Linda Williams was een Amerikaanse academica bedrijvig in de discipline van de filmstudies, auteur van het boek Hard Core: Power, Pleasure (1989), een vroege academische studie van pornografie. Ze schreef ook het essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” (1991) waarin ze de definitie van de parapluterm ‘body genres’ — de lichaamsgenres dus — uitbreidde met het genre van de melodrama.
‘In Hard Core: Power, Pleasure zette Linda Williams eigenhandig de hele trend van de academische studie van pornografie op de kaart. De publicatie was wat gedurfd, met het beladen woord hardcore in de titel. De omslag zelf zag eruit als een sensationalistische seksroman, met de Miami Beach art deco-belettering uit de jaren tachtig die populair was in de pornofilms die in dit boek worden besproken.’
Met die woorden beschreef Sholem Stein het belangrijkste boek van Williams.
En vorig jaar reeds stierf academica Joan DeJean in de Verenigde Staten zonder dat ik daar vanop de hoogte was. Wij hebben alles in beweging gezet om haar stoffelijk overschot te laten opgraven en het naar Dodenstad te laten overbrengen. Ze zal een plaatsje krijgen naast Robert Darnton die ondertussen ook al tegen de 85 aanloopt en statistisch gezien weinig kans maakt nog twintig jaar te leven.
The Reinvention of Obscenity (2002), op de cover staat het schilderij Farceurs français et italiens depuis 60 ans et plus (1670), soms toegeschreven aan Antonio Verrio.
Ik ken DeJean van boeken zoals The Reinvention of Obscenity (2002), een bron voor mijn boek De geschiedenis van de erotiek (2011).
In The Reinvention of Obscenity beschrijft de academica het ontluikende concept obsceniteit in het vroegmoderne Frankrijk aan de hand van de volgende drie werken: de hoerendialoog L’Escole des Filles, het gedicht “Tout est foutu” van Viau en L’Ecole des Femmes van Molière, bij ons ook gekend als De leerschool der vrouwen.
Het boek begint met de woorden:
‘Het proces tegen de dichter Theophile de Viau in 1623 is een mijlpaal in de heruitvinding van obsceniteit en in de geschiedenis van de censuur.’
Waarom DeJean hier spreekt van heruitvinding i.p.v. uitvinding is mij een raadsel waar ik u misschien binnen tien jaar een antwoord op kan geven, of morgen, naargelang mijn bezigheden hier in Dodenstad mijn volledige, dan wel halve aandacht vergen. Wel kan ik u zeggen dat in 1623 de term obsceniteit nog niet gebezigd werd, men sprak toen van folastrie.
Albert Bandura was a Canadian-American psychologist at Stanford University best known for the 1961 Bobo doll experiment in which a child was shown and adult mistreating a doll, after which the child imitated the adult.
“Vampires and American presidents began to converge in my imagination, not because all presidents are equally vampiric, but because both are personification of their age […] Since I loved vampires before I hated Republicans, this book also reflects my idiosyncrasies.”
These radicals came to my attention when I wrote a review of Whiteshift (2018) by Eric Kaufmann.
Googling for Noel Ignatiev does not bring up pages of left-wing political propaganda but pages of right-wing political propaganda. Of right wing white supremacists upset by what Ignatiev is saying.
Below is a transcript of a video of which you’ll find several copies on YouTube. It is a spliced video and I do not know where it was recorded nor who interviewed Ignatiev.
“My concern is doing away whiteness. Whiteness is a form of racial oppression, sure. The suggestion is that it is somehow possible to separate whiteness from oppression and it is not. There can be no white race without the phenomenon of white supremacy. If you abolish slavery you abolish slave holders. In the same way, if you abolish racial oppression you do away with whiteness, treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” Interviewer: “Your views are fairly well received in academia” … “Yes the they are legitimate, not to say that everyone agrees but sure … I could not point to any examples where it has provoked political censorship … whiteness is an identity that arises entirely out of oppression … whiteness is not a culture … it’s not a religion, it’s not a language, it’s simply an oppressive social category …. Blackness is an identity that can be plausibly argued, black studies is a study of a people that has formed itself in resistance to its oppression. The task is to bring this minority together in such a way that it makes it impossible for the legacy of whiteness to continue to reproduce itself.”
I have not read books by Ignatiev but I do wonder how he would have gone about doing away with whiteness.
Bloom interviewed by Charlie Rose on ‘The Western Canon’
He is perhaps best known for his book The Western Canon, to its supporters a work defending art for art’s sake, the absoluteness of aesthetic value and literary genius; to its detractors a defense of elitism and dead white males. This makes Bloom is a cultural critic in the tradition of Matthew Arnold who stated that “[culture is] the best that has been said and thought in the world” (Culture and Anarchy, 1869).
I discovered Bloom in the early 2000s in a period I was researching the nobrow concept.
His death has been a good occasion to dig into the university library and bring home The Western Canon and The Anxiety of Influence.
The bulk of today’s research went to The Western Canon, it is arguably Bloom’s best-known work and it has had relevance outside of the lit crit world.
The notion of a canon has also recently shown itself the object of a political debate in Flanders, the region I live and where the right (NVA) has managed to include it into to the policy of the Jambon Government The opposition (the left) was against it. The culture war fought in our region is one akin to the clash of civilizations of Huntington, more specifically the west and how it tries to come to to terms with the renewed religiosity in the form of Islam.
That Bloom’s canonization of 26 authors was an apolitical process can be read on page 4:
“I am not concerned with . . . the current debate between the right-wing defenders of the Canon, who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexistent) moral values, and the academic-journalistic network I have dubbed the School of Resentment, who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for social change.”
If you’re not familiar with Bloom and what to catch up quickly, you may want to check the interviews Bloom gave to Charlie Rose.
Here [above] is one in which he makes a couple of amusing and astute observations on the western canon and its detractors:
