The experience of railway travel "is necessary for the birth... of unknown landscapes and the strange fables of our private stories."-Michel de CerteauBeginning with its epigraph, Anita Nair's Ladies Coupe is a novel about female identity and female space: "Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn. But we fight for our rights, we will not let anybody take our breath away from us, and we resist all attempts to prevent us from using our wills." This invocation from Rebecca West, in a passage which also recalls Woolfs A Room of One's Own, evokes the demand for an opening, for the creation of both literal and figurai spaces for women within a patriarchal system that has long confined them. It recalls those women persecuted for existing outside of marriage and rejecting motherhood, embraces those women who exist in marginal or potentially dangerous spaces, and exhorts all women to set and pursue their own agendas and to seize the right to live a life of their own choosing. The novel that follows under this banner is similarly about awakenings, about navigating the spaces of and between "in" and "out," about transformative change and self-discovery, and, also, about existing limitations.Space, far from natural or neutral, is deeply ideological, and the division of space into public and private realms is a gendered phenomenon. Since the 1960s, historians have used the concept of separate spheres to interpret the lives of women (Richter 6). Some scholars have defined the public/private divide as an oppressive set of cultural norms that confine women to the home and limit their destinies (Malcolm 255). While men are afforded the freedom of public affairs, women are marginalized, confined to domesticity, to an ideology of oppression that is experienced both as a spatial limitation and, in limiting the roles open to women, a way of denying them autonomy and self-fulfillment. Other scholars have interpreted the private sphere in a more positive light, viewing it as a woman's domain, a nurturing alternative to the public world of men, and a catalyst for gender consciousness and the emergence of feminism (Richter 6). And yet, public spaces remain spaces of power governed largely by patriarchal structures and institutions, in which women have very little visibility and influence (Malcolm 256).However, this public/private binary overlooks, as Doreen Massey has argued, a third important area of space: the transitional space. As obscured zones, transitional spaces deserve more attention: neither fully public nor fully private, they break a binary structure which, much like patriarchy, can be experienced as overly confining and determining. If, within this tenuous, as-yet-unformed model of space, "dwellers produce their own mutable spaces" (Malcolm 256), it may well be within these transitional spaces that women can enact change, transformation, an
{"title":"\"Into a Horizon I Will Not Recognize\": Female Identity and Transitional Space Aboard Nair's Ladies Coupé","authors":"C. Bausman","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1441","url":null,"abstract":"The experience of railway travel \"is necessary for the birth... of unknown landscapes and the strange fables of our private stories.\"-Michel de CerteauBeginning with its epigraph, Anita Nair's Ladies Coupe is a novel about female identity and female space: \"Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn. But we fight for our rights, we will not let anybody take our breath away from us, and we resist all attempts to prevent us from using our wills.\" This invocation from Rebecca West, in a passage which also recalls Woolfs A Room of One's Own, evokes the demand for an opening, for the creation of both literal and figurai spaces for women within a patriarchal system that has long confined them. It recalls those women persecuted for existing outside of marriage and rejecting motherhood, embraces those women who exist in marginal or potentially dangerous spaces, and exhorts all women to set and pursue their own agendas and to seize the right to live a life of their own choosing. The novel that follows under this banner is similarly about awakenings, about navigating the spaces of and between \"in\" and \"out,\" about transformative change and self-discovery, and, also, about existing limitations.Space, far from natural or neutral, is deeply ideological, and the division of space into public and private realms is a gendered phenomenon. Since the 1960s, historians have used the concept of separate spheres to interpret the lives of women (Richter 6). Some scholars have defined the public/private divide as an oppressive set of cultural norms that confine women to the home and limit their destinies (Malcolm 255). While men are afforded the freedom of public affairs, women are marginalized, confined to domesticity, to an ideology of oppression that is experienced both as a spatial limitation and, in limiting the roles open to women, a way of denying them autonomy and self-fulfillment. Other scholars have interpreted the private sphere in a more positive light, viewing it as a woman's domain, a nurturing alternative to the public world of men, and a catalyst for gender consciousness and the emergence of feminism (Richter 6). And yet, public spaces remain spaces of power governed largely by patriarchal structures and institutions, in which women have very little visibility and influence (Malcolm 256).However, this public/private binary overlooks, as Doreen Massey has argued, a third important area of space: the transitional space. As obscured zones, transitional spaces deserve more attention: neither fully public nor fully private, they break a binary structure which, much like patriarchy, can be experienced as overly confining and determining. If, within this tenuous, as-yet-unformed model of space, \"dwellers produce their own mutable spaces\" (Malcolm 256), it may well be within these transitional spaces that women can enact change, transformation, an","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"27 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120920133","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}
