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Nele Noppe

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books - 0 views

  • The WWW is the Great Mother of All Hypertexts, a world-wide library where you can, or you will in short time, pick up all the books you wish. The Web is the general system of all existing hypertexts. Such a difference between text and system is enormously important,
  • Today there are new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a poem, can be transformed to hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the problem is no longer, or not only, a physical one, but rather one that concerns the very nature of creative activity, of the reading process, and in order to unravel this skein of questions we have first of all to decide what we mean by a hypertextual link.
  • Notice that if the question concerned the possibility of infinite, or indefinite, interpretations on the part of the reader, it would have very little to do with the problem under discussion.
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  • No: what are presently under consideration are cases in which the infinity, or at least the indefinite abundance of interpretations, are due not only to the initiative of the reader, but also to the physical mobility of the text itself, which is produced just in order to be re-written. In order to understand how texts of this genre can work we should decide whether the textual universe we are discussing is limited and finite, limited but virtually infinite, infinite but limited, or unlimited and infinite.
  • First of all, we should make a distinction between systems and texts. A system, for instance a linguistic system, is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language.
  • If you are able to use an English dictionary well you could write Hamlet, and it is by mere chance that somebody did it before you. Give the same textual system to Shakespeare and to a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
  • Grammars, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are systems: by using them you can produce all the texts you like. But a text itself is not a linguistic or an encyclopaedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe.
  • A text castrates the infinite possibilities of a system.
  • Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is certain that it will never provide you with a demonstration of Fermat's last theorem, or with the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of many deconstructionists was to believe that you can do anything you want with a text. This is blatantly false.
  • How can hypertextual strategies be used to "open" up a finite and limited text?
  • The first possibility is to make the text physically unlimited, in the sense that a story can be enriched by the successive contributions of different authors and in a double sense, let us say either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. By this I mean that given, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, the first author proposes a starting situation (the girl enters the wood) and different contributors can then develop the story one after the other, for example, by having the girl meet not the wolf but Ali Baba, by having both enter an enchanted castle, having a confrontation with a magic crocodile, and so on, so that the story can continue for years. But the text can also be infinite in the sense that at every narrative disjunction, for instance, when the girl enters the wood, many authors can make many different choices. For one author, the girl may meet Pinocchio, for another she may be transformed into a swan, or enter the Pyramids and discover the treasury of the son of Tutankhamen. This is today possible, and you can find on the Net some interesting examples of such literary games.
  • AT THIS POINT one can raise a question about the survival of the very notion of authorship and of the work of art, as an organic whole. And I want simply to inform my audience that this has already happened in the past without disturbing either authorship or organic wholes.
  • Yet, there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing infinite and unlimited texts and the existence of already produced texts, which can perhaps be interpreted in infinite ways but are physically limited. In our same contemporary culture we accept and evaluate, according to different standards, both a new performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new Jam Session on the Basin Street theme. In this sense, I do not see how the fascinating game of producing collective, infinite stories through the Net can deprive us of authorial literature and art in general. Rather, we are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will coexist with the interpretation of already written texts. I like this. But we cannot say that we have substituted an old thing with a new one. We have both.
  • I have tried desperately to find an instance of unlimited and finite textual situations, but I have been unable to do so. In fact, if you have an infinite number of elements to play with why limit yourself to the production of a finite universe? It's a theological matter, a sort of cosmic sport, in which one, or The One, could implement every possible performance but prescribes itself a rule, that is, limits, and generates a very small and simple universe.
  • A hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader. They can thus build up their own personal story. Such an idea is not a new one.
  • All these physically moveable texts give an impression of absolute freedom on the part of the reader, but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom.
  • n contrast, a stimulus-text that provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move pre-established textual chunks in a reasonably high number of ways.
  • At the last borderline of free textuality there can be a text that starts as a closed one, let us say, Little Red Riding Hood or The Arabian Nights, and that I, the reader, can modify according to my inclinations, thus elaborating a second text, which is no longer the same as the original one, whose author is myself, even though the affirmation of my authorship is a weapon against the concept of definite authorship. The Net is open to such experiments, and most of them can be beautiful and rewarding. Nothing forbids one writing a story where Little Red Riding Hood devours the wolf. Nothing forbids us from putting together different stories in a sort of narrative patchwork. But this has nothing to do with the real function and with the profound charms of books.
  • A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified.
  • Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.
  • That is what every great book tells us, that God passed there, and He passed for the believer as well as for the sceptic. There are books that we cannot re-write because their function is to teach us about necessity, and only if they are respected such as they are can they provide us with such wisdom. Their repressive lesson is indispensable for reaching a higher state of intellectual and moral freedom.
  • Its model is not so much a straight line as a real galaxy where everybody can draw unexpected connections between different stars to form new celestial images at any new navigation point.
  • Even after the invention of printing, books were never the only instrument for acquiring information. There were also paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. Simply, books have proved to be the most suitable instrument for transmitting information.
  • Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete.
  • Then they are books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopaedias.
  • There are two sorts of book: those to be read and those to be consulted.
  • Yet, can a hypertextual disk or the WWW replace books to be read? Once again we have to decide whether the question concerns books as physical or as virtual objects. Once again let us consider the physical problem first.
  • Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.
  • TWO NEW INVENTIONS, however, are on the verge of being industrially exploited. One is printing on demand: after scanning the catalogues of many libraries or publishing houses a reader can select the book he needs, and the operator will push a button, and the machine will print and bind a single copy using the font the reader likes. This will certainly change the whole publishing market.
  • Simply put: every book will be tailored according to the desires of the buyer, as happened with old manuscripts.
  • Alas, if by chance one hoped that computers, and especially word processors, would contribute to saving trees, then that was wishful thinking. Instead, computers encourage the production of printed material. The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents.
Nele Noppe

