Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8503476
R. Rexer
This essay explores the sudden popularity and redefinition of the word pornographie in France in the 1880s. Following the publication of Émile Zola’s novel Nana and the rise of a genre of cheap, bawdy newspapers in 1880, the French daily press knowingly “invented” the word pornographie to designate these sexually explicit publications. Reviving an esoteric word, the press redeployed it with a new meaning and a (concocted) origin narrative that highlighted both the word’s “newness” and Zola’s place in the “new” genre it designated. This reinvention and deployment of the word were driven by the evolving politics and economics of the daily press during the first decades of the Third Republic. Ultimately, this politically motivated, half-fabricated reinvention of the word pornographie culminated with its becoming the catchall term that would all but replace obscenity as a signifier of sexually charged representation in the twentieth century.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8503492
Hanan Elsayed
This essay focuses on Kamel Daoud’s “response” to Albert Camus’s L’Étranger by highlighting the differences in and implications of their writing styles and narrative voices. Daoud’s narrative refigures the concept of the absurd and his linkage of Camus’s silences to the colonial condition. However, the colonial legacy continues to pervade Daoud’s own narrative particularly in his portrayal of contemporary Algeria and Islam. There are unresolved contradictions in the fabric of Daoud’s text as well as a silence that emerges from a hyperbolic bavardage.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8503484
Zakir Paul
Widely considered the first French-language photo narrative, the use of images in Bruges-la-Morte (1892) tends to occlude as much as it reveals. Drawing on archives and contemporary debates about the image, this article contends that photography structures the novel on a formal level by reinforcing its poetics of analogy, a project that connects Georges Rodenbach’s oeuvre to the larger symbolist movement from Baudelaire to Mallarmé. Rodenbach’s novel attempts to invent a tradition of symbolist prose, which provocatively locates a shared likeness in otherwise dissimilar literary and pictorial practices. The aura of Bruges is used to explore the nature and limits of analogy—a term shared by symbolism and photography—leading to a critique of forms of identification that conflate difference with similitude.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8007936
M. Desmond, N. Guynn
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8007950
J. Gilbert
This essay focuses on two of the modes of existence posited by AIME, a collaborative project comprising Bruno Latour’s monograph An Inquiry into Modes of Existence and a multiauthored website associated with it. I juxtapose the modes of reference [REF] and fiction [FIC] with a famous digression reflecting on historiographical practice in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum. AIME offers analytical rigor to medievalists’ discussions of the notorious overlap between “history” and “fiction.” William’s bold use of [FIC] to advance [REF] is in the spirit of AIME’s project, though he goes further in trusting [FIC] than AIME is always willing to do. An instance of medieval historiography thus leads the way in overcoming a residual Modern suspicion of a nonreferential mode of existence and of knowledge. Additionally, although AIME’s restriction of crossings to two modes is useful for defining each, in practice more than two are often found “plaited.” I make this argument through a discussion of the use of brackets to mark verse form and rhyme scheme in medieval manuscripts: an example of [TEC•FIC•REF] plaiting. Finally, I call for further development of the multimodal possibilities of “form,” which AIME flags but does not pursue, and for a new mode of existence to be added to Latour’s list: [FOR].
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8007943
M. Griffin
This essay focuses on the recurrent metaphor of a painstaking journey in Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence and the ways in which it can be deployed as a reading of the world. I use this metaphor to scrutinize the transmission, in manuscript Chantilly, Musée Condé 653, of Antoine de la Sale’s Le Paradis de la Reine Sibylle, a fifteenth-century account of travel to, and myths associated with, the Monte della Sibilla in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. From a Latourian perspective, Chantilly 653 attests to the agency of a mountainous landscape and the myths that inhabit it, as well as to the ways in which myths solicit representation in material form. In this instance, material form is a medieval manuscript, one that can be read, through a Latourian lens, as a set of category crossings that bring together points in space and time. Those points are not organized as historical periods but rather as modes of understanding the world.