In 1967, artist Richard Long became famous for completing his revolutionary^ Line Made From Walking (Figure 1)-a simple black and white photograph of a straight line etched into the ground. Long's mark managed to underscore the perspectival space of the field as it receded into the distance, while it simultaneously functioned formally, akin to a Barnett Newman "zip" down the center of the canvas. This was not Long's first attempt to carve his mark onto the surface of the earth, but his earlier experimental work from 1966, Turf Circle, a large circle of grass sliced from its soil and reconstructed into a recessed position, was initially overshadowed by the sheer visual power of the line. Today, it is clear that both Turf Circle and A Line Made From Walking have become the basis for Long's life-long art practice. After decades of trekking in both straight and circular paths, the artist has progressively undertaken more ambitious walks, as is represented by a 1981 piece entitled A Line and Tracks in Bolivia: An Eleven Day Walk Crossing and Re-crossing a Lava Plain. Despite the increased scope, the premise remains the same, with Long etching a line into the land through his repeated movement back and forth over the surface of the earth. The performance of the walk, a ritual wandering, is only later documented through a photograph, marked map, or text work. Though the art object is created as a permanent remembrance of the walk, the traces are always ephemeral, sometimes drawn in the snow, or sometimes signified by upturned stones, and will disappear through the passing of time and exposure to the elements.By making his own human contact with the earth the central focus of the artistic performance, Long marks his own presence and withdrawal from the site (Boetzkes 18). Because his physical body is almost never visible in the documenting photograph, the line alone reveals the artist's existence in the landscape but simultaneously announces his absence from the scene. This seemingly paradoxical insight extends the concept of passage beyond Long's traceable movements from point A to B, with each coming and going gesturing toward the existential. In a 1982 artist's statement, Words After the Fact, published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the Amolfini Art Gallery in Bristol, Long announced to the world: "My work has become a simple metaphor of life." With this highly charged statement, the artist offered up his oeuvre for thoughtful reflection; his artworks are not to be appreciated exclusively on an aesthetic level, but rather with a certain ontological attention.It is significant that Long's artistic breakthrough came during his time at St. Martin's College (1966-1968) as a student in the recently developed Advanced Course. This unique program offered a rather unconventional approach to traditional artistic techniques, and former instructor Peter Atkins recalled of his own curriculum that it was specifically engineered to expose young artists t
1967年，艺术家理查德·朗因完成了他革命性的作品《行走的线》(图1)而成名——这是一张简单的黑白照片，画的是一条蚀刻在地面上的直线。朗的标记成功地强调了场地的透视空间，因为它向远处退去，同时它也在形式上发挥作用，类似于巴内特·纽曼在画布中心的“拉链”。这并不是朗第一次尝试在地球表面刻下他的印记，但他早在1966年的实验作品《草皮圈》(Turf Circle)——一个从土壤上切下的草圈，重建成一个凹陷的位置——最初被线条的纯粹视觉力量所掩盖。时至今日，《草皮圈》和《行走的线》都已成为龙先生一生艺术实践的基础。在经历了几十年的直线和圆形徒步旅行之后，这位艺术家逐渐开始了更加雄心勃勃的徒步旅行，正如1981年的作品《玻利维亚的一条线和轨迹:穿越和重新穿越熔岩平原的11天徒步》所代表的那样。尽管范围扩大了，但前提仍然是一样的，朗通过在地球表面上来回的反复运动，在陆地上蚀刻了一条线。散步的表演，一种仪式性的漫游，只是后来通过照片、标记地图或文字作品记录下来。虽然艺术品的创作是为了永久地纪念步行，但这些痕迹总是短暂的，有时画在雪地里，有时用倒立的石头来表示，随着时间的流逝和暴露在自然环境中，这些痕迹会消失。通过将他自己与大地的接触作为艺术表演的中心焦点，朗标志着他自己的存在和退出现场(Boetzkes 18)。因为他的身体在记录照片中几乎从未出现过，这条线本身就揭示了艺术家在风景中的存在，但同时也宣告了他在场景中的缺席。这种看似矛盾的洞察力将通道的概念延伸到了朗从A点到B点的可追溯运动之外，每一次的来去都指向了存在主义。1982年，朗在布里斯托尔的阿莫菲尼美术馆(Amolfini Art Gallery)举办个展时发表了一篇艺术家声明《事实之后的话语》(Words After the Fact)，向世界宣布:“我的作品已经成为对生活的简单隐喻。”这位艺术家带着这种高度紧张的声明，拿出他的全部作品进行深思熟虑;他的作品不应该只在审美层面上欣赏，而是要有一定的本体论的关注。值得注意的是，朗在圣马丁学院(1966-1968)学习高级课程期间取得了艺术上的突破。这个独特的项目为传统艺术技巧提供了一种相当非传统的方法，前讲师彼得·阿特金斯回忆起他自己的课程，这是专门设计的，让年轻艺术家接触到更大的“哲学、心理和社会背景”(《天堂与地球》38)。在与当代策展人克拉丽·沃利斯的谈话中，他深情地回忆起自己花了很多时间仔细研读伯特兰·罗素1945年的《西方哲学史》(1938)。我们有理由推测，鉴于他对道路制造和哲学的浓厚兴趣，朗可能对马丁·海德格尔(Martin Heidegger)的教导特别感兴趣。海德格尔是一位20世纪的德国哲学家，他至少写了两本专门讨论道路的著作:《道路》(Der Feldweg)和《霍尔茨韦格》(Holzwege)，直译为“树木繁茂的小路”，但在英语中被称为“人迹寥寥的小路”。海德格尔将自己置于伟大思想家——黑格尔、康德、卢梭——的长期轨迹之中，他们认识到步行的简单行为是一种调解形式(Roelstraete 11)，并进一步断言“这条路与思想家的脚步一样接近，就像农民在清晨走出去割草一样”(the pathway 33)。…
{"title":"Richard Long’s Passage as Line: Measuring Toward the Horizon","authors":"Antonia Dapena-Tretter","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1443","url":null,"abstract":"In 1967, artist Richard Long became famous for completing his revolutionary^ Line Made From Walking (Figure 1)-a simple black and white photograph of a straight line etched into the ground. Long's mark managed to underscore the perspectival space of the field as it receded into the distance, while it simultaneously functioned formally, akin to a Barnett Newman \"zip\" down the center of the canvas. This was not Long's first attempt to carve his mark onto the surface of the earth, but his earlier experimental work from 1966, Turf Circle, a large circle of grass sliced from its soil and reconstructed into a recessed position, was initially overshadowed by the sheer visual power of the line. Today, it is clear that both Turf Circle and A Line Made From Walking have become the basis for Long's life-long art practice. After decades of trekking in both straight and circular paths, the artist has progressively undertaken more ambitious walks, as is represented by a 1981 piece entitled A Line and Tracks in Bolivia: An Eleven Day Walk Crossing and Re-crossing a Lava Plain. Despite the increased scope, the premise remains the same, with Long etching a line into the land through his repeated movement back and forth over the surface of the earth. The performance of the walk, a ritual wandering, is only later documented through a photograph, marked map, or text work. Though the art object is created as a permanent remembrance of the walk, the traces are always ephemeral, sometimes drawn in the snow, or sometimes signified by upturned stones, and will disappear through the passing of time and exposure to the elements.By making his own human contact with the earth the central focus of the artistic performance, Long marks his own presence and withdrawal from the site (Boetzkes 18). Because his physical body is almost never visible in the documenting photograph, the line alone reveals the artist's existence in the landscape but simultaneously announces his absence from the scene. This seemingly paradoxical insight extends the concept of passage beyond Long's traceable movements from point A to B, with each coming and going gesturing toward the existential. In a 1982 artist's statement, Words After the Fact, published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the Amolfini Art Gallery in Bristol, Long announced to the world: \"My work has become a simple metaphor of life.\" With this highly charged statement, the artist offered up his oeuvre for thoughtful reflection; his artworks are not to be appreciated exclusively on an aesthetic level, but rather with a certain ontological attention.It is significant that Long's artistic breakthrough came during his time at St. Martin's College (1966-1968) as a student in the recently developed Advanced Course. This unique program offered a rather unconventional approach to traditional artistic techniques, and former instructor Peter Atkins recalled of his own curriculum that it was specifically engineered to expose young artists t","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132302500","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}
