Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.01
P. Petrar, C. Borbély
The argument behind our introductory essay, as well as behind our special issue of the Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, is that the human can emerge as part of the texture of the world only by being reminded of and by objects, that is, only by engaging in a dialogue with them, by recognising both their strangeness and their familiarity, by conferring upon them the distinction of containing the traces and archives of individual and collective history. We examine the turn towards things enacted by recent critical and artistic trends as a complex amalgam of de-anthropocentrising modes recalibrating experience under the pressure of imminent extinction (of humans, animals, inanimate objects) which produces a new imperative of togetherness by excavating the memory of our shared materiality.
我们的介绍性文章，以及我们的Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory特刊背后的论点是，只有通过被物体提醒和提醒，人类才能成为世界结构的一部分，也就是说，只有通过与它们对话，通过认识到它们的陌生和熟悉，通过赋予它们包含个人和集体历史的痕迹和档案的区别。我们审视了由最近的批判和艺术趋势所制定的转向事物的趋势，将其作为一种复杂的去人类中心化模式的混合体，在即将灭绝的压力下(人类、动物、无生命物体)重新校准经验，通过挖掘我们共同物质的记忆，产生了一种新的团结的必要性。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.14
Andrei-Bogdan Popa
My essay will aim to prove that John McGahern’s Memoir foregrounds the material dimension of anticipatory grief and its aftermath as a space in which different affective responses to the “Thing” can be explored. Firstly, I look at how the text edits together memories of anticipatory grief in order to dramatize the “apparatus of thinking” (Steven Connor) as an affective spatiality (Marta Figlerowicz) in relation to an irrupting thingness within the object world. Secondly, I look at how McGahern and his father are “timed by things” (Timothy Morton) in their effort to remember or objectify affect, and how mourning itself becomes a matter of accepting nonhuman temporality. As such, this textual engagement with memories and inscriptions enacts a writerly form of anticipatory-vicarious grief, a “moral emotion” arising from the “anticipated harm” (Somogy Varga and Shaun Gallagher) that the subject feels will affect those close to her after her death.
{"title":"The World of the Dying:’ John Mcgahern’s Memoir and the Thingness in Anticipatory Grief","authors":"Andrei-Bogdan Popa","doi":"10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.14","url":null,"abstract":"My essay will aim to prove that John McGahern’s Memoir foregrounds the material dimension of anticipatory grief and its aftermath as a space in which different affective responses to the “Thing” can be explored. Firstly, I look at how the text edits together memories of anticipatory grief in order to dramatize the “apparatus of thinking” (Steven Connor) as an affective spatiality (Marta Figlerowicz) in relation to an irrupting thingness within the object world. Secondly, I look at how McGahern and his father are “timed by things” (Timothy Morton) in their effort to remember or objectify affect, and how mourning itself becomes a matter of accepting nonhuman temporality. As such, this textual engagement with memories and inscriptions enacts a writerly form of anticipatory-vicarious grief, a “moral emotion” arising from the “anticipated harm” (Somogy Varga and Shaun Gallagher) that the subject feels will affect those close to her after her death.","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":"42783952","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.2021.11.13
Ada Beleuță
Tracing some of the inflection points in our conceptualization of empathy, social cognition, intersubjective understanding, and social theories over time, this essay attempts to contextualize and give a possible explanation to the more radical changes determined by the so-called nonhuman turn. Drawing on the theories proposed by Steven Connor, Bill Brown, and Bruno Latour on the relations between human and nonhuman agents, the paper will argue for the inherent potential of things to both exceed the limits of human agency and cognitive capacities (specifically, memory and intersubjective understanding) and foster their expansion. A reading of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) will emphasize the importance of interobjectivity as a mechanism of augmenting empathy and intersubjective understanding. The polyphony of narrativized memories of loss, mourning, trauma – and even pre-trauma, in their construction of an alternative history to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, uses things to encode, store, and retrieve memories, as well as to facilitate (re)connections with others beyond boundaries of space, time, or death. Thus, the democratic force of storytelling returns to corroborate “a democracy extended to things” (Latour).