havocthecat: Want to know why I'm in (Western media) fandom? - 0 views

  • Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley
  • Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley
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    Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley
Nele Noppe

The Poetics of the Open Work By Umberto Eco - 0 views

  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
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  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece, w
  • the new musical works referred to above reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements.
  • initiative of the individual performer
  • As he reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to their patterning, the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices. Thus, his comprehension of the original artifact is always modified by his particular and individual perspective. In fact, the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.
  • A work of art, therefore, is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.
  • it is obvious that works like those of Berio and Stockhausen are "open" in a far more tangible sense.
  • the poetics of the "open" work tends to encourage “acts of conscious freedom” on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations,
  • Instead nowadays it is primarily the artist who is aware of its implications.
  • However, in this type of operation, "openness" is far removed from meaning "indefiniteness" of communication, "infinite" possibilities of form, and complete freedom of reception. What in fact is made available is a range of rigidly preestablished and ordained interpretative solutions,
  • and these never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the author.
  • It is not that the four solutions of the allegorical passage are quantitatively more limited than the many possible solutions of a contemporary "open" work. As I shall try to show, it is a different vision of the world which lies under these different aesthetic experiences
  • Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time, man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and finds that he is faced (both in art and in science) by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his part.
  • the new man's inventive role. He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination.
  • W. Y. Tindall, in his book on the literary symbol, offers an analysis of some of the greatest modern literary works in order to test Valéry's declaration that "il n'y a pas de vrai sens d'un texte" ("there is no true meaning of a text"). Tindall eventually concludes that a work of art is a construct which anyone at all, including its author, can put to any use whatsoever, as he chooses. This type of criticism views the literary work as a continuous potentiality of "openness"-in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings. This is the scope of the wave of American studies on the structure of metaphor, or of modern work on "types of ambiguity" offered by poetic discourse.
  • Clearly, the work of James Joyce is a major example of an "open" mode, since it deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world.
  • Here the work is "open" in the same sense that a debate is "open." A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience. In this case the "openness" is converted into an instrument of revolutionary pedagogics.
  • the examples considered in the preceding section propose an "openness" based on the theoretical, mental collaboration of the consumer, who must freely interpret an artistic datum, a product which has already been organized in its structural entirety (even if this structure allows for an indefinite plurality of interpretations). On the other hand, a composition like Scambi, by Pousseur, represents a fresh advance.
  • it is clear that a composition such as Scambi poses a completely new problem. It invites us to identify inside the category of "open" works a further, more restricted classification of works which can be defined as "works in movement," because they characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units
  • If we turn to literary production to try to isolate an example of a work in movement," we are immediately obliged to take into consideration Mallarmé's Livre, a colossal and far- reaching work, the quintessence of the poet's production. He conceived it as the work which would constitute not only the goal of his activities but also the end goal of the world:
  • However, Mallarmé's immense enterprise was utopian:
  • In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.
  • Hence, it is not overambitious to detect in the poetics of the "open" work – and even less so in the "work in movement” – more or less specific overtones of trends in contemporary scientific thought.
  • The notion of "possibility" is a philosophical canon which reflects a widespread tendency in contemporary science; the discarding of a static, syllogistic view of order, and a corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context.
  • The two-value truth logic which follows the classical aut-aut, the disjunctive dilemma between true and false, a fact and its contradictory, is no longer the only instrument of philosophical experiment. Multi-value logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive process. In this general intellectual atmosphere, the poetics of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer's freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedures and also as the verifiable pattern of events in the subatomic world.
  • Here are no privileged points of view, and all available perspectives are equally valid and rich in potential.
  • This is not the place to pass judgment on the scientific validity of the metaphysical construct implied by Einstein's system. But there is a striking analogy between his universe and the universe of the work in movement
  • Therefore, to sum up, we can say that the "work in movement" is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation. The invitation offers the performer the opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author.
  • All these examples of "open" works and "works in movement" have this latent characteristic, which guarantees that they will al- ways be seen as "works" and not just as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previously stood and permitted to assume any form whatsoever.
  • Now, a dictionary clearly presents us with thousands upon thou- sands of words which we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics, anonymous letters, or grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstitution of its raw material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a "work." The "openness" and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it
  • We have, therefore, seen that (1) "open" works, insofar as they are in movement, are characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author and that (2) on a wider level (as a subgenus in the species "work in movement") there exist works which, though organically completed, are "open" to a continuous generation of internal relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli. (3) Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range
  • of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance
  • The poetic theory or practice of the "work in movement" senses this possibility as a specific vocation. It allies itself openly and selfconsciously to current trends in scientific method and puts into action and tangible form the very trend which aesthetics has
  • already acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic systems recognize "openness" as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or consumer.
  • The poetics of the "work in movement" (and partly that of the "open" work) sets in motion a new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience, a new mechanics of aesthetic perception, a different status for the artistic product in contemporary society. It opens a new page in sociology and in pedagogy, as well as a new chapter in the history of art. It poses new practical problems by organizing new communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.
Nele Noppe

