David Banash is a professor of English at Western Illinois University, where he teaches courses in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture. He is the author of Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption (Rodopi) and co-editor of Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things (Scarecrow). Address: http://faculty.wiu.edu/D-Banash/
Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage: Between Cut and Glue, 2024
Collage is usually thought of as a technique of modernism, brought into the fine arts in the earl... more Collage is usually thought of as a technique of modernism, brought into the fine arts in the early twentieth-century. This paper surveys a long history of collage, tracing the origins of fragmentation and reassembly back to the early modern practice of commonplacing and connecting the commonplace book to contemporary experimental writers.
Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques... more Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques. As such, it demands consideration from multiple perspectives and from critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts. This book, the first of its kind, provides this framework, showing readers the richness and relevance of the worlds Tomasula constructs.
In contemporary consumer cultures, it is an affective orientation towards objects that pulls cons... more In contemporary consumer cultures, it is an affective orientation towards objects that pulls consumers into the future. As Lauren Berlant writes, “[w]hen we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make possible for us” (23). Through objects, we pursue the promises of an ever-elusive happiness. Theorists like Ahmed and Berlant focus largely on the fantasy objects of the good life—the family, the lover, the child, the job, but also on all those objects that are better described as stuff: a house, a new car, an appliance, a shirt, a pair of shoes, a gun, a toy, a phone, a bottle of water—that whole object world that we assemble into a lifestyle. Those concrete objects, and their inevitable fates as trash, are under scrutiny in this special issue of NANO. In this issue we will ask, what happens when those concrete objects that promised us a future are suddenly found to be empty in our present? What happens when objects that promised us a future are cast away and forgotten as we reach towards some new, seemingly better promise?
Seizing the amateur naturalist's field guide as a form, the artist Julian Montague has produ... more Seizing the amateur naturalist's field guide as a form, the artist Julian Montague has produced a provocative and haunting work that takes the shopping cart as its subject. While the project might well be read as an amusing and insightful parody of the taxonomic and stylistic ticks ...
Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage: Between Cut and Glue, 2024
Collage is usually thought of as a technique of modernism, brought into the fine arts in the earl... more Collage is usually thought of as a technique of modernism, brought into the fine arts in the early twentieth-century. This paper surveys a long history of collage, tracing the origins of fragmentation and reassembly back to the early modern practice of commonplacing and connecting the commonplace book to contemporary experimental writers.
Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques... more Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques. As such, it demands consideration from multiple perspectives and from critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts. This book, the first of its kind, provides this framework, showing readers the richness and relevance of the worlds Tomasula constructs.
In contemporary consumer cultures, it is an affective orientation towards objects that pulls cons... more In contemporary consumer cultures, it is an affective orientation towards objects that pulls consumers into the future. As Lauren Berlant writes, “[w]hen we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make possible for us” (23). Through objects, we pursue the promises of an ever-elusive happiness. Theorists like Ahmed and Berlant focus largely on the fantasy objects of the good life—the family, the lover, the child, the job, but also on all those objects that are better described as stuff: a house, a new car, an appliance, a shirt, a pair of shoes, a gun, a toy, a phone, a bottle of water—that whole object world that we assemble into a lifestyle. Those concrete objects, and their inevitable fates as trash, are under scrutiny in this special issue of NANO. In this issue we will ask, what happens when those concrete objects that promised us a future are suddenly found to be empty in our present? What happens when objects that promised us a future are cast away and forgotten as we reach towards some new, seemingly better promise?
Seizing the amateur naturalist's field guide as a form, the artist Julian Montague has produ... more Seizing the amateur naturalist's field guide as a form, the artist Julian Montague has produced a provocative and haunting work that takes the shopping cart as its subject. While the project might well be read as an amusing and insightful parody of the taxonomic and stylistic ticks ...
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