Group items tagged

"Conceptual writing has been thought of as an afterthought to conceptual art. And yet, writers deployed strategies of appropriation and recontextualization long before Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as sculpture. Centos made up of fragments of other works, poems built on the pure meaninglessness of sight or sound, and procedure-riddled texts where language play trumps sense anticipated and developed this tradition. In their anthology Against Expression, Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith take a broadly inclusive view to present this genre. For this ABR Focus, I would also like to concentrate on a subset of the genre that is sometimes used interchangeably with the term for the whole: uncreative writing. Uncreative writing is the appropriation of previously produced material, taking something out of its original context and putting it forth as art by reproducing it in another context."

"In "Composition as Explanation," Gertrude Stein claims that people only appreciate contemporary works of culture retrospectively. Stein keenly quips, "the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer." Kenneth Goldsmith's new collection of essays, Uncreative Writing, aims to lessen the lag, for this is a critical poetics that seeks to clarify. Donning his outlaw status as UbuWeb innovator, conceptual poetry provocateur (as evidenced in his Harriet blog posts for the Poetry Foundation, from which this collection is largely culled), and author of works including Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003), and The Weather (2005), Goldsmith, not quite making a claim to the classic, seeks to advance understanding of avant-garde work being done now."

"Prosser and Berlant focus on some paradoxes of autobiography: notably, that individual stories are impersonal too, in their formal and emotional conventionality. Relatedly, they discuss how different genres, media, and political situations produce the sense of immediacy, of belonging and survival that Berlant associates with what binds people to intimate publics."

"That the world is terribly complex is now a vital part of global cultural experience, a structure of feeling which has grown more pervasive in the 21st century. How do we find ways of navigating the complex challenges of our time? And what role can we, as cultural researchers, play in this task? Much humanities and social science scholarship in the past few decades has embraced complexity, so much so that the pursuit of complexity (e.g. in scholarly theorizing) has become an end in itself, a key element in the production of cultural critique. In this essay, I argue that if we wish to engage with the real-world need to deal with complex realities, cultural research must go beyond deconstructive cultural critique and work towards what I call 'cultural intelligence'. The development of sophisticated and sustainable responses to the world's complex problems requires the recognition of complexity, not for complexity's own sake, but because simplistic solutions are unsustainable or counter-productive. At the same time, cultural intelligence also recognizes the need for simplification to combat the paralyzing effects of complexity. Developing simplifications should not be equated with being simplistic. While being simplistic is tantamount to a reductionism which dispenses with complexity, simplification allows us to plot a course through complexity. To put the question simply, how does one simplify without being simplistic?"

Outlining the terms of a 'new sexual contract', Angela McRobbie traces the trajectory of feminism and 'sophisticated anti-feminism' across the last two decades of political and cultural change.

"Over the last three decades, the role played by phenomena linked to the (re-)making of collective memory, or, more precisely, of collective memories in situations of societal and political change, has gained attention in the humanities and social sciences in general. Only in recent years has this subject been researched with respect to colonial and postcolonial settings (Sengupta 2009) and here also with respect to the Middle East.1 Approaches are highly diverse, ranging from cultural studies to psychosocial perspectives. Rare but highly interesting exceptions studying the violent history of the Middle East from a gender perspective and focusing on contesting memories of women include works by Efrat Ben Ze'ev (2010), Ruth Rubio-Marín (2006), and Alison Baker (1998)-in addition to films like The Forgotten by Driss Deiback (2006). These studies link the general trend toward marginalizing or denying female experiences in the field of officially recognized memory production to the continuing hegemony of gender stereotypes that identify women with passive and "helping hand" roles, thus neglecting their distinct collective as well as individual contributions to society and history. Generally speaking, memory studies seem to suggest that representations of women as "self-abandoning" and "self-forgetful" are one common characteristic element of the making of collective memory. This may be explained by the fact that the making of collective memory is often linked to highly gendered and sexualized models of national, religious, or ethnic identity. Though fully aware that most of the terms describing phenomena of collective memory or collective forms of trauma are highly controversial, we decided not to engage in a more general theoretical debate here but rather to test such concepts with respect to the material presented in the case studies"