Electronic Literature: What is it? - 0 views

  • the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works.
  • "literature" has always been a contested category.
  • To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all.
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  • Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast "digital born," a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer
  • At the same time, because electronic literature is normally created and performed within a context of networked and programmable media, it is also informed by the powerhouses of contemporary culture, particularly computer games, films, animations, digital arts, graphic design, and electronic visual culture
  • Digital technologies are now so thoroughly integrated with commercial printing processes that print is more properly considered a particular output form of electronic text than an entirely separate medium. Nevertheless, electronic text remains distinct from print in that it literally cannot be accessed until it is performed by properly executed code
  • immediacy of code to the text's performance is fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production
  • How to maintain such conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict, and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction.
  • . "Giving the audience access to the raw materials of creation runs the risk of undermining the narrative experience," she writes, while still acknowledging that "calling attention to the process of creation can also enhance the narrative involvement by inviting readers/viewers to imagine themselves in the place of the creator.
  • Hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, "codework," generative art and the Flash poem are by no means an exhaustive inventory of the forms of electronic literature, but they are sufficient to illustrate the diversity of the field, the complex relations that emerge between print and electronic literature, and the wide spectrum of aesthetic strategies that digital literature employs
  • . Such close critical attention requires new modes of analysis and new ways of teaching, interpreting, and playing. Most crucial, perhaps, is the necessity to "think digital," that is, to attend to the specificity of networked and programmable media while still drawing on the rich traditions of print literature and criticism.
  • One problem with identifying the hyperlink as electronic literature's distinguishing characteristic was that print texts had long also employed analogous technology in such apparati as footnotes, endnotes, cross-reference, and so on, undermining the claim that the technology was completely novel. Perhaps a more serious problem, however, was the association of the hyperlink with the empowerment of the reader/user. As a number of critics have pointed out, notably Espen J. Aarseth, the reader/user can only follow the links that the author has already scripted.
  • ergodic literature
  • The shortcomings of importing theoretical assumptions developed in the context of print into analyses of electronic media were vividly brought to light by Espen J. Aarseth's important book Cybertext: Explorations of Ergodic Literature.
  • ," texts in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text"
  • The deepest and most provocative for electronic literature is the fifth principle of "transcoding," by which Manovich means the importation of ideas, artifacts, and presuppositions from the "cultural layer" to the "computer layer" (46).
  • arguing that print texts also use markup language, for example, paragraphing, italics, indentation, line breaks and so forth.
  • Complementing studies focusing on the materiality of digital media are analyses that consider the embodied cultural, social, and ideological contexts in which computation takes place.
  • electronic literature can be seen as a cultural force helping to shape subjectivity in an era when networked and programmable media are catalyzing cultural, political, and economic changes with unprecedented speed.
  • Liu urges a coalition between the "cool" — designers, graphic artists, programmers, and other workers within the knowledge industry — and the traditional humanities, suggesting that both camps possess assets essential to cope with the complexities of the commercial interests that currently determine many aspects of how people live their everyday lives in developed societies.
  • The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information
  • Realizing this broader possibility requires that we understand electronic literature not only as an artistic practice (though it is that, of course), but also as a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise.
  •  
    Hayles
Nele Noppe

terri_testing: The Keeper of the Keys: Harry Potter meta - 0 views

  •  
    Very interesting analysis of Dumbledore's motives, starting from why he sent Hagrid to introduce Harry to the Wizarding World instead of a more dependable and level-headed faculty member. Unlikely that this is how JKR envisioned it, but the analysis makes so much sense and is so well-supported by canon evidence that it sounds far more likely than JKR's own interpretation of Dumbledore. Gives a whole different meaning to 'creating a monster': the author's idea of the character seems far less reasonable than the readers' here, and it's not pretty.
Nele Noppe

Death of the Author - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • he Death of the Author is an essay by the French literary critic Roland Barthes.
  • The essay argues against incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of text, and says that writing and creator are unrelated.
  • In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."
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  • arthes' articulation of the death of the author is a radical and drastic recognition of this severing of authority and authorship. Instead of discovering a "single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)," readers of text discover that writing, in reality, constitutes "a multi-dimensional space," which cannot be "deciphered," only "disentangled."
Nele Noppe

