Abstract:This essay takes Thoreau's frustrations with the impossibility of perceiving the injustice of slavery as an invitation to discern within his larger corpus a distinct body of work that we can call Thoreau's antislavery writing. Beyond the mere topic of antislavery, I argue in this essay that Thoreau's antislavery writing is defined by a spatial politics that intersects with the politics of emotion: I argue that Thoreau is deeply invested in how the issue of slavery is consistently displaced spatially and emotionally. Through careful close readings of a number of shorter entries from Thoreau's Journal and his major antislavery essays—including "Resistance to Civil Government," "Slavery in Massachusetts," "A Plea for Captain John Brown," and "The Last Days of John Brown"—I show how Thoreau returns throughout his career to a recurring set of images and rhetorical tropes to help conceptualize the immediate importance of abolition, even to those who think themselves too far removed from slavery to do anything about it, or to care. In his writing, Thoreau wants to know why slavery and the abolitionist cause engender such an apathetic response, and why, similarly, slavery appears to be such a distant issue. As I show, the emotional and spatial distance from the issue of slavery that Thoreau notes in his neighbors results from how economics compartmentalizes the political sphere. Political economy and the language of economics make the most pressing political issues always seem remote and insignificant. Thoreau is interested in how political conviction and action can become disjointed: just because you know something is wrong does not mean you are going to do anything about it. This essay, then, starts from a place of frustration. It tracks Thoreau's frustrations, and it pairs those frustrations with a shared set of politically coded images and rhetorical tropes to consider Thoreau not just as an antislavery speaker and figure, but also as a literary writer whose most complex thinking reveals itself to us when we treat him and his writing as such.
{"title":"Apathy, Political Emotion, and the Politics of Space in Thoreau's Antislavery Writing","authors":"A. Moskowitz","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay takes Thoreau's frustrations with the impossibility of perceiving the injustice of slavery as an invitation to discern within his larger corpus a distinct body of work that we can call Thoreau's antislavery writing. Beyond the mere topic of antislavery, I argue in this essay that Thoreau's antislavery writing is defined by a spatial politics that intersects with the politics of emotion: I argue that Thoreau is deeply invested in how the issue of slavery is consistently displaced spatially and emotionally. Through careful close readings of a number of shorter entries from Thoreau's Journal and his major antislavery essays—including \"Resistance to Civil Government,\" \"Slavery in Massachusetts,\" \"A Plea for Captain John Brown,\" and \"The Last Days of John Brown\"—I show how Thoreau returns throughout his career to a recurring set of images and rhetorical tropes to help conceptualize the immediate importance of abolition, even to those who think themselves too far removed from slavery to do anything about it, or to care. In his writing, Thoreau wants to know why slavery and the abolitionist cause engender such an apathetic response, and why, similarly, slavery appears to be such a distant issue. As I show, the emotional and spatial distance from the issue of slavery that Thoreau notes in his neighbors results from how economics compartmentalizes the political sphere. Political economy and the language of economics make the most pressing political issues always seem remote and insignificant. Thoreau is interested in how political conviction and action can become disjointed: just because you know something is wrong does not mean you are going to do anything about it. This essay, then, starts from a place of frustration. It tracks Thoreau's frustrations, and it pairs those frustrations with a shared set of politically coded images and rhetorical tropes to consider Thoreau not just as an antislavery speaker and figure, but also as a literary writer whose most complex thinking reveals itself to us when we treat him and his writing as such.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"1 1","pages":"139 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88792081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Critical phenomenologies of space and sensation often represent them as forms of popular liberation because they draw from the modernist theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. However, a historical phenomenology of movement through space in two early modern period's walking texts—as rhetorical ecologies—reveal public spaces and their sensations as controversial and uncanny landscapes bound by historical and cultural practice. This analysis employs John Stow's 1598 Survey of London and the recently discovered 1618 "Foot Voyage" of Ben Jonson from London to Edinburgh as case studies for phenomenal experiences of space in Renaissance cultural history.
{"title":"Moving in the Renaissance: The Rhetorical Ecologies of John Stow's Survey of London and Ben Jonson's \"Foot Voyage\"","authors":"P. Reid","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Critical phenomenologies of space and sensation often represent them as forms of popular liberation because they draw from the modernist theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. However, a historical phenomenology of movement through space in two early modern period's walking texts—as rhetorical ecologies—reveal public spaces and their sensations as controversial and uncanny landscapes bound by historical and cultural practice. This analysis employs John Stow's 1598 Survey of London and the recently discovered 1618 \"Foot Voyage\" of Ben Jonson from London to Edinburgh as case studies for phenomenal experiences of space in Renaissance cultural history.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"237 1","pages":"115 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77350120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer Theory in the Bardo","authors":"H. Lukes","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"3 1","pages":"103 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89708972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Hortense Spillers's famous essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" (1987) cathects black masculinity to death, both social and biological, and simultaneously to femininity, the latter articulation enacting the maternal influence—the female "handing"—so central to the rearing of black men. This convergence of morbidity and femininity at the site of black masculinity, I argue—especially given the essay's publication date—necessarily evokes the HIV/AIDS epidemic, whose literalization of that convergence had by the late 1980s become culturally salient. Most counterintuitively and provocatively, however, Spillers's circuit of signification invests the epidemic with reparative and generative gravity, installing it as an objective correlative of the baroque vibrancy of black expressive culture under conditions of social death. HIV/AIDS here condenses a black cultural idiom anchored in environmental exposure, vulnerability, and risk—a political–ecological openness that is always a gamble with death.The present essay excavates this logic from Spillers's slippery essay and proceeds to trace it through the more thoroughgoing emergences in Sapphire's avant-gardist novel Push and in the poetry of Gary Fisher. Finally, it leverages this literary discourse into a reflection on the queer–ecological predicates animating the putatively ontological problematic of Afropessimism.
{"title":"The Fateful Gamble: Autoimmunity and the Mattering of Black Life","authors":"T. Alexander","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Hortense Spillers's famous essay \"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe\" (1987) cathects black masculinity to death, both social and biological, and simultaneously to femininity, the latter articulation enacting the maternal influence—the female \"handing\"—so central to the rearing of black men. This convergence of morbidity and femininity at the site of black masculinity, I argue—especially given the essay's publication date—necessarily evokes the HIV/AIDS epidemic, whose literalization of that convergence had by the late 1980s become culturally salient. Most counterintuitively and provocatively, however, Spillers's circuit of signification invests the epidemic with reparative and generative gravity, installing it as an objective correlative of the baroque vibrancy of black expressive culture under conditions of social death. HIV/AIDS here condenses a black cultural idiom anchored in environmental exposure, vulnerability, and risk—a political–ecological openness that is always a gamble with death.The present essay excavates this logic from Spillers's slippery essay and proceeds to trace it through the more thoroughgoing emergences in Sapphire's avant-gardist novel Push and in the poetry of Gary Fisher. Finally, it leverages this literary discourse into a reflection on the queer–ecological predicates animating the putatively ontological problematic of Afropessimism.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"64 1","pages":"1 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78551244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article explores John Steinbeck's Vietnam War journalism as a way of understanding how hawks—those who favor military intervention—read the world with what affect theorists would call a "strong theory" of aggression. I argue that hawkish reading weaponizes the rhetorical precepts of synecdoche, taking its premise that a part can represent a whole as a means to escalate and invade. Steinbeck's journalism demonstrates how hawkish reading occurs not only in a hawk's depiction of the enemy abroad, but inevitably becomes a way of depicting protestors at home. What hawkish reading shows is how the hawk is dedicated to maintaining his strong theory of aggression at any cost, even when the hawk's depictions perpetuate cliché, stereotype, and ultimately, demagoguery. To explore texts like Steinbeck's for their hawkish reading is to better understand not only how the hawk uses facile language to create intense attachments, but also to better understand how the hawk's language creates dissensus at home.
