Pub Date : 2021-12-17DOI: 10.24193/mjcst.2021.12.07
Alex Goldiș
The paper investigates the cultural transfers and translations of the term ‟theory”, as instrumented in some of the most influential anthologies of the past decades. It puts forward the argument that while in literature per se a widening of the canon has been produced, ‟theory” remains a term charged with high hegemonical presumptions. Therefore, it pleads for a non-hierarchical and practical conception of theory, that can account for the large variety of non-Western literary phenomena.
{"title":"The Untranslatables of World Theory. A Geopolitical Outlook","authors":"Alex Goldiș","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2021.12.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2021.12.07","url":null,"abstract":"The paper investigates the cultural transfers and translations of the term ‟theory”, as instrumented in some of the most influential anthologies of the past decades. It puts forward the argument that while in literature per se a widening of the canon has been produced, ‟theory” remains a term charged with high hegemonical presumptions. Therefore, it pleads for a non-hierarchical and practical conception of theory, that can account for the large variety of non-Western literary phenomena.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46110798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.04
Alexandru Matei
During the Middle Ages, integumentum was a term widely used by “intellectuals” (Le Goff) in order to unfold the function of allegory: there is no story whose signification does not echo the sacred texts, and every sacred truth needs a story to bring it to life. Integumentum was a way to make this echo explicit: a sort of “poetical coat hiding a moral or philosophical truth” (John of Garland). We want to suggest that, while no one uses integumentum anymore in order to designate the rhetoric of modern and contemporary theoretical discourse, it is in ecological theory that we may rediscover its afterlives. Hence, integumentum is not only a form of telling truths, but a form of memory, as well. In this respect, Michel Serres may be considered the first “ecological” thinker, as he avoids abstract metalanguages as much as possible, relying instead on fictions and characters in his attempt to describe the world afresh. If integumentum resurfaces as the proper way of “ecologizing,” instead of modernizing (Latour), we would like to uncover, in Michel Serres’ works, the dialectic of subjects and objects.
{"title":"Michel Seress’ Integumentum, or Why Ecology Lies (Also) Beyond Arguments","authors":"Alexandru Matei","doi":"10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.04","url":null,"abstract":"During the Middle Ages, integumentum was a term widely used by “intellectuals” (Le Goff) in order to unfold the function of allegory: there is no story whose signification does not echo the sacred texts, and every sacred truth needs a story to bring it to life. Integumentum was a way to make this echo explicit: a sort of “poetical coat hiding a moral or philosophical truth” (John of Garland). We want to suggest that, while no one uses integumentum anymore in order to designate the rhetoric of modern and contemporary theoretical discourse, it is in ecological theory that we may rediscover its afterlives. Hence, integumentum is not only a form of telling truths, but a form of memory, as well. In this respect, Michel Serres may be considered the first “ecological” thinker, as he avoids abstract metalanguages as much as possible, relying instead on fictions and characters in his attempt to describe the world afresh. If integumentum resurfaces as the proper way of “ecologizing,” instead of modernizing (Latour), we would like to uncover, in Michel Serres’ works, the dialectic of subjects and objects.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48282058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.10
Á. Kovács
Toni Morrison’s project of reimagining individual memories of the African American past has been immortalized by the image of the chokecherry tree of scar tissue on Sethe’s back in Beloved. Invisible and dumb for Sethe, the scars have to be faced and interpreted with the help of others in order to process traumatic memories of the slave past. The image questions a presumed opposition between objects of memory as separate from subjects of memory, as the wound, the supposed object is located in the body of the subject, Sethe. Body marks of the past also appear in Morrison’s novels after 2001, which are generally considered sparse compared to her previous texts. Relying on Marianne Hirsch’s method of reading how body marks create a “sense memory” of traumatic experience, the paper explores the webs of meaning invoked by bodily wounds and other extended objects of memory in Morrison’s late novels. The paper claims that although these novels continue to rely on the representation and processing of sense memories, they represent a truncated version compared to earlier novels, in which wounds figure not so much as metaphoric nodes of interaction, but rather as themes.