Affective Aesthetics « Symposium Blog - 0 views

  • But then that’s an argument Henry Jenkins has repeatedly made, here, for example, that parody tends to be male- and industry-preferred whereas the more emotional engagement of fanvids is often dismissed out of hand.
  • Vidding thus is an art form that is both too subtly critical (because always inflected with fannish passion) and too polished aesthetically (because the aesthetic dimension does matter above and beyond the critical point being made) to, perhaps, fit into a quick overview of YouTube remixes. Still, as both a vibrant subculture of critical interpretive if not outright political remix culture and an sophisticated artistic subculture with its own aesthetic value system, fan vids certainly deserve to be included in any “Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing.”
  • The academy has often been accused of unrealistic attempts of objectivity in the humanities in particular but even in the sciences. After English departments in the seventies destroyed the idea of an objectively created value system that can separate great from merely mediocre and bad literature, after anthropology departments realized in the eighties that observers cannot ever remain neutral and always bring their own biases to their field research; after queer theory and gender theory and critical race studies have brought the personal into the academic in the nineties; after affect theory has established itself as a field of study since–it amazed me that vidding may indeed have been overlooked in its merging of love and inquiry, affect and analysis, celebration and criticism.
Nele Noppe

"Kinda like the folklore of its day": "Supernatural," fairy tales, and ostension | Tose... - 0 views