本文着重于布鲁诺·拉图尔的《生存模式探究》中反复出现的一段艰苦旅程的隐喻，以及它作为世界阅读的方式。我用这个比喻来仔细研究Antoine de la Sale的《莱因西比尔的天堂》（Le Paradis de la Reine Sibylle）在手稿《尚蒂利》（Chantilly，Musée Condé653）中的传播，这本书讲述了15世纪意大利亚平宁山脉的西比尔山之旅以及与之相关的神话。从拉图里人的角度来看，Chantilly 653证明了山区景观和居住在其中的神话的作用，以及神话以物质形式寻求表现的方式。在这种情况下，物质形式是中世纪的手稿，可以通过拉图里的镜头阅读，作为一组将空间和时间点结合在一起的类别交叉。这些观点不是作为历史时期来组织的，而是作为理解世界的模式来组织的。
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8007964
Mary Franklin-Brown
Through a study of early French romances, especially the Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre, this essay offers a new approach to the automaton in medieval literature. Bruno Latour’s plural ontology, which elaborates on the earlier work of Gilbert Simondon and Étienne Souriau, provides a way to break down the division between the human mind and the world (and hence the mind and the machine), offering a rich understanding of the way in which the beings of technology [TEC], fiction [FIC], and religion [REL] act in concert upon us to inspire our desire for technological fictions.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8007999
N. Guynn
This essay deploys Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence and Bert States’s Great Reckonings in Little Rooms to analyze the pyrotechnics used in mystery plays to symbolize supernatural truths. On the one hand, these effects cultivated aesthetic immersion, allowing audiences to perceive stage illusions as real. On the other hand, they drew attention to their own artfulness, inviting spectators to marvel at human achievement and contemplate the possibility of misfire. This paradox encapsulates the theological ambiguities of medieval religious theater, which asked spectators to suspend disbelief in the name of conversion even as they maintained skepticism about sacred simulacra. Latour’s metaphysics allows us to see how mystery plays deployed multiple modes of existence, each of which mediated the others but could not reduce or explain them. States’s theater phenomenology shows us how mystery plays used self-given realities like flame to shuttle between human and nonhuman standpoints. If Latour rejects phenomenology for its refusal to consider the agency of the nonhuman, States’s focus on reality as resistance offers an implicit retort. I propose a rapprochement by showing that theater phenomenologists and medieval effects masters are both willing to embrace the ontological work of nonhuman actants.
{"title":"Binocular Vision","authors":"N. Guynn","doi":"10.1215/00358118-8007999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-8007999","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay deploys Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence and Bert States’s Great Reckonings in Little Rooms to analyze the pyrotechnics used in mystery plays to symbolize supernatural truths. On the one hand, these effects cultivated aesthetic immersion, allowing audiences to perceive stage illusions as real. On the other hand, they drew attention to their own artfulness, inviting spectators to marvel at human achievement and contemplate the possibility of misfire. This paradox encapsulates the theological ambiguities of medieval religious theater, which asked spectators to suspend disbelief in the name of conversion even as they maintained skepticism about sacred simulacra. Latour’s metaphysics allows us to see how mystery plays deployed multiple modes of existence, each of which mediated the others but could not reduce or explain them. States’s theater phenomenology shows us how mystery plays used self-given realities like flame to shuttle between human and nonhuman standpoints. If Latour rejects phenomenology for its refusal to consider the agency of the nonhuman, States’s focus on reality as resistance offers an implicit retort. I propose a rapprochement by showing that theater phenomenologists and medieval effects masters are both willing to embrace the ontological work of nonhuman actants.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"76 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85309566","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 : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8007971
M. Desmond
Among the twelve modes he describes in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour identifies two—the “beings of technology” [TEC] and the “beings of fiction” [FIC]—that aptly depict the nonhuman agency inherent in the production and circulation of the premodern book. This essay offers a survey of the pan-European textual traditions on the matter of Troy as a case study in the history of the book, with the manuscript codex conceived as a crossing between [TEC] and [FIC]. I show that the affordances and ecologies of the codex as a “being of technology” lent it a vitality that allowed the fictional beings of Troy to proliferate in the Middle Ages. I conclude with an examination of the medieval topos of the “book of nature,” which offers a compelling example of the spirituality of technology.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-8007957
C. Keen
This essay uses Bruno Latour’s model of diplomacy from An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (AIME), alongside the networks/worknets of actor-network theory, to discuss how the medieval Italian writers Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri explore experiences of political exile in their vernacular writings. It examines how the two authors reflect on the pluralities of language and community that connect them to readerships both at home and in exile, focusing especially on Brunetto’s Rettorica and Dante’s Convivio. The essay investigates Brunetto’s rhetorical doctrine and Dante’s models of vernacular knowledge sharing by drawing on AIME’s notion of the diplomat, whose measured speech helps “renegotiate the new frontiers of self and other.” It is especially concerned with the modes of engagement Latour labels as the beings of politics [POL], law [LAW], and fiction [FIC].
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