I: The possibilities of SPACE in Dickinson's "Four Trees"We must be careful when speaking about SPACE as it often leads to empty thoughts. Although we are surrounded by spaces and cannot experience our environments without presupposing space, its omnipresence (both physical and conceptual) makes it difficult to grasp. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that definitions of space frequently rely on cognate concepts-time and place-that confuse rather than clarify what the term "space" might mean. Space is vast and requires that we experience it through boundaries. We learn space through mediated encounters.More significantly, spaces intentionally altered for cultural reasons, whether to promote specific forms of community or to engender a particular individual experience, introduce more variables to consider before articulating what that space can mean-both for itself, and for an expanded awareness of the value of thinking critically about spaces. Space, in other words, is not neutral: the spaces that we inhabit or frequent tend to influence our actions and values. Our preunderstandings of certain spaces-remaining reverent within a space considered "sacred" by a community, accepting joyful frolics in spaces set aside for frivolity and laughter, respecting silence in spaces of thought-allow us to navigate our worlds with diminished impatience and frustration. We understand, more or less, what we can expect from the spaces where we place ourselves and spending time within these spaces attunes us to their nuances: we learn more of what to expect and how we should behave as we spend more time within them.Emily Dickinson's Fr778, a poem that Christopher Benfey describes as "one of Dickinson's fullest and happiest expressions of the relation between nature and the human knower" (113), provides an example of a textual space that plays upon ways that our perception simultaneously reveals and conceals (in time) the multiple potentialities for a true experience of a given environmental expanse. She writes:Four Trees - upon a solitary AcreWithout DesignOr Order, or Apparent Action -Maintain -The Sun - upon a Morning meets them -The Wind -No nearer Neighbor - have they -But God -The Acre gives them - Place-They - Him - Attention of Passer by -Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply -Or Boy -What Deed is Their's unto the General Nature-What PlanThey severally - retard - or further -Unknown -The various interpretations of Dickinson's meditation focus primarily on her language (Miller, Benfey) and the ecological implications of place (Christine Gerhardt's reading is particularly impressive). My interest in offering the poem is to show how its space juxtaposes the cultural and the natural senses of space in a particularly apt way.The space that Dickinson evokes is an "Acre," a term that itself suggests a variety of perspectives on the same space. According to the 1831 Webster's dictionary that Dickinson was fond of consulting, the term acre has many cognates in oth
{"title":"Introduction: The Reflexive Appropriation of Space","authors":"Daniel Boscaljon","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1438","url":null,"abstract":"I: The possibilities of SPACE in Dickinson's \"Four Trees\"We must be careful when speaking about SPACE as it often leads to empty thoughts. Although we are surrounded by spaces and cannot experience our environments without presupposing space, its omnipresence (both physical and conceptual) makes it difficult to grasp. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that definitions of space frequently rely on cognate concepts-time and place-that confuse rather than clarify what the term \"space\" might mean. Space is vast and requires that we experience it through boundaries. We learn space through mediated encounters.More significantly, spaces intentionally altered for cultural reasons, whether to promote specific forms of community or to engender a particular individual experience, introduce more variables to consider before articulating what that space can mean-both for itself, and for an expanded awareness of the value of thinking critically about spaces. Space, in other words, is not neutral: the spaces that we inhabit or frequent tend to influence our actions and values. Our preunderstandings of certain spaces-remaining reverent within a space considered \"sacred\" by a community, accepting joyful frolics in spaces set aside for frivolity and laughter, respecting silence in spaces of thought-allow us to navigate our worlds with diminished impatience and frustration. We understand, more or less, what we can expect from the spaces where we place ourselves and spending time within these spaces attunes us to their nuances: we learn more of what to expect and how we should behave as we spend more time within them.Emily Dickinson's Fr778, a poem that Christopher Benfey describes as \"one of Dickinson's fullest and happiest expressions of the relation between nature and the human knower\" (113), provides an example of a textual space that plays upon ways that our perception simultaneously reveals and conceals (in time) the multiple potentialities for a true experience of a given environmental expanse. She writes:Four Trees - upon a solitary AcreWithout DesignOr Order, or Apparent Action -Maintain -The Sun - upon a Morning meets them -The Wind -No nearer Neighbor - have they -But God -The Acre gives them - Place-They - Him - Attention of Passer by -Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply -Or Boy -What Deed is Their's unto the General Nature-What PlanThey severally - retard - or further -Unknown -The various interpretations of Dickinson's meditation focus primarily on her language (Miller, Benfey) and the ecological implications of place (Christine Gerhardt's reading is particularly impressive). My interest in offering the poem is to show how its space juxtaposes the cultural and the natural senses of space in a particularly apt way.The space that Dickinson evokes is an \"Acre,\" a term that itself suggests a variety of perspectives on the same space. According to the 1831 Webster's dictionary that Dickinson was fond of consulting, the term acre has many cognates in oth","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121112960","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}
Michel Foucault's concept of "heterotopia" is finding a welcome place among twenty-first century theoreticians who are concentrating increasingly on space in relation to social, cultural, and political arrangements. The widespread use of Foucault's "heterotopia" in literary and cultural theory stems from the popularity of a lecture titled "Des Espace Autres," 1 given in 1967 but not published until 1984, only a few months after his death and the same year, coincidentally, as the publication of science fiction writer William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. This essay will argue for a renewed look at "heterotopia," both in and outside of Foucault's writing, as a contextually and theoretically situated concept, using Gibson's Neuromancer as a literary backdrop for the theoretical mise-en-scene.2 As a potent theoretical tool (Foucault sometimes referred to his texts as providing "toolkits"), "heterotopia" can be deployed more productively by resituating it into Foucault's broader and continually evolving theories on space (especially in relation to social technologies/regimes of knowledge). Such a resituation is important for critical discourse today-not only in literature, but also in conversations ranging from political philosophy to digital humanities-because the theoretical investigation of space has re-entered the dialogue in force. That such theorization is receiving renewed importance can be seen in contemporary analyses of a wide array of spaces (from all eras)-for example, the city, the prison camp, the brothel, the sex club, the restaurant, the department store, the resort, etc.