{"title":"Body Marks of the Past in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Home","authors":"Á. Kovács","doi":"10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.10","url":null,"abstract":"Toni Morrison’s project of reimagining individual memories of the African American past has been immortalized by the image of the chokecherry tree of scar tissue on Sethe’s back in Beloved. Invisible and dumb for Sethe, the scars have to be faced and interpreted with the help of others in order to process traumatic memories of the slave past. The image questions a presumed opposition between objects of memory as separate from subjects of memory, as the wound, the supposed object is located in the body of the subject, Sethe. Body marks of the past also appear in Morrison’s novels after 2001, which are generally considered sparse compared to her previous texts. Relying on Marianne Hirsch’s method of reading how body marks create a “sense memory” of traumatic experience, the paper explores the webs of meaning invoked by bodily wounds and other extended objects of memory in Morrison’s late novels. The paper claims that although these novels continue to rely on the representation and processing of sense memories, they represent a truncated version compared to earlier novels, in which wounds figure not so much as metaphoric nodes of interaction, but rather as themes.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49115995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.06
E. Sava
The article proposes an analysis of family cookbooks from the perspective of memory studies. Its main goal is to show that these are objects that shape family memory, helping to preserve and transmit it from one generation to the next. The first section outlines the theoretical framework, discussing the multiple layers of content and meaning in homemade cookbooks, the similarities between them and scrapbooks, as objects that can elicit voluntary (or involuntary) memories. Other theoretical issues that are essential for the problem in question are also examined: the complex relationships between individual memory and family memory, the layers that make up family memory, how family meals shape family memory, and recipe books seen as Proustian devices. The second part proposes a case study that explores the particular way in which the aspects discussed in the theoretical section are illustrated by two recipes notebooks belonging to a woman who was born in a Romanian town in 1944. As regards the research methodology, the case study is based on a life-story interview and the qualitative analysis of the two notebooks.
{"title":"Family Cookbooks – Objects of Family Memory","authors":"E. Sava","doi":"10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.06","url":null,"abstract":"The article proposes an analysis of family cookbooks from the perspective of memory studies. Its main goal is to show that these are objects that shape family memory, helping to preserve and transmit it from one generation to the next. The first section outlines the theoretical framework, discussing the multiple layers of content and meaning in homemade cookbooks, the similarities between them and scrapbooks, as objects that can elicit voluntary (or involuntary) memories. Other theoretical issues that are essential for the problem in question are also examined: the complex relationships between individual memory and family memory, the layers that make up family memory, how family meals shape family memory, and recipe books seen as Proustian devices. The second part proposes a case study that explores the particular way in which the aspects discussed in the theoretical section are illustrated by two recipes notebooks belonging to a woman who was born in a Romanian town in 1944. As regards the research methodology, the case study is based on a life-story interview and the qualitative analysis of the two notebooks.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48464113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.15
Lavinia Tache
The materiality of the human body is to be understood in a complementary relation with the objects that produce an extension of life and the privation of it. The Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa) and Human Acts (Han Kang) reassemble the past through the instrumentalization of objects, thus creating life in the present. The question that arises is whether this certain present can preserve the integrity of the human. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk suggests the body as a locus of conversion and tackles contemporary interests regarding plastic, for instance. These texts authored by Ogawa, Kang and Tokarczuk allow for a repositioning of the standpoint from which the consequences of subject-object relation are approached in literature, because they tap into human experience by addressing the essentiality of objects as repositories of memories. The essay attempts to analyse how objects having either a beneficial or a lethal meaning can be seen as deeply encapsulated in human existence.
{"title":"Objects Reconfiguring the Present and the Presence. Routes of Displacement for Humans: Yoko Ogawa, Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk","authors":"Lavinia Tache","doi":"10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.15","url":null,"abstract":"The materiality of the human body is to be understood in a complementary relation with the objects that produce an extension of life and the privation of it. The Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa) and Human Acts (Han Kang) reassemble the past through the instrumentalization of objects, thus creating life in the present. The question that arises is whether this certain present can preserve the integrity of the human. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk suggests the body as a locus of conversion and tackles contemporary interests regarding plastic, for instance. These texts authored by Ogawa, Kang and Tokarczuk allow for a repositioning of the standpoint from which the consequences of subject-object relation are approached in literature, because they tap into human experience by addressing the essentiality of objects as repositories of memories. The essay attempts to analyse how objects having either a beneficial or a lethal meaning can be seen as deeply encapsulated in human existence.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47439613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.02
C. Moraru
