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Carlie Wallentine

Mormon Literature and Criticism - 1 views

blog.mormonletters.org/...o-start-criticizing-each-other

criticism LDS Literary interpretation

shared by Carlie Wallentine on 27 May 11 - No Cached
  • Carlie Wallentine on 27 May 11
     
    I mostly liked the 8th paragraph about how critics looking at any literature from an LDS perspective need to leave physical evidence of their work, so future LDS critics can build upon it and stop re-inventing the wheel.
Audrey B

Digital Zapatismo and the Threatened Persecution of Prof. Ricardo Dominguez (UCSD) | Ca... - 0 views

thevirtualcampfire.org/...ricardo-dominguez

shared by Audrey B on 09 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The EDT and other Digital Zapatistas succeeded in furthering the message of the EZLN and the indigenous peoples of Mexico, but they never physically harmed anyone or anything, in spite of the government violence directed at them.
    • Audrey B
      Audrey B on 09 Jun 10
       
      nonviolent electronic civil disobedience
  • As an artist, Dominguez has always looked to open “disturbance spaces” inside our contemporary communication platforms. He is a former member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a group of artists and activists whose focus is “the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism.” Later Dominguez helped found the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) which sought to expand the work of the CAE into cyberspace. They developed the idea of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD), which just as the name suggests is an electronic extension of Thoreau’s old idea.
  • With black tape across their mouths, surgical masks marked with X’s, and holding signs that read “Art is not a Crime,” and “Academic Freedom,” over 200 students gathered on Thursday, April 8th at the Silent Tree on library walk.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • In 2009 Dominguez was named by CNN one of its “Most Interesting People” for his work in developing the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT
  • Professor Dominguez’s work, first with Critical Art Ensemble and then with Electronic Disturbance Theater, has been highly cited, and he has been invited to lecture on the work across a host of important international venues…The esteemed status of Professor Dominguez’s field-defining work has been duly noted by the external referees, who include major international intellectuals working in performance art, new media and globalization.
  • EDT illuminates a new set of possibilities for understanding the relation between performance, embodiment, and spatial practice in cyberspace. Unlike a number of other performance artists, who have explored the relation of the body to technology through the literal encounter of individual physical bodies to machines, those working at EDT have placed the very notion of “embodiment” under question. Rather, they have sought to understand the specific possibilities for constituting presence in digital space that is both collective and politicized.
  • taking known forms and then augmenting or subverting their messages in order to provoke thought, discussion and emotion. What made the EDT different is how they applied these age-old principles of artistic expression to “new” media and digital technology.
  • performances and interventions were based upon questioning (but never fully answering) contemporary social problems and injustices.
  • Members of the EDT, including Dominguez, contributed to the artistic front of the EZLN’s fight for the indigenous people of Mexico. They crafted themselves as Digital Zapatistas, “attacking” the websites of the Mexican government and the agencies of the US government, which were supporting the oppression of the people in Chiapas. But the “attacks” were never effective… only affective.
  • developments of EDT was FloodNet — the technology behind Virtual Sit-Ins such as the one against the UCOP website for which Dominguez is now under investigation.
  • EDT’s goal was to take the long respected tradition of a peaceful sit-in to the virtual space of a website.
  • And, just like an embodied sit-in, to be effective the virtual sit-in must be open and transparent.
  • There are key differences between the virtual sit-in and a “Distributed Denial of Service Attack,” which Dominguez has been accused of launching. With the latter, computers of unknowing individuals become conduits to increase traffic to a particular Internet address, therefore rendering it inoperable, threatening the potential crash of the system itself. In this type of attack the identity of the perpetrators remains obscured in a prolonged assault usually motivated either by retribution, financial gain, and/or attempts to censor free speech.
  • In contrast, with the virtual sit-in, the goals of the action are stated, grievances described, participants known and once it is over no physical damage is done. FloodNet is a Java applet that is the code equivalent of going to the target website and constantly clicking the “reload” button. It also allows the participants to leave messages in the server’s error log by looking for non-existent URLs in the target server, which will then generate error messages. For example, a search for “human_rights” will generate an error message “File not found. ‘human_rights’ does not exist on this .gov server.”
  • by the same administration, which is now threatening him.
    • Audrey B
      Audrey B on 09 Jun 10
       