-as well as in concerns over the new digital or virtual "spaces" constantly emerging and bringing with them political, social, and legal questions. Many of these spaces (both of the past and present, real and virtual) may too easily be construed as special, deviant, and free, and be idealized under what I will argue is the ossified version of heterotopia as any "other" or heterogeneous "disconnected" space. Yet the "heterotopia" designated in Foucault's work is not simply an other, deviant space, but, as a real or virtual instantiation of a utopian ideal, heterotopic space carries the potential for abuse, for the violent rounding of real comers that refuse to conform to the ideal, or merely for ignoring the parts of the instantiation that do not fit. More importantly, these spaces, and the violence that accompanies them, function to maintain the network of places that constitute "normal" space.Neuromancer is an excellent vehicle for elaborating the complexity of Foucault's "heterotopology," as well as the difficulties that can emerge from attempts to deploy it theoretically. Not only was it composed and published in the same theoretical milieu (i.e. with similar concerns about space and life in a late capitalist world) in which "Different Spaces" came to prominence, but it also reflects many of the spatial arrangements that Foucault posits. Both the text itself and the c
{"title":"Reflected Spaces: “Heterotopia” and the Creation of Space in William Gibson’s Neuromancer","authors":"W. Dalton","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1440","url":null,"abstract":"Michel Foucault's concept of \"heterotopia\" is finding a welcome place among twenty-first century theoreticians who are concentrating increasingly on space in relation to social, cultural, and political arrangements. The widespread use of Foucault's \"heterotopia\" in literary and cultural theory stems from the popularity of a lecture titled \"Des Espace Autres,\" 1 given in 1967 but not published until 1984, only a few months after his death and the same year, coincidentally, as the publication of science fiction writer William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. This essay will argue for a renewed look at \"heterotopia,\" both in and outside of Foucault's writing, as a contextually and theoretically situated concept, using Gibson's Neuromancer as a literary backdrop for the theoretical mise-en-scene.2 As a potent theoretical tool (Foucault sometimes referred to his texts as providing \"toolkits\"), \"heterotopia\" can be deployed more productively by resituating it into Foucault's broader and continually evolving theories on space (especially in relation to social technologies/regimes of knowledge). Such a resituation is important for critical discourse today-not only in literature, but also in conversations ranging from political philosophy to digital humanities-because the theoretical investigation of space has re-entered the dialogue in force. That such theorization is receiving renewed importance can be seen in contemporary analyses of a wide array of spaces (from all eras)-for example, the city, the prison camp, the brothel, the sex club, the restaurant, the department store, the resort, etc.-as well as in concerns over the new digital or virtual \"spaces\" constantly emerging and bringing with them political, social, and legal questions. Many of these spaces (both of the past and present, real and virtual) may too easily be construed as special, deviant, and free, and be idealized under what I will argue is the ossified version of heterotopia as any \"other\" or heterogeneous \"disconnected\" space. Yet the \"heterotopia\" designated in Foucault's work is not simply an other, deviant space, but, as a real or virtual instantiation of a utopian ideal, heterotopic space carries the potential for abuse, for the violent rounding of real comers that refuse to conform to the ideal, or merely for ignoring the parts of the instantiation that do not fit. More importantly, these spaces, and the violence that accompanies them, function to maintain the network of places that constitute \"normal\" space.Neuromancer is an excellent vehicle for elaborating the complexity of Foucault's \"heterotopology,\" as well as the difficulties that can emerge from attempts to deploy it theoretically. Not only was it composed and published in the same theoretical milieu (i.e. with similar concerns about space and life in a late capitalist world) in which \"Different Spaces\" came to prominence, but it also reflects many of the spatial arrangements that Foucault posits. Both the text itself and the c","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123733390","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}
Some things have to be believed to be seen.-Ralph HodgsonVideo games, especially those with religious content, create something similar to sacred space. They can, like sacred spaces, provide a sense of orientation via the assumption of an ordered cosmos with predictable rules. They too can frame discrete spatial elements, and sometimes even attempt to map the rules of the circumscribed space onto reality. They focus desire by presenting us with a symbolic arena in which designers have predetermined how things should work. In those video games that intersect directly with religion via symbolism or depiction of real sacred space, the game itself also often functions as a sort of sacred space, with many of the same features and symbolic, ideological functions. If the deliberate circumscribing of space is a means by which humans map order onto reality, then looking at video games as having ritual and spatial components seems an apt means of uncovering their ideological potential.In the middle of the twentieth century, long before video games were even imagined as a mode of popular entertainment, religious theorist Mircea Eliade argued that the recognition of the "sacred" within the "profane" world is a kind of order-making activity, offering a "hierophany" that reveals "an absolute fixed point, a center" within otherwise chaotic space (21). For Eliade, "to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods" (32). The creation and maintenance of sacred space is a way of rejecting the chaos of ordinary life, of symbolically arguing instead for an ordered cosmos, represented symbolically by the ordered area of the sacred space itself set apart from the rest of life. Much more recently, media theorist Ken Hillis has expressed a similar sentiment about virtual reality's ability to induce our sense of desire, transcendence, and the ideal. Hillis notes an idealization of virtual reality, marked by "a widespread belief that space (understood variously as distance, extension, or orientation) constitutes something elemental." Virtual reality lulls us into thinking that the space behind the screen is real, since it "reflects support for a belief that because light illuminates space it may therefore produce space a priori." The illusion of space registers for us as real space. As a result, says Hillis, users of virtual reality "may experience desire or even something akin to a moral imperative to enter into virtuality where space and light ...have become one immaterial 'wherein.'" We are motivated by the desire for a "sense of entry into the image" and encouraged to view the screen and its mechanisms as a "transcendence machine" or "subjectivity enhancer," that "works to collapse distinctions between the conceptions built into virtual environments by their developers and the perceptive faculties of users" ("Modes of Digital Identification" 349). That is, the technology encourages us to see virtual reality as more "real" than reality.Brenda Brasher s