This is a largely theoretical essay that, in conversation with Graham Harman’s energetic view of objects and Ben Lerner’s idiosyncratic theory of poetry, articulates the basic tenets of a “flat aesthetics” and then moves on to tease out this aesthetics’ ramifications in terms of form, reading thereof, and politics. When the object’s ontological dignity is acknowledged, as flat ontology does, and further, when literature too is dealt with as an object whose “intransitive” objecthood is recognized, literary form, Moraru argues, no longer reflects an elsewhere, a beyond, or other transcendent place, meaning, or design. Instead, this form deflects clarifying light “prismatically,” illuminating other objects, the bigger ensembles into which they are arranged, as well as the potential for new arrangements and worlds. Drawing from Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry, the article’s closing segment explains how this potentiality is already embedded in form qua object and sprouts dialectically from the limits within which literary forms inherently coalesce.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.03
Maryam Muliaee
This paper adopts an art-based research model to investigate how media objects, as entangled material agencies, can become co-creators with artists and condition the viewers' memory and imagination. My work Recycled Series among other artists’ work are the subjects of this analysis. All these works involve images that are degenerated with a copy machine. The degenerated images lose coherence and become forms of ruins that the copier builds. Drawing from theories of things (Brown; Harman; Shaviro), I examine these works as the examples of “media-as-things” to show when media is misused, the potential of media is revealed. I place these works in the context of “broken-tech art” (Boym) and “haptic visuality” (Marks). I argue that these images determine a different object-subject relationship for their audience and their “thingness,” which is intensified through degeneration effects, becomes a major factor in their aesthetic reception.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.11
Dana Percec
Referring to the British writers’ prompt reaction to the Brexit crisis, in developing what has already come to be known as BrexLit, Robert Eaglestone remarks the “cultural and emotional landscapes” created by such literary responses, which attempt to “humanize” major political dilemmas. Ali Smith, commenting on the same speed of writing books “pressed against the contemporaneous,” considers this as the result of history repeating itself with us failing to be aware of it, evidence of what we might call a community of unreliable remembers. The paper focuses on Ian McEwan’s 2019 The Cockroach, a novella offering a reversed Kafkaesque metamorphosis, a pretext to satirize Brexit and to meditate on how the antiheroic character caught in this allegorical transformation devolves from subject into object. I argue that this process of objectification (using Martha Nussbaum’s concept, derived from, but not limited to the feminist critique) contributes to the disembodiment and further relativization of memory.
{"title":"Subject or Object? The Anti-Hero of the Allegory and the Hero of the Anti-Allegory","authors":"Dana Percec","doi":"10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.11","url":null,"abstract":"Referring to the British writers’ prompt reaction to the Brexit crisis, in developing what has already come to be known as BrexLit, Robert Eaglestone remarks the “cultural and emotional landscapes” created by such literary responses, which attempt to “humanize” major political dilemmas. Ali Smith, commenting on the same speed of writing books “pressed against the contemporaneous,” considers this as the result of history repeating itself with us failing to be aware of it, evidence of what we might call a community of unreliable remembers. The paper focuses on Ian McEwan’s 2019 The Cockroach, a novella offering a reversed Kafkaesque metamorphosis, a pretext to satirize Brexit and to meditate on how the antiheroic character caught in this allegorical transformation devolves from subject into object. I argue that this process of objectification (using Martha Nussbaum’s concept, derived from, but not limited to the feminist critique) contributes to the disembodiment and further relativization of memory.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48858188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.08
A. Preda
Focusing on The PowerBook and The Stone Gods, this article explores the ways in which Jeanette Winterson articulates the interconnections between consciousness and memory, delineates their role in identity formation and reveals how posthuman subjects’ practices of embodiment work to undermine both heteronormative and anthropocentric worldviews. The technologically inscribed bodies of the characters portrayed in these two novels, together with Winterson’s rhizomatic conceptualization of space and her vertical figuration of time, allow for the time-travelling endeavours of e-storyteller Ali/x and of Robo-sapiens-cum-Robo-head Spike. Such fictional entities prompt investigations into the essence of social-material encounters, of subject-object interdependence, of matter-energy vitality, of interaction and intra-action, of reflexive thought and of self-configuration.
本文以《权力书》和《石头神》为中心，探讨了珍妮特·温特森阐述意识和记忆之间相互联系的方式，描绘了它们在身份形成中的作用，并揭示了后人类主体的化身实践如何破坏非规范和人类中心的世界观。这两部小说中描绘的人物的技术雕刻身体，加上温特森对空间的根状概念化和她对时间的垂直塑造，允许e-storyteller Ali/x和Robo sapiens兼Robo head Spike进行时间旅行。这些虚构的实体促使人们对社会物质相遇的本质、主客体相互依存的本质、物质能量活力的本质、相互作用和内在行动的本质、反射性思维的本质和自我配置的本质进行调查。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.12
Ana Țăranu
Starting from Hirsch and Smith’s concept of a feminist counterhistory and referencing the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this paper undertakes a (re)reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as construction of gendered countermemory. Such an interpretation would enable a recognition of the political function of the novel as an identity matrix of African-American womanhood. Expanding upon the classical, post-Lacanian approach to trauma studies and its post-colonial reconfigurations, I use a poststructuralist framing of collective trauma, and the Saussurian concept of signification, to highlight the struggle for self-determination of an oppressed community as it is signified-upon by its oppressors through violently imposed discourse. I further question the complicity between conventional forms of narration and the hegemony of an external signifier, and I trace this patterned mechanism of aggression within the linguistic and diegetic fabric of the novel, in order to expose Hurston’s literary methodology of collective memorialization and the way it challenges canonical representations of trauma.
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