H e elevates her through her virginity and perfect service role, but suppresses her by denying her active role and by silencing her voice, constructing her identity only through sets of cultural signs. Any contradiction between the Christian king's and Ethelthryth's perceptions of God's calling is also suppressed in this manipulation of her story, and a concomitant effect is the elision of any problem that might exist about how to discern and heed God's
10 citations