{"title":"This Is Not a Game: Violent Video Games, Sacred Space, and Ritual","authors":"Rachel Wagner","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1439","url":null,"abstract":"Some things have to be believed to be seen.-Ralph HodgsonVideo games, especially those with religious content, create something similar to sacred space. They can, like sacred spaces, provide a sense of orientation via the assumption of an ordered cosmos with predictable rules. They too can frame discrete spatial elements, and sometimes even attempt to map the rules of the circumscribed space onto reality. They focus desire by presenting us with a symbolic arena in which designers have predetermined how things should work. In those video games that intersect directly with religion via symbolism or depiction of real sacred space, the game itself also often functions as a sort of sacred space, with many of the same features and symbolic, ideological functions. If the deliberate circumscribing of space is a means by which humans map order onto reality, then looking at video games as having ritual and spatial components seems an apt means of uncovering their ideological potential.In the middle of the twentieth century, long before video games were even imagined as a mode of popular entertainment, religious theorist Mircea Eliade argued that the recognition of the \"sacred\" within the \"profane\" world is a kind of order-making activity, offering a \"hierophany\" that reveals \"an absolute fixed point, a center\" within otherwise chaotic space (21). For Eliade, \"to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods\" (32). The creation and maintenance of sacred space is a way of rejecting the chaos of ordinary life, of symbolically arguing instead for an ordered cosmos, represented symbolically by the ordered area of the sacred space itself set apart from the rest of life. Much more recently, media theorist Ken Hillis has expressed a similar sentiment about virtual reality's ability to induce our sense of desire, transcendence, and the ideal. Hillis notes an idealization of virtual reality, marked by \"a widespread belief that space (understood variously as distance, extension, or orientation) constitutes something elemental.\" Virtual reality lulls us into thinking that the space behind the screen is real, since it \"reflects support for a belief that because light illuminates space it may therefore produce space a priori.\" The illusion of space registers for us as real space. As a result, says Hillis, users of virtual reality \"may experience desire or even something akin to a moral imperative to enter into virtuality where space and light ...have become one immaterial 'wherein.'\" We are motivated by the desire for a \"sense of entry into the image\" and encouraged to view the screen and its mechanisms as a \"transcendence machine\" or \"subjectivity enhancer,\" that \"works to collapse distinctions between the conceptions built into virtual environments by their developers and the perceptive faculties of users\" (\"Modes of Digital Identification\" 349). That is, the technology encourages us to see virtual reality as more \"real\" than reality.Brenda Brasher s","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132248233","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}
In this paper I want to tell a story of discourse, space, and community-or more specifically, a story of how discourse and space can intersect with a community's efforts to construct its own identity. The community that interests me is the Polish immigrant community in Chicago, which is the center of my ethnographic research. By telling the story of how Chicago Poles have moved among urban neighborhoods and suburban areas over the last 150 years or so, and by drawing on research participants' ways of talking about the present-day spaces of metropolitan Chicago, I want to look at how these collective movements and discourses overlap with the community's shifting ideologies and aspirations. Also, by drawing on the idea of the "ethnoburb," a term geographer Wei Li uses to describe the emerging phenomenon of suburban areas where many ethnic groups live together, I aim to show how Chicago Poles' recent settlement patterns mirror larger demographic trends. But I also want to use this specific site to develop a broader theoretical understanding of the relationship between discourse and space. In short, my argument is that discourse and space are mutually productive and constitutive forces, such that our experience of space is deeply discursive and our discursive inventions are deeply embedded in spatial experience. Even more, I want to show not only how space interlinks with discourse, and implicitly ideology, but also how it actively partici- pates in discourse as a signifier. My method for developing this argument relies on a combination of theoretical insights from fields such as spatial theory, urban planning, and rhetorical studies; evidence from historical writings about both Chicago and Poland; and data from my fieldwork among Polish immigrants in and around Chicago. It is this "grounded" evidence-which emerges from nearly two years of participant observation and extensive interviews with several Chicago Poles-that provides the real foundation of my argument, because, in my view, the analysis of everyday practices and ways of talk offers an exceptionally rich method for understanding the relationship between space and discourse. In my case, these are the practices of a specific group of immigrants in a specific place, and in the second half of the paper I will examine some of the ways in which Poles' unique political and social histories have influenced their discourses. However, the processes I will explore operate among many other groups, including other immigrant groups in the U.S., and the theoretical implications are much broader.As a way into those broader claims, I want to start at the level of ethnographic observation, by offering two brief vignettes from my fieldwork that I think help encapsulate, in miniature, the larger points I am trying to develop. Both scenes involve maps-our most pervasive and stylized discourse of space-and both scenes take place in a small room in the basement of a Polish church on Chicago's northwest side. As a