"Work-life balance (hereafter WLB) is a discursive refrain in European public debate that reflects goals for a more productive workforce: that women and men should be able to be both earners and carers. It is not merely a buzzword in policy circles, however, but mirrors rising expectations of working parents for a better quality of life and the tensions that ensue from these expectations within individual lives, households, work organizations, and policy frameworks. European societies' attitudinal studies reveal that an overwhelming majority of both women and men maintain that WLB is a primary priority when considering job and workplace (Hobson and Fahlén 2009a, 2009b). There is also convincing evidence that most European men would like to reduce their working hours, even with an equivalent reduction in hourly pay (Fagan 2004; Hobson and Fahlén 2009a). Yet, there is a growing gap between attitudes and practices, the ideal and the real, as seen in the rising numbers of individuals who work long hours (Boulin et al. 2006; Guest 2002; Lee 2004), and the significant proportions of jobs with unsocial hours (Boulin et al. 2006; Perrons et al. 2006). When applied to working parents, WLB is often defined as a lack thereof, i.e., work-life imbalance, or work-life conflict (Guest 2002), which is reflected in international research that shows that individuals most often view work demands as impinging on family time rather than vice versa (Frone 2003)."

"Critics have commonly interpreted J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello as a defense of animal rights. However, this essay argues that it more accurately demonstrates the liabilities of enlisting the idiom of rights to advocate for animal welfare. It thus develops a phenomenology of embodiment indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's thought as an analytic through which both to elucidate the status of the animal in Coetzee's text and to probe the limits of the liberal logic of rights. In doing so, it argues that liberal discourses of rights paradoxically occlude the ontological condition of embodiment. Although the text of Elizabeth Costello often appears closer to philosophy than literature, this essay further maintains that its narrative stages a plea for art's superior ability to manifest animal being-in particular its deeply embodied texture."

"Beginning with a quirky example by Aris Fioretos, this essay considers the peripheral and unintended associations that accompany any act of reading. After some contextualization in genetic criticism and the thought of Maurice Blanchot, it contrasts two versions of what goes on unconsciously while reading a literary work. The first version follows the author's implicit directions; the second gives free rein to personal associations. It may seem that the second reader is missing the text's true meaning; however, these free-ranging associations are necessary in order to create any meaning at all, according to Daniel Dennett's "multiple-drafts" theory of consciousness. Whether we validate it or not, an obbligato of associations always accompanies our reading. Such an obbligato is not only necessary and useful in producing meaning; it is part of the pleasure of the text."

"Suspicion of reading as a lived experience is a consequence of the rhetorical success of a few key arguments that together have defined a critical landscape dominated by various forms of contextualism. Where the contextualist consensus prevails, reading is tacitly or explicitly regarded as an epiphenomenon, inasmuch as the real locus of meaning-creation is elsewhere. The essay analyzes three core contextualist doctrines (about consciousness, history, and the status of the subject) and argues that they need not delegitimate the experience of reading. Rather, in each case the defining assumptions and beliefs of contextualism require attention to reading in order to do their interpretive work. Giving reading its due may also have a corrective function to the extent that contradictions caused by its neglect have thwarted an understanding of issues such as the relation of form and history, the status of the aesthetic, and the disciplinary purpose of the lettered humanities. Recognizing reading as the hidden ground of our critical and theoretical activity can help get us past various conundrums, impasses, and dead ends that haunt our profession."

"In this article, I consider the implications for fiction of Slavoj Žižek's argument that the violence of individual subjects is informed by "symbolic violence" (1-2), that is, the distortions concomitant on language's constitutive, rather than merely referential, relation to the world. Given that the medium of the novel is language, Žižek's contention raises serious questions about this genre's capacity to address violence. I argue that this problem is most apparent in those forms of realism that, in seeking to render language transparent, compromise their ability to recognize the violence of the symbolic order. While my argument in this connection has implications for fiction-writing in general, I confine my discussion to postcolonial fiction that focuses on the racialization of the human body, that is, its reduction to a sign in a discursive system."

"Reflecting on the relation between the media ages of orality, writing, and digital networking, Liu asks the question: what happens today to the "sense of history" that was the glory of the high age of print? In particular, what does the age of social computing-social networking, blogs, Twitter, etc.-have in common with prior ages in which the experience of sociality was deeply vested in a shared sense of history? Liu focuses on a comparison of nineteenth-century historicism and contemporary Web 2.0, and concludes by touching on the RoSE Research-oriented Social Environment that the Transliteracies Project he directs has been building to model past bibliographical resources as a social network."

This paper tries to examine what is at stake in the various projects to "re-enchant the world", which have arisen in the face of modernity. It sees the ambition to "save the sacred" in this context. It poses a number of problems which arise for such projects, and in particular examines the notion of "polytheism" which is central to the recent book of Sean Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining.