  • show does not simply depict folklore, but uses it thematically, as a way of reflecting and commenting upon Sam and Dean's relationship.
  • Supernatural makes transformative use of folk narratives
  • Ostension is defined by Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi as "presentation as contrasted to representation (showing the reality itself instead of using any kind of signification)" (1983, 6). Or, as Jan Harold Brunvand describes it, "sometimes people actually enact the contents of legends instead of merely narrating them as stories" (2001, 303). Supernatural does not simply retell folk narratives, but actually performs the stories.
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  • Furthermore, Koven argues that legend ostension in popular culture texts encourages audiences to engage in "some form of postpresentation debate regarding the veracity of the legends presented" (2008, 139) (note 4). This is reflected in Supernatural; most episodes engage with narratives that are usually told in their folk context as if they were "true." Vampires, werewolves, shtrigas, the Hook Man, La Llorona, witches, Robert Johnson's rumored pact with the Devil, zombies, djinn, changelings, evil clowns, and ghosts of all kinds have been featured on the show. Moreover, Sam and Dean's methods of defeating these creatures are those which folk belief likewise deems "true": salting and burning remains, performing exorcisms, helping ghosts resolve unfinished business, casting magic spells attested to by the folklore record, and so forth.
  • The majority of the scholarship on fan fiction, especially slash fan fiction, understands it as a way for women to intervene creatively in male-dominated pop culture texts. Fairy tales can be said to follow a parallel tradition—like fan fiction, fairy tales are a gendered genre of storytelling. As Marina Warner notes, "although male writers and collectors have dominated the production and dissemination of popular wonder tales, they often pass on women's stories from intimate or domestic milieux" (1995, 17). Postmodern feminist writers such as Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, and Emma Donoghue reworked the "old wives' stories" collected by Perrault, the Grimms, and others, seeing in them a space to articulate female experiences and desires—a move not dissimilar to those performed by fan writers, most of whom identify as female.
  • In other words, to traditionalist folklorists, the "folk" were best understood as "illiterate, rural, backwards peasants" (Dundes 1980, 6), who, isolated from modern culture, retained "rural, quaint, or 'backward' elements of the culture" (Toelken 1979, 5). Underpinning this condescension was the theory of "cultural evolution," a late 19th-century adaptation of the then cutting-edge theory of Darwinian evolution to fields that had nothing to do with biology. This theory, whose primary exponents were E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang, posited that cultures, just like individual humans, proceeded in a unilinear fashion through the stages of "savagery" (infancy), "barbarism" (childhood), and finally "civilization"—with upper-class European patriarchal Christian culture representing the pinnacle of civilization (and adulthood), of course. European peasants were, naturally, barbarians, and their folklore represented traces of earlier "stages" of civilization; information on the ancestors of civilized peoples could be supplemented with studies of contemporary "savages," such as African tribespeople (Dundes 1980, 2). Lang, in particular, argued that the child is the microcosm of the culture, and therefore, logically, the stories of lower-class "barbaric" adults were suitable material—after extensive bowdlerization—for upper-class children, as they were all on the same level of development (see Smol 1996). In other words, the still-pervasive notion that folktales, especially fairy tales, are primarily "kids' stuff" owes a great deal to 19th-century racism, classism, and religious bigotry.
  • Endemic to this line of theorizing is the assumption that the folklorist, the one collecting and interpreting folklore, is not of the folk: the folk are always the Other. Traditional folklorists were educated bourgeois outsiders who traveled to rural areas in their own lands—or, better yet, foreign locales—since one cannot find folklore among one's own group, because only "they" have folklore—"we" have Culture
  • Unlike Mulder and Scully, the Winchesters, even before Mary's death, are decidedly working-class; John, prior to becoming a homeless drifter, was a mechanic. Julia M. Wright, in a perceptive article on class in the series, argues that "to hunt in Supernatural is to be immersed in the local, not the multinational-driven culture of brand recognition and globalized consumerism, and this is understood in the series as an insistently classed move" (Wright 2008, ¶15). Although Sam and Dean often behave like professional traditional folklorists—not just by doing research, but also in the fact that they are almost always geographic outsiders to the sites they visit—they are actually amateurs, autodidacts with no formal academic training in the field (note 8).
  • Before getting into this episode's presentation of fairy tales, some background information is in order. Fairy tales, as a genre, are considered to be a subcategory of folktales. The category of "folktale" is a broad one, defined by most folklorists as "a narrative which is related and received as a fiction or fantasy" (Oring 1986, 126), as opposed to myths or legends, both of which are making truth claims;
  • Within that group of stories, fairy tales are usually understood as folktales which involve magic, particularly magical acts, objects, and transformations that are not remarked upon as unusual within the story: no one in a fairy tale stops and cries, "Wait a minute, frogs don't talk!"
  • While initially published for scholars, the Grimms' collection achieved some success as a book for children, and subsequent editions (seven in total, with the final and most widely available edition appearing in 1857) were extensively revised by Wilhelm Grimm to better conform to changing ideas of what was appropriate for young readers. This marked a major shift in the perceived audience,
  • Other revisions, documented by Tatar (1987), Jack Zipes (1991, 45–70, 2002a, 2002b), and Ruth Bottigheimer (1986), reflect a systematic imposition of bourgeois mores, particularly in the realm of gender: this included curtailing the proactivity and direct speech of heroines, while increasing them for female villains (because good women are passive and silent). This was especially noteworthy in stories that featured wicked stepmothers (note 13), as the texts often, in an exception to the general rule of harsh justice, bend over backward to exonerate fathers for their failure to protect their children
  • This story about fairy tales—we can call it the "recovery story"—is a rescue operation, uncovering the "real" fairy tale and liberating it from Disney oppression, and theoretically also recovering the "true" voices of the "original" tellers, usually figured as female. Versions of this approach have a long history in folklore studies, which, in the early days, tended to treat all folklore as brands rescued from the fire: in this case, the "fire" destroying a once-pure folk product is not urbanization and mechanization per se, but the stultifying effects of male collectors and male-dominated popular media.
  • Fairy tales have absolutely been sanitized to rid them of elements deemed unacceptable, whether those elements be violence, sexuality, nonnormative gender roles, insufficient respect for authority, or whatever bugaboos moral guardians wish to prevent young readers from encountering. In addition, female tellers, writers, and collectors have absolutely been ignored, silenced, and subsumed under the totalizing category of the anonymous "folk" by male authorities—and those male authorities such as Perrault sometimes had to turn around and defend fairy tales as worthwhile, despite the perceived feminine (or even, in the case of the French female salon writers, feminist) "taint" of the genre (Warner 1995, 168–70). I merely want to point out that, in the realm of popular culture, the "recovery narrative" is a story we tell about fairy tales, and it's one that both contradicts and relies upon the existence of the "fairy tales are sweet and innocent" narrative for its power. Disney's "normative influence" is so pervasive that any literature or media that concerns itself with fairy tales must negotiate the received Disney understanding, even if only to dismiss it.
  • As James R. Kincaid (1998) might put it, the best thing about innocence is the threat of its violation, and roughing up a story for kids is thrilling in a way that pre-roughed-up stories for adults are not. Thus, it is unsurprising that there are a number of horror films based explicitly on fairy tales, including Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Suspiria, Freeway, and The Company of Wolves.
  • Dean's snide, defensive comments spring from the centuries-long linkage of fairy tales with women: the fairy tale is a gendered genre of folklore. More to the point, fairy tales often suffer the same fate as other female-identified artistic genres such as romance, "chick flicks," and fan fiction—widespread dismissal and denigration. It is no accident that the term "fairy tale" is widely used as a synonym for "childish, unrealistic fantasy"—the kind women must be discouraged from having, at all costs.
  • In response, Sam invokes the recovery narrative, which, in the context of the rest of the scene, suggests a problematic conclusion: it is the goriness and sexuality of fairy tales that renders them appropriate for masculine interest.
  • Within the show, fairy tales do not automatically possess the status of "real" folklore, but must be shown to be both "scary" and "sexy"—as the show's UK tagline promises—to be worthy of the brothers' attention.
Nele Noppe