{"title":"From Urban Enclave to Ethnoburb: Discourse, Space, and Community in Polish Chicago","authors":"Jason Schneider","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1442","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I want to tell a story of discourse, space, and community-or more specifically, a story of how discourse and space can intersect with a community's efforts to construct its own identity. The community that interests me is the Polish immigrant community in Chicago, which is the center of my ethnographic research. By telling the story of how Chicago Poles have moved among urban neighborhoods and suburban areas over the last 150 years or so, and by drawing on research participants' ways of talking about the present-day spaces of metropolitan Chicago, I want to look at how these collective movements and discourses overlap with the community's shifting ideologies and aspirations. Also, by drawing on the idea of the \"ethnoburb,\" a term geographer Wei Li uses to describe the emerging phenomenon of suburban areas where many ethnic groups live together, I aim to show how Chicago Poles' recent settlement patterns mirror larger demographic trends. But I also want to use this specific site to develop a broader theoretical understanding of the relationship between discourse and space. In short, my argument is that discourse and space are mutually productive and constitutive forces, such that our experience of space is deeply discursive and our discursive inventions are deeply embedded in spatial experience. Even more, I want to show not only how space interlinks with discourse, and implicitly ideology, but also how it actively partici- pates in discourse as a signifier. My method for developing this argument relies on a combination of theoretical insights from fields such as spatial theory, urban planning, and rhetorical studies; evidence from historical writings about both Chicago and Poland; and data from my fieldwork among Polish immigrants in and around Chicago. It is this \"grounded\" evidence-which emerges from nearly two years of participant observation and extensive interviews with several Chicago Poles-that provides the real foundation of my argument, because, in my view, the analysis of everyday practices and ways of talk offers an exceptionally rich method for understanding the relationship between space and discourse. In my case, these are the practices of a specific group of immigrants in a specific place, and in the second half of the paper I will examine some of the ways in which Poles' unique political and social histories have influenced their discourses. However, the processes I will explore operate among many other groups, including other immigrant groups in the U.S., and the theoretical implications are much broader.As a way into those broader claims, I want to start at the level of ethnographic observation, by offering two brief vignettes from my fieldwork that I think help encapsulate, in miniature, the larger points I am trying to develop. Both scenes involve maps-our most pervasive and stylized discourse of space-and both scenes take place in a small room in the basement of a Polish church on Chicago's northwest side. As a ","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"135 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120996841","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}
"Here in this country it's change the reel and change the man."-Senator Adam Sunraider in Three Days Before the Shooting..."A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography."-Roland Barthes, Camera LucidaWhen Ralph Ellison passed away in 1994 at the age of eighty, he left behind a treasure trove of published writing that includes numerous short stories and book reviews, more than two volumes of essays of literary and cultural criticism, and his masterpiece Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also left behind two archives-and two enigmas-that are the subjects of this essay. The first is the sprawling manuscript of an unfinished second novel upon which Ellison labored for forty years that was carefully pieced together by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley and published in 2010 as Three Days Before the Shooting.... The other is a collection of hundreds of Polaroid photographs taken by Ellison over the last thirty years of his life, the subjects of which consist almost entirely of objects instead of people.When viewed in relation rather than in isolation, these two archives become less enigmatic. Instead, they appear as homologous components of Ellison's lifelong exploration of visual technologies of mechanical reproduction and the role these technologies play in reducing temporalities to form. That a tight connection exists between Ellison's photography and his fiction writing was first fully realized by Sara Blair, who convincingly demonstrates how the historical critique of Invisible Man is informed by, if not rehearsed in, Ellison's early street photography. In this essay, I extend Blair's argument by examining Ellison's later photography alongside his post-Invisible Man fiction. In the process, I illustrate how Ellison spent the last decades of his life using pen and camera together to trouble the temporal construct of static time that subtends progressive, linear histories-histories that underwrite the racial cartographies Ellison so lucidly critiqued in Invisible Man.To understand both the importance of Ellison's Polaroids and the ekphrastic logic of Three Days, Ellison's "instant" photographs need to be viewed as antidotes to the ways of seeing formalized by the sequential photographic apparatuses that organ-ize the identities of two of the novel's principal characters. In Three Days, Ellison juxtaposes the first-person narratives of two white subjects who internalize the form(s) of mechanical visual reproduction associated with his current and/or former profession. Book I of the novel is told from the point of view of a journalist and self-proclaimed liberal named Welborn McIntyre who unconsciously objectifies and thereby "mortifies" African Americans with a photographic gaze reflexively doubled by the still images that surround him. Book II, in turn, is partially told from the perspective of a U.S. Senator named Adam Sunraider whose atemporal filmic creations, traces of his younger days as a cinematograph
