Missing Person (1978) – Patrick Modiano

Missing Person (1978) – Patrick Modiano
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

My brother is a fan of Patrick Modiano a writer of semi-autobiographical novels (more on that category of novels later). Today is my brother’s fortieth birthday. I think I am going to buy him Paul Auster’s last, Brooklyn Follies. Modiano did not have an entry at Wikipedia (so I translated one from French), nor is he listed in the 1001 books book I am reading. Modiano’s themes include time, memory, place, identity, neglect and the past.

Patrick Modiano is a French language novelist born July 30, 1945 in Boulogne-Billancourt of a father of Italian origins and a Belgian mother, Louisa Colpijn (actress). He is a winner of the Grand prix du roman de l’Académie française in 1972 and the Prix Goncourt in 1978.

A number of his novels have been adapted for film [1], Lacombe Lucien by Louis Malle probably being the most famous. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Modiano [Aug 2006]

Off topic: I’ve updated my notes on postmodernist cinema and modernist cinema.

If you’re the girl of my dreams…

“If you’re the girl of my dreams. then…”, he says. “Then you could be the man of mine.,” she says.

Reconstruction (2003) – Christoffer Boe [Amazon.com]

Watch the trailer

A beautiful film about recognition/forgetting. Lots of old-fashioned clouds of cigarette smoke, lyrical dialogues, interesting soundtrack (Thomas Knak), reminiscent of Gilles Mimouni‘s 1996 L’Appartement.

See wiki entry: Reconstruction

k-punk’s contribution to the pornography symposium

k-punk’s contribution to the pornography symposium:

What Ballard, Lacan and Burroughs have in common is the perception that human sexuality is essentially pornographic.

For all three, human sexuality is irreducible to biological excitation; strip away the hallucinatory and the fantasmatic, and sexuality disappears with it. As Renata Salecl argues in (Per)Versions of Love and Hate, it is easier for an animal to enter the Symbolic Order than it is for a human to unlearn the Symbolic and attain animality, an observation confirmed by the news that, when an orang-utan was presented with pornography, it ceased to show any sexual interest in its fellow apes and spent all day masturbating. The orang-utan had been inducted into human sexuality by the ‘inhuman partner’, the fantasmatic supplement, upon which all human sexuality depends. —k-punk [Aug 2006]

Capitalized Phrases analysis:

Eyes Wide Shut – J. G. Ballard – Jacques Lacan – William Burroughs – – Renata Salecl – Boschian – Jean Baudrillard – Sigmund Freud – Delvaux – Helmut Newton – David Cronenberg – Immanuel Kant – Marquis de Sade – Sacher-Masoch – Jonathan Weiss – Dior – Chanel – Iain Sinclair

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