Collective intelligence - 0 views

  • If the current media environment makes visible the once invisible work of media spectatorship, it is wrong to assume that we are somehow being liberated through improved media technologies. Rather than talking about interactive technologies, we should document the interactions that occur amongst media consumers, between media consumers and media texts, and between media consumers and media producers.
  • On-line fan communities might well be some of the most fully realized versions of Levy's cosmopedia, expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture.
  • Fan women routed around male hostility, developing web communities 'that combine the intimacy of small groups with a support network similar to the kind fan women create off-line.' Discussion lists, mailing groups, webrings, and chatrooms each enabled fan communication.
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  • Matthew Hills has criticized audience researchers for their preoccupation with fan's meaning production at the expense of consideration of their affective investments and emotional alliances.
Nele Noppe

Participation, Reciprocity and Generosity in Art: On Open Work by Umberto Eco - 1 views

  • Eco distinguishes between the concept within aesthetic theory that every text is more or less open, because every text can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the reader brings to the text, and his more specific concept of the open work.
  • As examples
  • He also cites texts which on the surface are more traditional.
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  • “In Opera Aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Those works of literature that limit potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line are the least rewarding, while those that are most open, most active between mind and society and line, are the most lively (and, although valorizing terminology is not his business, best)
  • What the preceding entry leaves out is the historical context in which Eco puts openness. He feels that this type of work, open work, is the work of his age.
  • A sub-category of open work is work in movement which he describes as works which “characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units.”
  • Eco sees open work as essentially political; work that is open expresses a pluralistic worldview.
  • Work which is calling into question its own forms and assumptions has a valuable function – it teaches us how to operate with agency within a highly mediated world.
  • 1) Eco sees science as driving the worldview of an age, to which art responds
  • Forty or more years after the essays in The Open Work were written do we live in a world where the openness of our habits of interpretation makes the openness of the text less crucial?
Nele Noppe

Rip-Off Artist - Measure for Measure - Opinion - New York Times Blog - 0 views

  • In fact it is great fun to try to pry apart the musical and lyrical inspirations and underpinnings of all the great songs, or better yet to stumble upon what is obviously an immediate genetic predecessor of an “original” song that you love.
  • None of this takes into account that songs can also get their genetic material from movies, books, poems, even paintings.
  • Perhaps what I do should be called “song-composting,” “song-mulching,” “song-smoothie-ing,” something like that. Or you could just call it “ripping off” and take me to court. I’d probably lose.
Nele Noppe

The Future of the Book - 0 views

  • The present and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer- oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images.
  • Moreover, the new generation is trained to read at an incredible speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teenager
  • I am a rare-book collector, and I feel delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long. They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and lasted for pages and pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the virtues of the text to follow. If baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions are one-page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book, thank some national or international endowment for a generous grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children, and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten in a hurry.... But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines saying "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a baroque introduction. It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric.
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  • The quest for a new and surviving literacy ought not to be the quest for a preinformatic quantity. The enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere
  • the radical mistake of irresponsible deconstructionists or of critics like Stanley Fish was to believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This is blatantly false. Busa's hypertext on the Aquinas corpus is a marvelous instrument, but you cannot use it to find out a satisfactory definition of electricity.
  • Then there is the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael Joyce. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazzlike unending story. At this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free creativity. As the author of The Open Work I can only hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of produced texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a difference between producing infinitely many texts and interpreting precisely a finite number of texts. That is what happens in our present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New Orleans jam session
  • The problem is in saying that we have replaced an old thing with another one; we have both, thank God. TV zapping is an activity that has nothing to do with reading a movie
  • Debray has reminded us that the invention of the photograph has set painters free from the duty of imitation.
  • Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has freed literature from certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is something like postmodern literature, it exists because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema. This means that in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else
Nele Noppe