{"title":"“Rhopographic Photography and Atemporal Cinema: The Link Between Ralph Ellison’s Polaroids and Three Days Before the Shooting…”","authors":"Michael Germana","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1422","url":null,"abstract":"\"Here in this country it's change the reel and change the man.\"-Senator Adam Sunraider in Three Days Before the Shooting...\"A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography.\"-Roland Barthes, Camera LucidaWhen Ralph Ellison passed away in 1994 at the age of eighty, he left behind a treasure trove of published writing that includes numerous short stories and book reviews, more than two volumes of essays of literary and cultural criticism, and his masterpiece Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also left behind two archives-and two enigmas-that are the subjects of this essay. The first is the sprawling manuscript of an unfinished second novel upon which Ellison labored for forty years that was carefully pieced together by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley and published in 2010 as Three Days Before the Shooting.... The other is a collection of hundreds of Polaroid photographs taken by Ellison over the last thirty years of his life, the subjects of which consist almost entirely of objects instead of people.When viewed in relation rather than in isolation, these two archives become less enigmatic. Instead, they appear as homologous components of Ellison's lifelong exploration of visual technologies of mechanical reproduction and the role these technologies play in reducing temporalities to form. That a tight connection exists between Ellison's photography and his fiction writing was first fully realized by Sara Blair, who convincingly demonstrates how the historical critique of Invisible Man is informed by, if not rehearsed in, Ellison's early street photography. In this essay, I extend Blair's argument by examining Ellison's later photography alongside his post-Invisible Man fiction. In the process, I illustrate how Ellison spent the last decades of his life using pen and camera together to trouble the temporal construct of static time that subtends progressive, linear histories-histories that underwrite the racial cartographies Ellison so lucidly critiqued in Invisible Man.To understand both the importance of Ellison's Polaroids and the ekphrastic logic of Three Days, Ellison's \"instant\" photographs need to be viewed as antidotes to the ways of seeing formalized by the sequential photographic apparatuses that organ-ize the identities of two of the novel's principal characters. In Three Days, Ellison juxtaposes the first-person narratives of two white subjects who internalize the form(s) of mechanical visual reproduction associated with his current and/or former profession. Book I of the novel is told from the point of view of a journalist and self-proclaimed liberal named Welborn McIntyre who unconsciously objectifies and thereby \"mortifies\" African Americans with a photographic gaze reflexively doubled by the still images that surround him. Book II, in turn, is partially told from the perspective of a U.S. Senator named Adam Sunraider whose atemporal filmic creations, traces of his younger days as a cinematograph","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115088265","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}
Emily Bronte's classic Wuthering Heights combines legends, myths, and notions of romance, but it is also full of villains, dastardly acts, betrayal and revenge. Criticism of the work often centers around the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine1 and their perceived feelings for one another, thwarted by fate, chance, and bad decisions.2 Many scholars point fingers at Heathcliff as being the ultimate "villain" of the story3; I, however, believe that the term "villain" is controversial, and this term can apply to all of the characters, not just Heathcliff-at least in the context of the world where the story takes place. In general, the villain can be a character who wishes evil things to happen and who helps to make these evil things happen. The villain may also be the dark side of human nature, the opposite of the hero, or what the hero could become if s/he ever fails. If we indeed have no heroes in Wuthering Heights, then the characters in the novel must all have a dark side (which may or may not be obvious), or be outright malicious in their intentions through their actions.The novel has no "good" characters-even the Lintons, whom Nelly our narrator describes as virtuous, have cruel intentions as they are introduced fighting over a dog, and they repeatedly exhibit passive behaviors where action is called for. For the inhabitants of the moors, villainy is linked with identity, but the characters of Wuthering Heights tend to defy definition and boundaries. Villainy is ascribed to "otherness" and that which is not understood; because of misunderstandings and biased attitudes of most characters, readers form negative opinions and assume villainy before evil deeds are performed. Villainy in the novel therefore stems, at least in part, from social condemnation of certain characters early on in the novel.Heathcliff often receives most of the criticism for being the most definitive villain in the novel; however, I believe he merely is placed in this position through the Nelly/Lockwood narration frame, which causes him to appear to exceed the villainy of other characters.4 Overall, I believe Heathcliff gets too much blame from critics for being devilish. In no way do I intend to excuse his behaviors- particularly in the second half of the novel-nor do I have any romanticized notions of his heroism (as Isabella Linton does). What I fail to see, is how he is considered to be so much worse than many of the other characters of the novel to be examined here. Truly, after Catherine's death we see a desperate man: a man who goes so far as to throw a knife at his own wife and has disdain for all around him in the living world. Ingrid Geerken makes a claim in her article '"The Dead Are Not Annihilated': Mortal Regret in 'Wuthering Heights'" that Heathcliff is the only character to draw blood: "Only Heathcliff ever draws blood in the novel, and he does so in order to entice Catherine's shade to appear to him. These injuries constitute a sacrificial offering to th
{"title":"(Dys)Function in the Moors: Everyone's a Villain in Wuthering Heights","authors":"Samantha Przybylowicz","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1410","url":null,"abstract":"Emily Bronte's classic Wuthering Heights combines legends, myths, and notions of romance, but it is also full of villains, dastardly acts, betrayal and revenge. Criticism of the work often centers around the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine1 and their perceived feelings for one another, thwarted by fate, chance, and bad decisions.2 Many scholars point fingers at Heathcliff as being the ultimate \"villain\" of the story3; I, however, believe that the term \"villain\" is controversial, and this term can apply to all of the characters, not just Heathcliff-at least in the context of the world where the story takes place. In general, the villain can be a character who wishes evil things to happen and who helps to make these evil things happen. The villain may also be the dark side of human nature, the opposite of the hero, or what the hero could become if s/he ever fails. If we indeed have no heroes in Wuthering Heights, then the characters in the novel must all have a dark side (which may or may not be obvious), or be outright malicious in their intentions through their actions.The novel has no \"good\" characters-even the Lintons, whom Nelly our narrator describes as virtuous, have cruel intentions as they are introduced fighting over a dog, and