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Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.16
Florina Ilis
Modern poetics imposed the image of Nietzsche’s split Subject, with the disaggregated self-emerging as dilemmatic subjectivity and its aesthetic culmination in the “dehumanisation of art.” Nietzsche’s philosophy provided postmodern poetics with the Subject as “fiction,” subjected to a complex process of self-multiplication and self-reflection (Ihab Hassan). The loss of the autonomy of the Subject as a “fashionable theme” (Frederic Jameson), combined with its multiplication into simulacra (Jean Baudrillard) and the abolition of reference, allow the Object to storm the places of its absence. The multiplicitous nature under which the image of subjectivity is formed is a possible solution for the issue of the Subject. Another solution would be inflicting violence upon the Subject, replaced by the corporeality of the Object, by the body, to the point of its destruction, or to the ultimate point of abjectness. My essay will use Murakami Ryū’s novel Coin Locker Babies to examine its author’s views on the Object-Subject relation, on the Subject as an Object (corporeality) and on the forms through which the Object inflicts violence upon the Subject.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.05
D. Clinci
Plastic has become a ubiquitous material on planet Earth. I use Bennett’s term, thing-power, to analyse various aspects of plastic’s onto-materiality. Generally considered a single-use material, plastic is easily discarded, leaving the individualized, private space of capitalism, and becoming a nomad, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, thus travelling through a smooth space. Then, plastic enters a symbiotic relationship with all biotic and abiotic bodies, becoming endo-plastic. As a geological layer, it becomes a “vibrant” memory of the nexus between capitalism and humanism, revealing its full political potential. Plastic is a witness, by-product and determinant of the Anthropocene, and its memory tells the political and ideological geostory (Donna J. Haraway) of human exceptionalism. Becoming-plastic is one way of overcoming anthropocentrism: not just by advocating for “post-humanism,” but by advocating for “posthum-ism,” even if this means “embracing human extinction” (Patricia MacCormack).
塑料已经成为地球上无处不在的材料。我用班尼特的术语“物力”来分析塑料的非物质性的各个方面。塑料通常被认为是一种一次性材料，很容易被丢弃，离开了资本主义的个性化、私人空间，成为德勒兹和瓜塔里所说的游牧民，从而在一个平滑的空间中旅行。然后，塑料与所有生物和非生物体进入共生关系，成为内塑性。作为一个地质层，它成为资本主义和人文主义之间联系的“充满活力的”记忆，揭示了其充分的政治潜力。塑料是人类世的见证者、副产品和决定因素，它的记忆讲述了人类例外论的政治和意识形态历史(Donna J. Haraway)。变得可塑化是克服人类中心主义的一种方式:不仅要倡导“后人文主义”，还要倡导“后人类主义”，即使这意味着“拥抱人类灭绝”(帕特里夏·麦考马克)。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.07
A. Bellot
The remembrance of war and commemoration practices shape the collective memories of society and, as such, war has been one of the most productive topics in memory studies. Commemorating past wars is one of the ways of constructing a commonly shared memory that would enhance group cohesion and shape collective identity. This paper will provide three examples of sites of memory in reference to the Malvinas/Falklands War, one from each side of the dispute— United Kingdom, Argentina and a third example from the actual territory of the Falkland Islands to illustrate how war memorials are an expression of patriotism, built to frame the deaths in terms of a national narrative of glorious sacrifice for cause and nation. Therefore, war commemoration recalls past experiences of suffering, but at the same time, of resistance.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-08DOI: 10.24193/MJCST.2021.11.09
I. Dragoș
Rooted in the tradition of eighteenth-century circulation novels recounted by an object narrator, The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760) epitomizes the features of this experimental novelistic subgenre by foregrounding a coat which, acting as a homodiegetic narrator, lambastes the world of commodities prompted by the rise of early capitalism. As an object endowed with moral conscience, the coat epistemologically proves to be a reliable narrator that is able to render authentic experience and feelings by getting empirically involved in the world it describes. Worn by a few owners, the coat becomes a sharp observer of society and, most importantly, it foreshadows what Karl Marx has termed “commodity fetishism.” According to Marx, commodities and humans become part of a process that is economically endorsed by exchange. Read in this light, I argue that the text reveals the Marxist process of reification whereby social relations between humans turn into social relations between things. Despite being an object narrator, the coat fulfils a typically eighteenth-century pedagogical function, in that it warns the reader against the degrading morals of a society addicted to material culture.