"[A]ll knowledge is encoded as stories." This sweeping assertion by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson seems designed to provoke (2). 1 But then here's Mark Turner affirming much the same position: "Narrative imagining-story-is the fundamental instrument of thought" (4). And here's Merlin Donald asserting that "the narrative mode is . . . the basic product of language" (257). Fredric Jameson called narrative "the central function . . . of the human mind" (13), and Lyotard called it "the quintessential form of customary knowledge" (19). Goranson and Cardier called narrative a "driving imperative" (1), and Robert Storey contended that narrative is "an innate way of knowing, essentially as pre-linguistic in its operations as conceptualization has proven to be" (84) and, as such, "the 'deep grammar' of literature itself" (113). Storey was echoing both Algirdas Greimas and Greimas's sometime critic Paul Ricoeur, who both preferred the term "narrativity" for this deep pre-linguistic informing capability, with Ricoeur extending its operation well beyond fictive literature, as did most emphatically Hayden White, who called narrativity a "panglobal fact of culture" (19).

Science has a notorious history of using animals for its experiments. The two most famous of these unfortunate creatures are a canine and a feline, Pavlov's dog and Schrödinger's cat. Pavlov's dog shows all the features of a well-trained, obedient dog: he drools predictably when he hears the sound of a bell. Schrödinger's cat, by contrast, behaves with the whimsy that should be expected from a self-respecting feline: nobody knows whether he is dead or alive, or maybe even both at the same time, in the box where he has been locked up together with a contraption that has a fifty percent chance of killing him. Another difference between Pavlov's dog and Schrödinger's cat is that the dog really existed, while Schrödinger's cat inhabits a purely imaginary world. The whole scheme is a thought experiment designed by Erwin Schrödinger to explore what his equation actually means for the nature of reality. Fortunately, no real cat has ever lost one of its lives to what would be otherwise an extreme case of animal abuse. The interpretations of Schrödinger's cat parable have been legion, and so have been the lives of the famous feline. In this paper, I will use Schrödinger's cat as a test case for the study of the relations between narrative and science. I will follow the development of the parable from science to fiction, that is, from its initial appearance as an example meant to make a point in an otherwise abstract, purely argumentative paper, to its narrative emancipation where the cat figures as a character or a symbol in a story worth reading for its own sake.

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.

What is an avant-garde? In posing such a question, this issue of New Literary History seeks to reexamine a category that often seems all too self-evident. Our aim is not to draw up a fresh list of definitions, specifications, and prescriptions but to explore the conditions and repercussions of the question itself. In the spirit of analogously titled queries-from Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" to Foucault's "What is an Author?"-we hope to spur reflection not only on a particular object of study but also on the frameworks and critical faculties that we bring to bear on it. As Paul Mann notes, every critical text on the avant-garde, whether tacitly or overtly, "has a stake in the avant-garde, in its force or destruction, in its survival or death (or both)." 1 A reassessment of these stakes is one of the priorities of this special issue.

Mauricio de Sousa's beloved comic books are a staple of many Brazilian childhoods. Starting in the 1960s, his six-year-old characters began providing not only entertainment, but also a distinctly Brazilian representative in a market dominated by imports. Currently, these publications-several different comic books and strips-represent 70 percent of the children's market in Brazil, with over one billion issues sold, not to mention a large Internet presence. The characters' expansive commercial empire includes an enormous indoor theme park, videos, live theater, and over 3,500 consumer products (Mauricio de Sousa Produções [MSP], "Mauricio de Sousa: Cartoonist"). Thus it is not surprising that Mauricio is sometimes referred to as the Walt Disney of Latin America. He was awarded the Yellow Kid (a major industry award), and recognized by the Order of Rio Branco for his service to the country in 1971. The thirtieth year anniversary publication, Mauricio: 30 Anos, includes a number of interviews in which various well-known Brazilians stress the national nature of the themes found in the comics, their identification with the characters, and their pride regarding the success of the series (Editora Globo 16-18). In 2009, in commemorating the fiftieth year of Mauricio's career, the Ministry of Culture declared his first character-Mônica-a cultural ambassador ("Personagem Mônica").

This essay relies on the psychoanalytic literary theories of Peter Brooks and Julia Kristeva to examine the transferential relationship between the analysand-narrator and the analyst-narratee in the novel Restlessness. Van Herk uses typical conventions of the psychoanalytic talking cure to unsettle the common reader's desire for linearity and final meaning.

This essay both reflects upon ecocriticism's investment in cultivating environmental consciousness at a distance from critical reflexivity and explores its theoretical discontents. Arguing for the necessity of bringing theory into praxis, the essay suggests that ecocriticism needs to cross the threshold between discursivity and materiality, experience and representation.