Monthly Archives: August 2006

Postmodern American literature

In search of Cross the Border—Close the Gap and Playboy magazine.

For our discussion, the term [postmodernism] only really becomes interesting with the debate on American literature, as introduced by Irving Howe, who in his essay Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction (Partisan Review XXVI, 1959, pp. 420-36) heralded in a complete reversal with his use of the term. He describes contemporary literature as being characterised by limpness, as having lost its potency. This was an accusation (although he also considered it a natural development) inasmuch as he stated that the new mass society with its egalitarian forms found its approximation in literature, i.e., no longer possessed innovative power. Worth mentioning are also Leslie Fiedler: Cross the Border—Close the Gap ( Playboy, December 1969) (so there was “transcending of borders” already then!). The term first became a central topic of debate in American literature of the 1950s. — via wsws.org

See also: postmodern literature

Blogging and remediation

In search of genre theory

One of the fundamental principles of new media that directly influenced our teaching and research is the principle that old media and familiar genres end up as the content of new media. Marshall and Eric McLuhan (1988) call this principle the “law of retrieval” (pp. 102-06), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) call it “remediation” (pp. 2-15), and Lev Manovich (2001), drawing on the McLuhans and Bolter and Grusin, says, “the language of cultural interfaces is largely made up from elements of other, already familiar cultural forms” (p. 71). The web is remediating all media that has come before it (print, music, film, television, radio, paintings, email, etc.); therefore in our teaching we wanted to emphasize for our students that weblogging is not a radically new way of writing, but a repurposing of familiar (we hoped) print genres. Other theories of or approaches to media, like Gregory Ulmer’s theory of electracy and his pedagogy articulated in Internet Invention (2003) might lead to more experimental uses of weblogging than what we encouraged from our students, but rather than emphasize the newness and unfamiliarity of weblogs, we wanted to balance the novelty of the activity with a grounding in familiar literate practices. Bolter and Grusin’s response to the “modernist rhetoric” of making a “radical break with the past” sums up our own understanding of new media, including weblogs: “what is new about digital media lies in their particular strategies for remediating television, film, photography, and painting [and print]. Repurposing as remediation is both what is ‘unique to digital worlds’ and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness” (50). —Into the Blogosphere

See also: genre theory

The first question in genre theory

According to Bulgarian philosopher and literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov 1970 book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970) the first question in genre theory is:

“Are we entitled to discuss a genre without having studied (or at least read) all the works wich constitute it [the corpus]?”

He answers the question with yes:

“Scientific method allows does not require us to observe every instance of a phenomenon in order to describe it; scientific method proceeds reather by deduction.”

But he also warns that:

“Whatever the number of phenomena (of literary works, in this case) studied, we are never justified in extrapolating universal laws from them.”

After which he goes on to quote Karl Popper and the famous black swan example of inductive vs deductive reasoning:

“no matter how many instances of white swans we have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that swans are white.”

See also: genre theory

Women’s fiction, men’s fiction

This is a collection of soundbites from around the web prompted by The Reading Experience.

Via the Reading Experience:

Teach Me Tonight on how to define “romance novel” and why although “romance and romantic novels can be well-writen,” readers shouldn’t want “to jettison the genre definitions in order for them to gain acceptance.”

Via Teach me tonight:

I think the definition given by the Romance Writers of America (RWA), that ‘Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending‘ is pretty much perfect as a short definition of the genre. For a definition of the structural components (e.g. ‘barrier’, ‘moment of ritual death’) of each romance, Pamela Regis’ A Natural History of the Romance Novel is excellent.

Via post-feminist literary critic Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance (1982):

Popular women’s fiction has come under attack for a number of different reasons. For one, popular culture specialists raise the issue of the passive consumption by women of mass-culture products which present women with negative role models. Most leisure-time activities are, in fact, passive, and few critics fault male readers with passivity when they read detective novels or westerns. –page 2

Via the guardian.co.uk

Publishers have been trying for years to find a winning formula for men’s fiction. From lad lit to dad lit to bad lit, men have been barraged with an array of reading matter since Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary stormed up the bestseller lists and into our lives in 1997. The New York Times reported last week on the failure of American publishers to find a satisfactory male equivalent for chick lit. Kyle Smith’s Love Monkey and Scott Mebus’s Booty Nomad, both published earlier this year, have failed to make any impact. As one blogger remarked, ‘Mebus’s antihero isn’t a character, he’s a demographic marketing fantasy.’

See also: genre theory

Rephotographing Atget

Rue de la Colonie (1900) – Eugène Atget
Image sourced here.

Via gmtPlus9 (-15) (a blog which combines old weird america music with modernist art) comes a project called Rephotographing Atget:

Lens Culture… Rephotographing Atget – photos and text by Christopher Rauschenberg.

On a 1989 trip to Paris, I suddenly found myself face to face with a spiral-topped gatepost that I knew very well from a beautiful photograph by Atget (the photograph on the left). I rephotographed his gatepost from memory (the photograph on the right) and wondered how many other Atget subjects might still be holding their poses.” Also… Paris: Eugène Atget and Christopher Rauschenberg, and exhibition at the International Center Of Photography which ends on the 27th. — gmtPlus9 (-15)


It reminds me of a similar project involving the New York re-photographs of Berenice Abbott by MrJumbo.

