Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9277216
K. Hurley
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9277227
A. Lowenstein
Abstract:This essay analyzes how George A. Romero, in his underrated psychological vampire film Martin, translates individual trauma (slow, process-based, unrecognized) into collective trauma (sudden, event-based, recognized) through a vocabulary of horror. The language of trauma spoken by Martin is not the one we expect from the horror film, with its traditional investments in fantastic spectacle. Instead, it is a language that combines horror’s fantastic vocabulary and documentary’s realist vocabulary in ways that undermine our attempts to distinguish between the two modes. Romero’s vision urges us to see catastrophe where we are accustomed to seeing only the mundane, and collective trauma where we routinely see only individual trauma. In Martin’s version of horror, the economic decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, is paired with trauma connected to the Vietnam War and immigration. The film moves between these coordinates to revisualize the distinctions that divide the fantastic from the real as well as the individual from the collective.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9277293
J. Dudley
While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.
{"title":"Ecology without Civilization","authors":"J. Dudley","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9277293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9277293","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66810719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9277304
S. Lindsay
The online community of vaporwave music is a cultural development that emerged in the 2010s and therefore fully within the ideological sphere of postindustrialism. Consisting of slowed-down samples from pop songs and advertising jingles from the 1980s and 1990s stitched together with original synthesizer pieces that resemble those used in horror-film scores, vaporwave is an undead, artificial soundscape that floats somewhere between music and sound. Its fake nostalgia for an alternative yet ossified past aims to confront our contemporary social paralysis in the face of postmillennial economic failure and political crisis. This article examines gothic elements of the vaporwave music phenomenon to analyze how vaporwave expresses sociopolitical traumas of late capitalism. Derridean notions of hauntology articulate the individual’s self-isolation and objectification under the neoliberal homogenization of culture in vaporwave artist Begotten’s contributions to the hushwave subgenre of the scene (2018–19). Vaporwave’s cyclical and uncanny sounds embody the spectral haunting of Marx in capitalism’s repetitive pronunciation of victory over its vanquished, communist foe in Sunsetcorp’s 2009 single “nobody here” and the manifestations of American political trauma after 9/11 in Cat System Corporation’s signalwave album, News at 11 (2016).
蒸汽波音乐的在线社区是2010年代出现的一种文化发展，因此完全处于后工业主义的意识形态范围内。vaporwave是一种不死的人造声景，漂浮在音乐和声音之间。它对另一种但僵化的过去的虚假怀念，旨在对抗我们在后千禧年经济失败和政治危机面前的当代社会瘫痪。本文考察了蒸汽波音乐现象中的哥特式元素，以分析蒸汽波是如何表达晚期资本主义的社会政治创伤的。在蒸汽波艺术家贝戈滕对场景的无声波亚类型的贡献（2018-19）中，德里德式的闹鬼学概念阐明了在文化的新自由主义同质化下个体的自我孤立和物化。Vaporwave的周期性和神秘的声音体现了马克思在Sunsetcorp 2009年单曲《这里没有人》中对资本主义战胜其被击败的共产主义敌人的重复发音中的光谱萦绕，以及Cat System Corporation的信号波专辑《News at 11》（2016）中对9/11后美国政治创伤的表现。
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9277249
Nandini Ramesh Sankar, V. Alexander
This article examines Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a gothic novel that augments its postmodernist credentials by preemptively imagining and representing the theoretical gaze that would otherwise have been directed on itself. The article suggests that despite the novel’s intense performance of self-reflexivity, it demonstrates a traumatic suppression of its own immediate historical conditions, particularly its temporal proximity to the events of the First Gulf War. This article thus reads the text’s telling silences and its thematization of uncanny spatial violations as indexing a minimally acknowledged guilt over the war in Iraq. The novel’s slippages in self-awareness not only point to an avoidance of its own scotomized history but also foreground the shifting boundaries and dispersed locations of textual self-consciousness.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9277348
Bryan Wagner
I t has been often noted that the history of Black American activism from slavery to the present has been catalyzed by developments in communications technology. This has been especially true in moments of crisis when activists and intellectuals havemoved quickly to take advantage of sudden shifts in themedia environment to convey their message and organize themselves. The posters and pamphlets that detonated the British movement against the transatlantic slave trade were signal expressions of late eighteenth-century culture made possible by a new kind of printing plate produced from plaster molds. Likewise the abolitionist movement in the United States was amplified in mass-produced pamphlets and newspapers made possible by cheaper costs of steam-powered printing. The civil rights movement in the United States was expanded and strengthened by unprecedented andwidely circulated photographic evidence of atrocities committed against Black Americans, including images of Emmett Till’s corpse published in Jet magazine and news broadcasts of protestors and bystanders attacked with police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1991 the LA police roadside beating of Rodney King was filmedby GeorgeHolliday on a SonyHandycam, creating what many have called thefirst viral video, which set off an insurrection that remains a vital precedent for current activism against police brutality. The articles surveyed in this note take this story up to our present, considering how contemporary movements take advantage of the affordances of media and social network technologies to organize and advance their work. These movements have produced new kinds of political documentation, which are leading to new archives and new styles of analysis. Obviously there is nothing at all about these social movements that is reducible to the mediums through which they have been documented and expressed. These essays propose, however, the need to take into account how the success of these movements has been enabled in part by their ready adaptation not only to new platforms (such as Twitter and Instagram) but also to new styles of communication (such as hashtags and memes). In their wide-ranging essay “#StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Elaine Richardson and Alice Ragland show that the “rhetorical practices” and “cultural literacies” of
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9277271
C. Belling
The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain some paradoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are the ethical implications of horror elicited by fictional representations of historical suffering? This article engages these questions through the reading of Mo Hayder’s 2004 novel The Devil of Nanking. Hayder exploits horror’s appeal and also—by foregrounding the acts of representation, reading, and spectatorship that generate this response—opens that process to critique. The novel may productively be understood as a work of posttraumatic fiction, both containing and exposing the concentric layers of our representational engagement with records of past atrocity. Through such a reading, a spherical rather than linear topology emerges for history itself, a structure of haunted and embodied consumption.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9277238
Xavier Aldana Reyes
This article unpacks the cultural work that Juan Carlos Medina’s Insensibles, released in English as Painless, carries out in relation to Spain’s modern history and argues that the film’s painless children are an allegory of the country’s postdictatorship generations. The rendering of fascism as monstrous is less interesting than the connection of insensitivity to the Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) and its suppression of painful memory. The fact that the children speak Catalan is a significant overlooked aspect, because Catalonia was the last region to succumb to Nationalist military forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and is known for its independentist fervor. A regionalist reading of the film does not simply connect the present and the past; it proposes that the children of the war mediate Spain’s current troubled relationship with historical trauma and act as an artistic response to centralist ideas of a unified and stable nation-state. Such a rethinking demonstrates that the horror genre continues to offer a language of anxiety capable of negotiating and contributing to debates around the importance of national accountability, war reparations, and the condemnation of genocide.
本文剖析了胡安·卡洛斯·梅迪纳的电影《无痛的无感》(Insensibles)与西班牙现代史的关系，并认为电影中无痛的孩子们是西班牙后独裁时代的寓言。将法西斯主义描绘成可怕的东西，不如将其与《遗忘之约》(Pacto del Olvido)及其对痛苦记忆的压制联系起来那么有趣。孩子们说加泰罗尼亚语的事实是一个被忽视的重要方面，因为加泰罗尼亚是西班牙内战(1936-39)期间最后一个屈服于民族主义军事力量的地区，并以其独立主义热情而闻名。地域主义解读这部电影并不仅仅是连接现在和过去;它提出，战争的孩子们调解了西班牙目前与历史创伤的麻烦关系，并作为对统一和稳定的民族国家的中央集权思想的艺术回应。这种重新思考表明，恐怖类型继续提供一种焦虑的语言，能够就国家问责制、战争赔偿和谴责种族灭绝的重要性进行谈判和促进辩论。
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