      So let me get this right, basically UCSD hired him after they knew that he co-founded EDT, had participated in ECD, and they knew what he was capable. So they were fine with him "attacking" the Mexican government. But when he and students non-violently protest through a virtual sit-in, because it is aimed towards them, they get mad and are now trying to take his tenure away? Hello, Dr. Dominguez is a professor teaching ECD. Are they going to fire him and take him to court for something he teaches their students?
  • Also among his scholarly and artistic accomplishments cited as reasons to grant Dominguez tenure were the various uses of FloodNet technology to conduct virtual sit-ins on websites run by governments, international finance organizations, anti-immigrant sites and even UCOP’s website.
  • In the hour to come Professor Dominguez would frame his encounter with the administration “Zapatista style,” transforming a closed meeting, the purpose of which was to conduct “fact finding” in relation to his March 4th actions, into a collective meeting or “consulta.”
  • Rejoining the crowd of supporters he sat quietly listening to faculty and students as they read letters that spanned the globe, and which voiced solidarity, alliance, and outrage at the administration’s criminalization of his work.
Weiye Loh

Our Greatest Political Novelist? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...eatest-political-novelist.html

Science Fiction Politics Identity Society

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it’s still anybody’s ballgame.
  • Robinson argues that, now that climate change has become a matter of life and death for the species, it’s time for scientists to abandon their scrupulous neutrality and enter into the messy arena of politics. Essentially, Robinson attempts to apply scientific thinking to politics, approaching it less like pure physics, in which one infallible equation / ideology explains and answers everything, than like engineering—a process of what F.D.R. once called “bold, persistent experimentation,” finding out what works and combining successful elements to synthesize something new.
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Dec 13
     
    "When we call literary writers "political" today, we're usually talking about identity politics. If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death. If they were looking for any indication that we were even dimly aware of the burgeoning global conflict between democracy and capitalism, or of the abyssal catastrophe our civilization was just beginning to spill over the brink of, they might need to turn to books that have that embarrassing little Saturn-and-spaceship sticker on the spine. That is, to science fiction.2"
Weiye Loh

BBC News - Belle de Jour's history of anonymity - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-20796615

Anonymity Internet Literature Writing

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • In the internet age, we have become increasingly concerned about the effects of anonymous online commentary. Anonymous bloggers can have enormous global audiences. "Trolls" can bring criticism straight to the computer screens of the people they disagree with. These trends are solidly in the tradition of literary anonymity - from unsigned political tracts to biting satirical graffiti, we've seen it all before.
  • the effects of anonymity are more important for the anonymous writer than they are for the audience. We'd still be dotty over Jane Austen's books if, like her contemporary audience, we never knew her name. The writing has enough authority and detail to carry us along in her inner world. Knowing her name, where she lived, and seeing the piecrust table where she painstakingly wrote out her manuscripts is interesting, but it's trivia. It's not what makes her novels sing.
  • Anonymous is one of our greatest writers. "From the medieval period to the modern period there have been authors who have enjoyed playing with and experimenting with anonymity, and it never really goes out of fashion," says Marcy North, author of The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England.
  • Weiye Loh on 05 Jan 13
     
    "Anon was, as Virginia Woolf noted in one of her final unpublished essays, "the voice that broke the silence of the forest". Elsewhere she suggested that "Anonymous was a woman". For anonymity has definitely been widely used by women throughout the ages, whether they're writing about relationships, sex or anything else. Without Anonymous, there are so many classics we would not have had - Gawain and the Green Knight, virtually all of the Bible and other religious texts. Anon is allowed a greater creative freedom than a named writer is, greater political influence than a common man can ever attain, and far more longevity than we would guess. Obviously, I'm a great fan of Anon's work, but then, as a formerly anonymous author, I would say that, wouldn't I?"
Amanda Giles

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...07awareness-t.html

identity reality social networking parasocial relationships ambient awareness

shared by Amanda Giles on 28 May 10 - Cached
  • Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” has been around for a while. The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night — tiny updates like “enjoying a glass of wine now” or “watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn’t very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.
  • capable
  • A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • ambient awareness
  • very much like being physically near someone
  • paradox of ambient awareness
  • insignificant on its own
  • he little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives
  • Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” has been around for a while. The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night — tiny updates like “enjoying a glass of wine now” or “watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn’t very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.
  • the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation
  • human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?
  • Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.
  • If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships.
  • Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.
  • hey can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”
  • people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are.
  • if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.
  • he dynamics of small-town life,
  • If anything, it’s identity-constraining now
  • result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves
  • t’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.
Weiye Loh