The Chelsea Hotel (1936) – Berenice Abbott
Image sourced here.

The Chelsea Hotel (2000) – MrJumbo
a 2000 mimic of a Berenice Abbott photograph by MrJumbo
Image sourced here.

That there are more links between Atget and Abbott is attested by:

In 1925, Abbott discovered the photography of Eugène Atget and helped him gain international recognition for his work. —MrJumbo

And:

Fellow photographer Berenice Abbott is given much credit for the recognition which Atget’s photographs received after his death in 1927. One year before his death, Abbott, then an assistant to Man Ray, met with Atget and conserved many of his negatives. When Atget passed away, Abbott raised enough money to acquire 1,500 of his negatives and 8,000 prints. She spent the next forty years promoting his work in America, elevating it to be recognized as art, above its original reputation as simply photographic documents. In 1968, Eugene Atget’s work was collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Berenice Abbott has commented regarding Atget: “He was an urbanist historian, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization.”–Wikipedia [Jan 2006]

Desert island books

In search of world literature

Behind the flagship of Walter Scott appears a ghostly fleet of the most wondrous ships that ever sailed in literature, crowding in chaos into a crammed but previously well ordered harbour. The strangest of these vessels should be identified. We find the first horror novel Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, Mary Shelley’s wonderfully romantic Frankenstein, the highstrung sea novels of Captain Marryat with “The Phantom Ship” leading, the fantastic production of Ernst Theodor Hoffmann with madness prevalent everywhere in glorious ebullience with The Devil’s Elixir as a supreme masterpiece of its kind, all the horrible tales of the Grimm brothers and H.C.Andersen to frighten small children out of their wits with, the unbalanced Nikolai Gogol of Russia with his weird tales of witches and magicians, martyrs and heroes of Ukraine and St. Petersburg with Taras Bulba as an unforgettable masterpiece, and the most absurd of them all: Victor Hugo, with his poems, dramas and novels of monsters and hunchbacks, convicts and suicides, the expert on victims of fate and the supreme master of supreme exaggerations. His first novels are so ridiculous that his reputation was unfairly tainted with the mark of his first absurdities. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables, Workers of the Sea and The Laughing Man all belong to the most fascinating masterpieces of world literature, and the least consummate of these is actually the most popular, Les Misérables, while The Laughing Man, the most notorious, is his most intelligent and splendid composition. —Philosophy and Literature

In search of the roots of impressionism

Garden in Shoreham (1820s or early 1830s) – Samuel Palmer

 

Samuel Palmer (1805 – 1881) was largely forgotten after his death. In 1909, large amounts of his Shoreham work were destroyed by his surviving son Herbert Palmer, who burnt “a great quantity of father’s handiwork … Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt; I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate”. The destruction “included sketchbooks, notebooks, and original works, and lasted for days”.

In search of photographic realism

Detail of the The Birth of Venus (also known as Aphrodite) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879.

In Plato’s Symposium the speech of Pausanias distinguishes two manifestations of Aphrodite, represented by the two stories: Aphrodite Ourania (“heavenly” Aphrodite), and Aphrodite Pandemos (“Common” Aphrodite). These two manifestations represented her role in homosexuality and heterosexuality, respectively. –via Aphrodite’s Wikipedia page [Aug 2006]

In his own time, Bouguereau was considered to be one of the greatest painters in the world. In 1900, his contemporaries Degas and Monet reportedly named him as most likely to be remembered as the greatest 19th century French painter by the year 2000. Although with Degas’ famous trenchant wit, and the aesthetic tendencies of the two Impressionists, it is possible the statement was meant as an ironic comment on the taste of the future public. 

Colin Wilson

Via the laughingbone:

One of the authors that I used to seriously collect was Colin Wilson. At one point in my life, his books – especially the Outsider Series – were like maps, guiding me through unknown territories. I eagerly hunted down everything in and out of print. And in those dark pre-Amazon days, it was a real triumph of discovery to find a copy of the long out-of-print Beyond the Outsider, signed by Wilson, on the dusty lower shelf in an old bookstore. —the laughingbone

Via Michael Blowhard:

Here’s a great tale: the electrifying rise and almost instant fall of the British writer Colin (“The Outsider”) Wilson. Acclaimed as a brilliant talent while still in his early 20s, he became rich and famous very fast. But he was critically eviscerated within a couple of years and has been ignored (and/or treated like an embarassment) ever since.

When the paratext is more interesting than the text

Exploitation Poster Art (2005) – Dave Kehr, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Horror Poster Art (2004) – Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Science Fiction Poster Art (2004) – Christopher Frayling, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In Europe, publisher Taschen have teamed up with Nourmand/Marsh, to publish a series of film poster books. Available in Belgium at a price of 13 Euros, they are a bargain. Some of the accompanying text of these lovingly produced coffee table books was written by American film critic Dave Kehr (Exploitation poster art) and British art historian Christopher Frayling (Science-fiction poster art). The posters are masterpieces of visual innuendo, offering, in most cases, far more that the films actually delivered. And that is what I meant in my title about the paratext being more interesting than the text.