Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the... more Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase reached its peak usage in English publications between 1936 and 1937 and then nosedived after those years. It's interesting to speculate about what came together at that time. In 1937, DC Thomson published the first issue of The Dandy, one of the best selling comics in the history of British pop culture and the third-longest-running comics in the world; Daffy Duck debuted in the animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series; and Detective Comics commenced publication. A year later, Superman went public. But 1937 also was the year that John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt University for Kenyon College and published “Criticism, Inc.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The target of Ransom's ire is “moralist” historical criticism, into which camp he puts actual morality purveyors, the new humanists and the new leftists (those purveyors o...
May–June 2013 As technology threatens to overwhelm our senses, globalization short-circuits equal... more May–June 2013 As technology threatens to overwhelm our senses, globalization short-circuits equality, and commodities define lifestyle, we see the rise of speculative fiction that attempts to re-envision the human, engage the reader’s empathy, and awaken a respect for life. In Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the novel of sensibility returns, but clothed in the garb of futuristic satire. Both novels flirt with the easy joke and metafictional plotting but widely sidestep the snide and the twee. In HTLSiaSFU, there are in-jokes about Luke Skywalker and Star Trek, and there is the familiar nested narrative (Charles Yu’s novel tells the story of a time-machine repairman named “Charles Yu” who reads a book by “‘Charles Yu’”). In this book, we literally enter a universe of discourse, the “science fictional universe” of the title. Charles lives in the unfinished Minor Universe 31, built by “Time Warner Time, a division of Google,” where immigrants live in the border zone “between SF and reality,” and inhabitants are divided into “protagonists and back office.” Life is equated with fiction according to the “theory of chronodiegetics”: “Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.” Memory is the story we make of time; life is a time machine. Also rifle-trained on memory and regret, Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story likewise can’t resist at one point the novel-within-a-novel technique and interlaces numerous intertextual references to film and science fiction, often played for sardonic laughs. Shteyngart is an expert satirist, having honed his vision two previous novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) and Absurdistan, listed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2006. In Super Sad True Love Story, his target is the technodystopia produced by multinational capital in an age of globalization. The U.S. is a failing police state, and human worth is based on credit ratings. Real-time conversation is dead: everyone emotes online through “Globalteens” (a spoof on Facebook) and constantly consults an “äppäräti” (a mobile device nicely named to sit between “apparatus” and “appartchik”). Analog media and critical thought are both socially suspect (students in online colleges are taught to “scan” publications such as the New York Lifestyle Times). One character notes that while shopping at JuicyPussy, “One of the salesladies even verballed me if I were ok and I told her I was ‘thinking’ and she was like ‘why?’”
Let’s face it: we all know that when you add the extra vowel, baad is the ultimate term of endear... more Let’s face it: we all know that when you add the extra vowel, baad is the ultimate term of endearment. All hipster, counter-culture, soul searchers love baad stuff, perhaps ever since Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. That’s because it does the right stuff: it refuses conformity to the powers that be; it refuses to take seriously all the high-falutin’ ideals and pretenses; it gets down with the real folks, whoever they might be. And it’s a pretty rigorous taxonomy, best used, of course, for the contemporary, the latest baad stuff. But you could take it back a bit, using the same criteria and say that, for instance, Madame Bovary (1857) is baad—so is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Henry Miller’s Sexus (1949) and Nexus (1960), Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone (1930), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and so on—you get the point, there’s a lot of baad stuff there that’s really good. But can a book be baad and bad at the same time given this taxonomy? The answer has to be: of course. The book can be hip, cool, revolutionary, code breaking on many levels, but just plain crappy. Examples will have to work here, and so I’m going to nominate for dual honors Bob Dylan’s 1966 classic baad book, Tarantula. If this isn’t baad and bad at the same time, I give up. So I’m just going to end with the first, well, let’s call it “sentence” of the book:
... The crisis of postmodern history is the endlessly repeated movement toward the historical sub... more ... The crisis of postmodern history is the endlessly repeated movement toward the historical sublime/History' (Elias 20014. Elias A 2001 Sublime Desire ... 19716. Heidegger M 1971, 1959 A dialogue on language in On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D Hertz, Harper & ...
... 8 And as many writers have observed since, undermining our faith in history still further hav... more ... 8 And as many writers have observed since, undermining our faith in history still further have been postcolonialism, multiculturalism, identity politics ... A literary work must be understood ascreating a dialogue, and philological scholarship has to be founded on a ... in a double bind. ...
This essay explores web-based art practices congenial to an avant-garde aesthetics defined by Guy... more This essay explores web-based art practices congenial to an avant-garde aesthetics defined by Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem and others affiliated with the Situationist International. Today, some cyberartists are redefining (and extending into new territories) key concepts of the 1960s Situationist avant-garde: psychogeography and détournement. An avant-garde arts counterculture is emerging on the web that takes as its starting point, in the manner of the SI, an attack on spectacular aesthetics in the interest of intellectual emancipation. New postconvergent media arts now extend SI concepts into new, dematerialized territories. I identify SI aims and principles that seem central to this new media art and examine some specific examples of net.art, Flash art, and Situationist- inspired art in Second Life® to contextualize the cyberarts within a Situationist effort to revitalize human experience, ironically from within its most spectacular creation.
Page 1. AMY J. ELIAS The Postmodern Turn on(:) the Enlightenment -T _he eighteenth-century Enligh... more Page 1. AMY J. ELIAS The Postmodern Turn on(:) the Enlightenment -T _he eighteenth-century Enlightenment is generally un-derstood as the birth time of late modernity, the "Age of Reason" heralded by the 1687 publication ...
Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the... more Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase reached its peak usage in English publications between 1936 and 1937 and then nosedived after those years. It's interesting to speculate about what came together at that time. In 1937, DC Thomson published the first issue of The Dandy, one of the best selling comics in the history of British pop culture and the third-longest-running comics in the world; Daffy Duck debuted in the animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series; and Detective Comics commenced publication. A year later, Superman went public. But 1937 also was the year that John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt University for Kenyon College and published “Criticism, Inc.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The target of Ransom's ire is “moralist” historical criticism, into which camp he puts actual morality purveyors, the new humanists and the new leftists (those purveyors o...
May–June 2013 As technology threatens to overwhelm our senses, globalization short-circuits equal... more May–June 2013 As technology threatens to overwhelm our senses, globalization short-circuits equality, and commodities define lifestyle, we see the rise of speculative fiction that attempts to re-envision the human, engage the reader’s empathy, and awaken a respect for life. In Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the novel of sensibility returns, but clothed in the garb of futuristic satire. Both novels flirt with the easy joke and metafictional plotting but widely sidestep the snide and the twee. In HTLSiaSFU, there are in-jokes about Luke Skywalker and Star Trek, and there is the familiar nested narrative (Charles Yu’s novel tells the story of a time-machine repairman named “Charles Yu” who reads a book by “‘Charles Yu’”). In this book, we literally enter a universe of discourse, the “science fictional universe” of the title. Charles lives in the unfinished Minor Universe 31, built by “Time Warner Time, a division of Google,” where immigrants live in the border zone “between SF and reality,” and inhabitants are divided into “protagonists and back office.” Life is equated with fiction according to the “theory of chronodiegetics”: “Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.” Memory is the story we make of time; life is a time machine. Also rifle-trained on memory and regret, Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story likewise can’t resist at one point the novel-within-a-novel technique and interlaces numerous intertextual references to film and science fiction, often played for sardonic laughs. Shteyngart is an expert satirist, having honed his vision two previous novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) and Absurdistan, listed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2006. In Super Sad True Love Story, his target is the technodystopia produced by multinational capital in an age of globalization. The U.S. is a failing police state, and human worth is based on credit ratings. Real-time conversation is dead: everyone emotes online through “Globalteens” (a spoof on Facebook) and constantly consults an “äppäräti” (a mobile device nicely named to sit between “apparatus” and “appartchik”). Analog media and critical thought are both socially suspect (students in online colleges are taught to “scan” publications such as the New York Lifestyle Times). One character notes that while shopping at JuicyPussy, “One of the salesladies even verballed me if I were ok and I told her I was ‘thinking’ and she was like ‘why?’”
Let’s face it: we all know that when you add the extra vowel, baad is the ultimate term of endear... more Let’s face it: we all know that when you add the extra vowel, baad is the ultimate term of endearment. All hipster, counter-culture, soul searchers love baad stuff, perhaps ever since Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. That’s because it does the right stuff: it refuses conformity to the powers that be; it refuses to take seriously all the high-falutin’ ideals and pretenses; it gets down with the real folks, whoever they might be. And it’s a pretty rigorous taxonomy, best used, of course, for the contemporary, the latest baad stuff. But you could take it back a bit, using the same criteria and say that, for instance, Madame Bovary (1857) is baad—so is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Henry Miller’s Sexus (1949) and Nexus (1960), Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone (1930), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and so on—you get the point, there’s a lot of baad stuff there that’s really good. But can a book be baad and bad at the same time given this taxonomy? The answer has to be: of course. The book can be hip, cool, revolutionary, code breaking on many levels, but just plain crappy. Examples will have to work here, and so I’m going to nominate for dual honors Bob Dylan’s 1966 classic baad book, Tarantula. If this isn’t baad and bad at the same time, I give up. So I’m just going to end with the first, well, let’s call it “sentence” of the book:
... The crisis of postmodern history is the endlessly repeated movement toward the historical sub... more ... The crisis of postmodern history is the endlessly repeated movement toward the historical sublime/History' (Elias 20014. Elias A 2001 Sublime Desire ... 19716. Heidegger M 1971, 1959 A dialogue on language in On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D Hertz, Harper & ...
... 8 And as many writers have observed since, undermining our faith in history still further hav... more ... 8 And as many writers have observed since, undermining our faith in history still further have been postcolonialism, multiculturalism, identity politics ... A literary work must be understood ascreating a dialogue, and philological scholarship has to be founded on a ... in a double bind. ...
This essay explores web-based art practices congenial to an avant-garde aesthetics defined by Guy... more This essay explores web-based art practices congenial to an avant-garde aesthetics defined by Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem and others affiliated with the Situationist International. Today, some cyberartists are redefining (and extending into new territories) key concepts of the 1960s Situationist avant-garde: psychogeography and détournement. An avant-garde arts counterculture is emerging on the web that takes as its starting point, in the manner of the SI, an attack on spectacular aesthetics in the interest of intellectual emancipation. New postconvergent media arts now extend SI concepts into new, dematerialized territories. I identify SI aims and principles that seem central to this new media art and examine some specific examples of net.art, Flash art, and Situationist- inspired art in Second Life® to contextualize the cyberarts within a Situationist effort to revitalize human experience, ironically from within its most spectacular creation.
Page 1. AMY J. ELIAS The Postmodern Turn on(:) the Enlightenment -T _he eighteenth-century Enligh... more Page 1. AMY J. ELIAS The Postmodern Turn on(:) the Enlightenment -T _he eighteenth-century Enlightenment is generally un-derstood as the birth time of late modernity, the "Age of Reason" heralded by the 1687 publication ...
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