Lingua Franca | Is Bad Writing Necessary? - 0 views

linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/...writing.html

Writings Postmodernism Critical Theory

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10
     
    IS BAD WRITING NECESSARY? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature BY JAMES MILLER
Weiye Loh

A `Bad Writer' Bites Back - 0 views

pantherfile.uwm.edu/...butler.htm

Academic Writing Postmodernism

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes."
  • The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?
  • scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10
     
    A `Bad Writer' Bites Back By JUDITH BUTLER
Audrey B

In Iran, Cyber-activism Without the Middle-man - PCWorld - 1 views

www.pcworld.com/166890

Iran Election Cyber Twitter YouTube Protest

shared by Audrey B on 22 May 10 - Cached
  • Twitter, which are giving Iranian citizens and supporters of the government protests there new ways of involving themselves in the political struggle.
  • They've let Iranians and supporters of the protesters share information, even within the centrally controlled Internet service in Iran and connected people like Papillon to a country on the other side of the world.
  • Proxy servers are Web sites that let people visit parts of the Internet that would normally be blocked to them.
    • Audrey B
      Audrey B on 22 May 10
       
      Allowing people in Iran to speak up!
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Web 2.0 is paving new routes around Internet censorship.
  • Nowhere is Internet activism more visible than on Twitter
  • t's amazing how naturally people who are not necessarily technical have found ways to organize information on-line and decide who to trust using things as simple as Twitter -- a 140 character micro-blogging service with a basic search feature. "It's a pretty incredible counter-intelligence network," he said.
  • proxy servers have become a critical conduit for information.
  • In recent days these social media networks are getting more important as mainstream reporters have been confined to their hotel rooms on government orders or forced to head home when their visas expire.On YouTube users can find street scenes in Iran, including videos of protesters being beaten and shot by police. "The traditional media is in some ways not able to provide it because there are restrictions placed on them by the Iranian government," said YouTube spokesman Scott Rubin ."It's the citizens stealing the story."
    • Audrey B
      Audrey B on 22 May 10
       
      News reporters assist in allowing civil disobedience. It mentions that on YouTube, there are certain videos that would not be shown on public television. However, by using the web, we are not limited in what we can see in the world. Things are not hidden from us. The web tells it how it is and doesn't beat around the bush. This is important. Citizens are telling the story. Afterall, shouldn't government be run by the people? This is what Thoreau believed and what he practiced resulting in the writing of his revolutionary essay "Civil Disobedience". Hearing, Tweeting, and Viewing the stories of the citizens, of those being attacked or denied certain rights creates an appeal to unite and defy government (in this case). But to do so civily.
  • "Twitter is such a cut-out-the middleman type of situation,"
  • This has made information available to a wider group of people, but it in addition to spreading information about proxy servers, it has made home-grown attack tools available to a wider audience.
  • But soon the anti-government activists realized that DOS attacks were maybe not such a good idea. Not only is it illegal in many countries to launch a DOS attack, but this type of activity also slows down the network throughout Iran, making it hard to get messages out.
  • Twitter, in particular, has proven particularly adept at organizing people and information, said Zittrain. Although Proxies are the most popular way of reaching Twitter, updates can also be sent via other Web applications, SMS (Short Message Service) or even e-mail. "It's a byproduct of the way Twitter was built," he said. "The fact that the APIs are so open has meant that there are already lots of ways to get data in and out of Twitter, that do not rely on direct access to Twitter.com."
  • Audrey B on 22 May 10
     
    Twitter and YouTube both revolutionizing the way to civily defy government.
Sarah Eeee

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views

www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php

shared by Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
  • We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
  • We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual.
  • The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.”
  • To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
  • At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe.
  • In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”
  • In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.
  • The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.”
  • Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice.
  • An example of a “world humanisms” approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.
  • Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
Bri Zabriskie

Literary Criticism: Map - 1 views

wwww.ksu.edu.sa/...Literary%20Criticism%20Map.htm

literary_criticism map

shared by Bri Zabriskie on 20 May 11 - Cached
  • Bri Zabriskie on 20 May 11
     
    Something I'm learning to do is look for things that have already been done in what I'm trying to do. Check out this map of literary theory. I think it could be "updated" to web 2.0 so it doesn't need as much explanation, but it's functional.
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