Abstracts - 0 views

  • Different periods of literary and philosophical thought place emphasis more strongly on either continuity or originality, and thinkers of modernity often privileged originality and artistic genius as they laid the groundwork for a value system that still affects the landscape of contemporary popular culture.
  • Countering this ascribed modernist valuation of originality, postmodern theorists and artists have emphasized pastiche, appropriation, and intertextuality.
  • copyright laws and marketplace expectations have helped establish aesthetic discourses within fan communities that often mirror modernist emphases on originality and authenticity.
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  • despite a cultural value placed on repetition, fandom still remains at least tenuously invested in more traditional notions of originality and uniqueness.
  • In contrast to Eliot's model of artistic genius, emphasizing originality and ownership of individual creativity, I’d like to foreground the fan community as a collective creative culture that values sharing, allusion, and repetition as aesthetic (and affective) choices.
  • Rhetoric is basically a pedagogical discipline comprising a number of pedagogical principles, where one is the principle of imitatio. According to the imitatio principle you have to, very actively, collect an arsenal of different strategies in the process of learning how to write and present a material.
  • With focus on imitatio and from perspectives such as genre, intertextuality, narratology, semiotics, we discuss the creation process of fan fiction in general and slash in particular.  
  • Further, and crucially, fic is a form of discourse that does not just analyse canon – it has the power to add to and change it as fanon and canon mix, encouraging ongoing reinterpretation and reframing of canon within the fanon/canon ‘verse as a whole.
  • Reading and writing fic remains a more popular online activity than taking part in meta discussion, but are the two activities so very different?
  • Harry Potter
  • from a close reading of a set of French potterfictions, my presentation will try to identify and compare the typical “scripts” used by the authors:
  • However, the various academic accounts written about yaoi have a tendency to pathologize yaoi as well as its female fans in terms of gender displacement, female sexual oppression, or sexual starvation.
  • how Queer Theory can assist the academic discussion of yaoi and slash, and counter the tendency to pathologize.
  • The British television show Torchwood has generated a vast amount of fan fiction. Among these stories are some which involve human-animal transformations.
  •   In this paper I intend to study how the human-animal transformations are described in a selected number of fanfic texts.
  • Can these stories be read as a comment on the relation between human and animal, or should the animal in this context rather be read as merely a symbol or a plot device?
  • Ludology, the academic study of games, has maintained a critical distinction that, fundamentally, a game cannot contain a narrative, as its focus is more oriented toward necessarily non-narrative interaction between the game and its players.  Fan fiction seems capable of exploding, or at least complicating, this claim, as the process of a writer’s active and creative engagement with a previously existing storyworld, expressed through fan fiction, appears clearly to meet the requirements both for a game,
  • close readings
  • In existing studies on fan fiction, it has been established that the majority of previous studies have been ethnographical or social in nature. Only very recently have studies on the literary aspects of fan fiction begun to emerge.
  • Harry Potter
  • helps us shorten the gap between literary practices of 'high' and 'low'.
  • Fan Fiction – ‘The Logical Extension’
  • The Love Song of T.S.Eliot and fandom  
  • Fan Fiction – as Dickens (Might) Have Written It
  • Redefining the EveryFan? Implicated reading and janeites on-line
  • Flexible Dancers: How Doctor Who fan fiction subverts and confirms the elements inherent in the romance novel genre
  • A Revamped Lover? The Limitations of the Romance Format in Black Dagger Brotherhood Slas
  • ”This Man Is My Friend – Nobody [Else] Touches Him”: Paris/Kim Fan Fiction from Star Trek: Voyager
  • Sex, power and kittens – human-animal transformations in Torchwood fan fiction
  • “It takes a real man to have a baby”: heterophobia or heteroflexibility in Supernatural mpreg
  • t fan fiction is a form of derivative or appropriative fiction
  • I suggest that we need to look toward tropes, the use of familiar plots, scenarios, and characterization as central organizing and generating principles for fan fiction communities.
  • yaoi and its Western fans are more receptive to a queer interpretation than slash and its fans are. Other key points raised by the research included fans’ rejection of ‘mainstream’ characterization of females, a strong awareness of legal and ethical issues and a desire to challenge contemporary accounts of ‘their’ fandom.  
  • Polish fans unlike their American or European colleagues are quite puritan.
  • Should the fan fiction writer be seen first and foremost as a reader, which is undoubtedly an essential role in fan fictions?
  • where a general rule is to stay true to the canon’s descriptions of characters,
Nele Noppe

McLuhan Studies Premiere Issue: Eco's Prophetic Vision of Mass Culture - 0 views

  • Even in his first essays in the sixties, the author's approach to reading, interpreting and commenting on culture could already be seen as that of a semiotician who had not yet adopted the technical jargon of the discipline. In fact, it would not be too far-fetched to consider the Eco of the sixties as essentially a young Adso (see the discussions on reading signs betwen William and Adso in The Name of the Rose) ready to learn about semiotics from the right mentor. We must also remember that as soon as Eco no longer feels satisfied by the early writings of French semioticians and structuralists like Barthes and Levi-Strauss, he turns to the studies of Jakobson and Peirce on the science of signs.
  • Also, few intellectuals can match Eco's great interdisciplinary skills.
  • In general, Eco's critics (most of them academic) have suggested that he is successful because he publishes trendy books.
Nele Noppe

Monstrous melodrama: Expanding the scope of melodramatic identification to interpret ne... - 1 views