《黑大衣历险记》(the Adventures of a Black Coat, 1760)植根于18世纪流通小说的传统，由一个实物叙述者叙述，它通过突出一件大衣，作为一个同质叙事的叙述者，痛斥早期资本主义兴起所催生的商品世界，集中体现了这种实验小说亚类型的特点。外衣作为一种被赋予道德良知的客体，在认识论上证明了它是一个可靠的叙述者，能够通过经验地参与到它所描述的世界中来呈现真实的体验和感受。只有少数人穿着，这种外套就成了社会的敏锐观察者，最重要的是，它预示着卡尔·马克思(Karl Marx)所说的“商品拜物教”。根据马克思的观点，商品和人成为一个过程的一部分，这个过程在经济上得到了交换的认可。从这个角度来看，我认为本文揭示了马克思主义的物化过程，即人与物之间的社会关系转化为物与人之间的社会关系。尽管是一个对象叙述者，外套履行了典型的十八世纪教育功能，因为它警告读者警惕沉迷于物质文化的社会的堕落道德。
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Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.03
Emanuel Modoc, Daiana Gârdan
The present study proposes an experimental exploration of the Romanian novel written between 1920 and 1940 through the use of stylometry, a method of distant reading employed for the statistical analysis of style. Drawing from the most recent advances in the field of computational stylistics, we select a formal standpoint from which we seek to investigate the relation between the Romanian novelistic canon and minor, tertiary novels published in the same. In our test cases, we will attempt to establish some of the more promising aspects of stylometric analysis, as well as single out the experiments that yield no relevant result. Because of the relative novelty of the method, the purpose of our investigations is to offer a kind of pilot experiment that can illustrate the benefits of using computational methods on Romanian literary corpora.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.02
This study revisits what is widely considered “the first modern novel” in Romanian literature, Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion, from a network theory perspective. Isolating the dialogue and quantitatively analysing the interventions of every character and their interactions in the fictional world, it provides a blueprint for the exploration of social and personal dynamics between characters. In recent years, rural literature in Romania has undergone a recontextualization process. Following in the footsteps of these approaches, our research provides the first character network of Ion and outlines who talks, how much, and to whom. It also explores how differences in social class influence speaking time or the structure of the individual discourses, taking an in-depth look at the relationship between and roles of the two characters who talk most.
{"title":"The Character Network in Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion: A Quantitative Analysis of Dialogue","authors":"","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.02","url":null,"abstract":"This study revisits what is widely considered “the first modern novel” in Romanian literature, Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion, from a network theory perspective. Isolating the dialogue and quantitatively analysing the interventions of every character and their interactions in the fictional world, it provides a blueprint for the exploration of social and personal dynamics between characters. In recent years, rural literature in Romania has undergone a recontextualization process. Following in the footsteps of these approaches, our research provides the first character network of Ion and outlines who talks, how much, and to whom. It also explores how differences in social class influence speaking time or the structure of the individual discourses, taking an in-depth look at the relationship between and roles of the two characters who talk most.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44479946","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 : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.01
Alex Cistelecan
The paper discusses an intermediary phase in Franco Moretti’s intellectual journey, namely the years 1990s. This is a period of transition in Moretti’s thinking, in which he is working simultaneously on two fronts: on the one hand, he is refining evermore and bringing to completion his specific brand of close reading analysis developed in the previous decade – namely the combination of evolutionary theory, formal-rhetorical analysis, and eclectic Marxism (with its highly unstable mix of Lukács, Wallerstein, and Della Volpe); on the other, he is forging for the first time the new tools and concepts of what will become, after 2000, his defining intellectual signature – the method of distant reading. The two undertakings correspond to two opposed literary objects: on the one hand, the novel – with its regularity of form, reproduction in large scale, centripetal movement, bourgeois imaginary, and national horizon; on the other, what we call the ‘anti-novel’, which is the modern epic in Moretti’s understanding – the few dozen ‘world-texts’, highly polymorphous and reproducible only in few and select occurrences, centrifugal in their movement, and transcending the national and bourgeois horizon, rooted as they are in the critical, semi-peripheral junctures of the capitalist world-system. The paper dwells on some of the oppositions and similarities, overlaps and contradictions, theoretical problems and practical solutions, raised or offered by the two methodological approaches and their corresponding literary objects.
{"title":"Novel and Anti-Novel. Moretti Before Distant Reading","authors":"Alex Cistelecan","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.01","url":null,"abstract":"The paper discusses an intermediary phase in Franco Moretti’s intellectual journey, namely the years 1990s. This is a period of transition in Moretti’s thinking, in which he is working simultaneously on two fronts: on the one hand, he is refining evermore and bringing to completion his specific brand of close reading analysis developed in the previous decade – namely the combination of evolutionary theory, formal-rhetorical analysis, and eclectic Marxism (with its highly unstable mix of Lukács, Wallerstein, and Della Volpe); on the other, he is forging for the first time the new tools and concepts of what will become, after 2000, his defining intellectual signature – the method of distant reading. The two undertakings correspond to two opposed literary objects: on the one hand, the novel – with its regularity of form, reproduction in large scale, centripetal movement, bourgeois imaginary, and national horizon; on the other, what we call the ‘anti-novel’, which is the modern epic in Moretti’s understanding – the few dozen ‘world-texts’, highly polymorphous and reproducible only in few and select occurrences, centrifugal in their movement, and transcending the national and bourgeois horizon, rooted as they are in the critical, semi-peripheral junctures of the capitalist world-system. The paper dwells on some of the oppositions and similarities, overlaps and contradictions, theoretical problems and practical solutions, raised or offered by the two methodological approaches and their corresponding literary objects.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49073235","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}
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