{"title":"Hawkish Reading: John Steinbeck and the Vietnam War","authors":"Douglas Dowland","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores John Steinbeck's Vietnam War journalism as a way of understanding how hawks—those who favor military intervention—read the world with what affect theorists would call a \"strong theory\" of aggression. I argue that hawkish reading weaponizes the rhetorical precepts of synecdoche, taking its premise that a part can represent a whole as a means to escalate and invade. Steinbeck's journalism demonstrates how hawkish reading occurs not only in a hawk's depiction of the enemy abroad, but inevitably becomes a way of depicting protestors at home. What hawkish reading shows is how the hawk is dedicated to maintaining his strong theory of aggression at any cost, even when the hawk's depictions perpetuate cliché, stereotype, and ultimately, demagoguery. To explore texts like Steinbeck's for their hawkish reading is to better understand not only how the hawk uses facile language to create intense attachments, but also to better understand how the hawk's language creates dissensus at home.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"1 1","pages":"77 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91236030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Tracking similarities between film and money, specifically focusing on connections between the financial economy and the films of Charlie Chaplin, this essay examines the dynamics between the movement of the Tramp and the movements of financial markets. It explores the power of lifeless money to activate and command people, driving them to labor, starvation, and even death, yet also providing them a gold rush of stimulation. What does the power of money and what Deleuze calls its obverse, film, mean for democratic politics, especially in terms of the challenges that it presents to conceptions of political action centered on human sovereignty? Cinematic conceptions—such as movement, emotion, and time—help us think of monetary activity in a new light, as an activity shared between organic and inorganic objects. Moreover, thinking becomes less about isolating objects and more about categories that cannot be nailed down as singularities, like movement or time—realities that escape our ability to conceptualize them as objects. Money is a rush—of emotion and time—and we should begin to use it that way.
{"title":"Gold Rush: Money-Image in Deleuze and Chaplin","authors":"Charles Miller","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Tracking similarities between film and money, specifically focusing on connections between the financial economy and the films of Charlie Chaplin, this essay examines the dynamics between the movement of the Tramp and the movements of financial markets. It explores the power of lifeless money to activate and command people, driving them to labor, starvation, and even death, yet also providing them a gold rush of stimulation. What does the power of money and what Deleuze calls its obverse, film, mean for democratic politics, especially in terms of the challenges that it presents to conceptions of political action centered on human sovereignty? Cinematic conceptions—such as movement, emotion, and time—help us think of monetary activity in a new light, as an activity shared between organic and inorganic objects. Moreover, thinking becomes less about isolating objects and more about categories that cannot be nailed down as singularities, like movement or time—realities that escape our ability to conceptualize them as objects. Money is a rush—of emotion and time—and we should begin to use it that way.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"77 1","pages":"29 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80902848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:One of the more divisive critical debates that has characterized the reception of James Thomson's famous locodescriptive poem The Seasons (1726–30) has centered around the question of the poem's social vision. One strain of critical responses sees the poem indulging a solipsism that obscures the suffering of the poor in a newly commercialized Britain, whereas other responses see the poem as setting forth a vision of social harmony and a critique of social conditions. In this piece, I argue that, for Thomson, the feeling of melancholy—a mood that performs solitude, genial pensiveness, and sympathy—stages the difficulty of knowing how to sympathize with the rural poor or how to protest the social conditions that lead to poverty, and aestheticizes social life so as better to understand it. To abstract social conditions under the aegis of a stylized melancholy is to run the risk of mischaracterizing or even evading those conditions. Crucially, though, for Thomson, melancholic feeling is not in itself the solution to social problems, but is important because of its staging of the difficulties of critical responses to those problems. The lesson of Thomson's melancholy is that solutions to social problems do not always emerge straightforwardly, but instead in awkward fits and starts. In this way, I argue, the potentially inoperative nature of the critical positions put forth by the melancholic mood may also be the very sign of their force.
{"title":"Melancholy's Ends: Thomson's Reveries","authors":"Jonathan C. Williams","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:One of the more divisive critical debates that has characterized the reception of James Thomson's famous locodescriptive poem The Seasons (1726–30) has centered around the question of the poem's social vision. One strain of critical responses sees the poem indulging a solipsism that obscures the suffering of the poor in a newly commercialized Britain, whereas other responses see the poem as setting forth a vision of social harmony and a critique of social conditions. In this piece, I argue that, for Thomson, the feeling of melancholy—a mood that performs solitude, genial pensiveness, and sympathy—stages the difficulty of knowing how to sympathize with the rural poor or how to protest the social conditions that lead to poverty, and aestheticizes social life so as better to understand it. To abstract social conditions under the aegis of a stylized melancholy is to run the risk of mischaracterizing or even evading those conditions. Crucially, though, for Thomson, melancholic feeling is not in itself the solution to social problems, but is important because of its staging of the difficulties of critical responses to those problems. The lesson of Thomson's melancholy is that solutions to social problems do not always emerge straightforwardly, but instead in awkward fits and starts. In this way, I argue, the potentially inoperative nature of the critical positions put forth by the melancholic mood may also be the very sign of their force.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"46 6 1","pages":"53 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76222341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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