  • Indeed, the negative responses to "Monster" provide an interesting case study in the context of increasingly intimate relations between television producers and viewers, an intimacy that, generally speaking, is highly desirable to fans. What interests me particularly is that in some cases this increased intimacy is not desirable; for some fans, and in some contexts, distance is preferred.
  • While previous scholarly attempts to characterize slash generically have linked it to fantasy/science fiction, romance, and a genre termed intimatopic, I prefer the descriptive power of melodrama as a type, a narrative style, and a cultural mode. As I will explicate further below, many slash stories dwell on situations of intense pathos, scenarios of emotional surfeit nearly unmatched in any other form of narrative.
  • In short, melodramatic identification cannot be restricted to an affective relationship with a character or plotline; rather, it is a relationship to a continuous interweaving of texts—including both fan fiction and the narrative of the fan herself—into a greater text that the fan knows as "my show.
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  • Indeed, melodrama, like many cultural forms associated with "female interests," is simultaneously omnipresent in television and yet continuously undervalued; it is that which must be avoided if a show is to be considered "quality"
  • Indeed, some forms of slash are completely committed to the exploration of intimacies in the most taboo, fantastic, or simply impossible situations. Wincest might be an example of one such type; certainly incest is a kind of impossible situation.
  • To invoke the term queer in relation to slash is to enter onto controversial ground. Even so, it is the case that, for some fans, an investment in a community and even an identity was part of the small but virulent negative reaction to "Monster," an episode whose clever and occasionally aggressive metatextual play triggered feelings of hurt, exposure, and outrage.
  • Concurrently, the writer Siege displays a keen understanding of the emotional investments of a large segment of Supernatural's audience, as the publisher drools over Sam and Dean's moments of angst, sighing: "It's just the best when they cry."
  • Clearly, there is something emotionally alluring for fans about the idea of being known.
  • A milder and more frequent kind of complaint invoked expectations of privacy. Despite—or because of—the understanding that Wincest is a potential violation of the sensibilities of Kripke, or of the actors who portray the characters in question, there was and is a feeling that the references to Wincest are exposing something that should remain within the community.
Nele Noppe

Reading Harry Potter: A personal and collective experience - 0 views

  • reception of the Harry Potter novels in France.
  • “media talk” has shaped an image of the Harry Potter readership and ascribed meanings to the novels.
  • Harry Potter readership seems to be very diverse, blurring some traditional age, gender or social distinctions related to reading preferences.
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  • Our research interest was to investigate how these very heterogeneous readers made sense of the books and organized their Harry Potter “reading career.”
  • We have tried to avoid the intellectualist bias of the academic discourse privileging the most analytic and erudite forms of reception, or the most articulate and literary forms of newspaper reviews (Barker, 2004). As Elizabeth Long pointed out, “the traditional imagery of the solitary reader” has privileged “a certain kind of reading: erudite, analytic” (Long, 2003, p. 2-3), and it “legitimat[es] only certain kinds of literary values and certain modes of reading” (p. 11).
  • The Harry Potter books are characterized by their serial publication over ten years, their dispersion on different media and tie-ins, and their symbolic status as best-sellers and objects of public attention: all these elements have shaped reading experiences.
  • Martin Barker emphasized the importance of the secondary, ancillary, or satellite texts that shape in advance the conditions under which interpretations of novels are formed: marketing campaigns, articles, reviews and debates in the media, and fan productions (Barker, 2004).
  • All these public discourses constitute discursive frames around the novels. They tend to ascribe meanings and effects to the Harry Potter books and to spread a homogeneous and sometimes simplistic image of Harry Potter readers.
  • Although the Harry Potter readership is much wider, the readers who were mostly described were teenagers. Assumptions about teenagers’ emotional instability, vulnerability, and identity crises have influenced many of the categories used in media discourse to talk about Harry Potter.
  • Reading Harry Potter was supposed to contribute to the harmonious maturation of the readers, as the characters themselves were growing up. The mechanism of this readers’ transformation was supposed to be “identification”:
  • layed an important role in turning Harry Potter into a part of legitimate and safe culture.
  • These ancillary discourses targeting teenagers were thus clearly gendered, and the labels applied to the movies and the novels can help to define a diversity of reading expectations. But do actual readers conform to these solicitations? How do they appropriate the novels? How do their reading experiences relate to their movie experiences with Harry Potter?
  • The Harry Potter novels, by their wide and diverse readership, lent themselves very well to an investigation of the diversity of “appropriation” and levels of engagement.
  • Cultures of feelings and ethical perceptions: 2.a: a preference for adult or “bad” characters: the appeal of psychological complexity
Nele Noppe

Relationhips towards animals in Japan - 0 views

  • The relationships that people have with other animals are important in determining how they will behave to animals.
  • We found that the relationships depend on the familiarity with individuals and species in general, and the perceived functions and roles of the animals. When asked what are the most familiar kinds of animals, overall 41% said dogs, 23% cats, 13% cows, 6% birds, 5% pigs, 4% chickens, 3% fish, 2% tortoise, with 2% other mammals and 1% beetles.
  • They viewed the question in terms of the species, but pet owners interpreted it more as individuals.
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  • A diverse range of feelings was seen, in addition to the predominant response, which was cute or pretty
  • People were also asked what types of animals they would like to have a relationship with in the future, and why they want to. This is shown in the next slide, depending on the animals they were in relationships with now. The popular animals were similar to the ones they have, with 49% saying dogs, 29% cats, other mammals were mentioned by 8%,
  • Animals were mentioned by less than 10% of respondents to the International Bioethics Survey in Japan in 1993 as part of an image of nature, with only a few more mentioning animals in images of life (Macer, 1994). However, 80% agreed with a statement that animals have rights that people should not violate.
  • A number of people personified animals,
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