they repeatedly exhibit passive behaviors where action is called for. For the inhabitants of the moors, villainy is linked with identity, but the characters of Wuthering Heights tend to defy definition and boundaries. Villainy is ascribed to \"otherness\" and that which is not understood; because of misunderstandings and biased attitudes of most characters, readers form negative opinions and assume villainy before evil deeds are performed. Villainy in the novel therefore stems, at least in part, from social condemnation of certain characters early on in the novel.Heathcliff often receives most of the criticism for being the most definitive villain in the novel; however, I believe he merely is placed in this position through the Nelly/Lockwood narration frame, which causes him to appear to exceed the villainy of other characters.4 Overall, I believe Heathcliff gets too much blame from critics for being devilish. In no way do I intend to excuse his behaviors- particularly in the second half of the novel-nor do I have any romanticized notions of his heroism (as Isabella Linton does). What I fail to see, is how he is considered to be so much worse than many of the other characters of the novel to be examined here. Truly, after Catherine's death we see a desperate man: a man who goes so far as to throw a knife at his own wife and has disdain for all around him in the living world. Ingrid Geerken makes a claim in her article '\"The Dead Are Not Annihilated': Mortal Regret in 'Wuthering Heights'\" that Heathcliff is the only character to draw blood: \"Only Heathcliff ever draws blood in the novel, and he does so in order to entice Catherine's shade to appear to him. These injuries constitute a sacrificial offering to th","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"135 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128600272","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}
Time Magazine's Richard Corliss, reviewing The Dark Knight, wrote that "[director Christopher] Nolan has a more subversive agenda. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten." Corliss's focus on evil makes sense given both the variety of villains populating the movie and the depth of Heath Ledger's Academy Award winning depiction of The Joker. I contend, however, that buried within the varied villains of the movie is a rare and precious vision of the good. It is in moving past the battle between Batman and Joker to focus on Harvey Dent that one finds a more complex vision of the good than what the two dominant figures embody. Focusing on Two-Face, the villain who provides hope, allows viewers to escape the pain of the "rat hole of evil."Arguing how Harvey Dent emerges as the central figure of the film, and how both Batman and The Joker promote ultimately untenable visions of the good requires an in-depth analysis of evil and villains. I begin by building on Umberto Eco's 1972 essay 'The Myth of Superman," which I update by articulating why the figure of Batman has become increasingly important in the twenty-first century, replacing Superman as a focal point in our culture. I then analyze how Nolan depicts evil in the movie, focused on three kinds of villains: mobsters, The Joker and Two-Face. In order to make sense of the variety of villains, I turn to Immanuel Kant's conception of evil as a way of understanding the importance of The Joker, and then review Paul Ricoeur's conception of fallibility in order to make a case for Harvey Dent as the heart of the film. It is by emphasizing Dent's character that the movie makes its grandest moral statement, undermining the heterodirected nature of superhero logic that permeates other films and graphic novels in order to present the human capacity for autonomy and freedom.Heterodirection and the Myth of SupermanScholars throughout the humanities find that our worldviews are both undergirded and reinforced by the cultural artifacts that we unthinkingly consume: although we seek out meaningless diversions as a way to relax after a tiring week, the products provided for us are not offered with neutral intentions. What the Frankfurt School critics understood in terms of culture industry still holds true: at root, we as consumers remain a means to an end and not ends in ourselves. Cultural products always leave a residue that continues to frame and influence consumers long after the product itself has disappeared.Umberto Eco's essay "The Myth of Superman" acknowledges the power that something as seemingly trivial as comic books has over its readers. This essay is particularly important as, thirty years after it was written, superheroes have transitioned from a niche market to become a dominant part of the entertainment industry. The seemingly inexhaustible stream of superhero movies, sequels and remakes, combined with the marketing tie-ins including action figures
《时代》杂志的理查德·科利斯在评论《黑暗骑士》时写道:“导演克里斯托弗·诺兰有一个更具颠覆性的计划。他想让观众把手伸进邪恶的老鼠洞，看看自己会不会被咬到。”考虑到电影中反派角色的多样性，以及希斯·莱杰对小丑的深度刻画，科利斯对邪恶的关注是有道理的。然而，我认为，在电影中形形色色的反派中，隐藏着一种罕见而珍贵的善的愿景。在超越蝙蝠侠和小丑之间的斗争，把注意力集中在哈维·登特身上时，人们会发现比这两个主导人物所体现的更复杂的善的愿景。以“双面人”这个给人希望的反派为中心，可以让观众逃离“邪恶的老鼠洞”的痛苦。要论证哈维·登特是如何成为电影的核心人物，以及蝙蝠侠和小丑是如何推动最终站不住脚的善的愿景，需要对邪恶和恶棍进行深入分析。我以翁贝托·艾柯(Umberto Eco) 1972年的文章《超人的神话》(The Myth of Superman)为基础，通过阐述为什么蝙蝠侠的形象在21世纪变得越来越重要，取代超人成为我们文化的焦点，对这篇文章进行了更新。然后我分析了诺兰在电影中是如何描绘邪恶的，重点分析了三种恶棍:暴徒、小丑和双面人。为了理解反派的多样性，我求助于伊曼努尔·康德的邪恶概念，以此来理解《小丑》的重要性，然后回顾保罗·里科尔的易犯性概念，以证明哈维·登特是这部电影的核心。正是通过强调登特的性格，这部电影做出了最伟大的道德宣言，破坏了渗透在其他电影和漫画小说中的超级英雄逻辑的异性恋本质，以呈现人类自主和自由的能力。人文学科的学者们发现，我们不假思索地消费的文化产物既巩固了我们的世界观，也强化了我们的世界观:尽管我们在疲惫的一周后寻找毫无意义的消遣，作为一种放松的方式，但提供给我们的产品并不是出于中立的意图。法兰克福学派批评家对文化工业的理解仍然是正确的:从根本上说，我们作为消费者仍然是达到目的的手段，而不是我们自己的目的。文化产品总是会在产品本身消失后很长一段时间内留下残留物，继续塑造和影响消费者。翁贝托·艾柯(Umberto Eco)的文章《超人的神话》(The Myth of Superman)承认，像漫画书这样看似微不足道的东西对读者有着巨大的影响力。这篇文章特别重要，因为在它写了30年后，超级英雄已经从一个利基市场转变为娱乐产业的主导部分。似乎取之不尽的超级英雄电影、续集和翻拍，加上包括动作人偶、服装、服装和海报在内的营销配套产品，构成了好莱坞收入的很大一部分。上世纪80年代，华纳兄弟利用蒂姆·伯顿(Tim Burton)执导的《蝙蝠侠》(Batman) 1在商业上的成功获利，这一点是正确的;在21世纪，《复仇者联盟》(Avengers)和《黑暗骑士崛起》(the Dark Knight Rises)打破了票房纪录，这一点仍然适用。尽管艾柯以超人为例阐述了超级英雄的伦理含义，但他的结论也适用于蝙蝠侠的电影表现。在他的整篇文章中，艾柯认为，超人漫画帮助延续了一个与财产有关的善恶二元体系，这样，“善”从保护中产阶级的财产权中出现，而“恶”则沦为盗窃的元素(22)。超人没有使用他的超能力来结束世界饥饿，消灭独裁者，停止战争或结束贫困，而是与试图夺取财产的人类和外星人恶棍作战。这些故事以一种迭代的结构提供，通过防止超人做出具有严重影响的决定(这会导致他衰老)，从而给人一种永恒世界的错觉(16)。…
{"title":"The Flip Side of Justice: The Two-Faced Spirit of The Dark Knight","authors":"Daniel Boscaljon","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1412","url":null,"abstract":"Time Magazine's Richard Corliss, reviewing The Dark Knight, wrote that \"[director Christopher] Nolan has a more subversive agenda. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten.\" Corliss's focus on evil makes sense given both the variety of villains populating the movie and the depth of Heath Ledger's Academy Award winning depiction of The Joker. I contend, however, that buried within the varied villains of the movie is a rare and precious vision of the good. It is in moving past the battle between Batman and Joker to focus on Harvey Dent that one finds a more complex vision of the good than what the two dominant figures embody. Focusing on Two-Face, the villain who provides hope, allows viewers to escape the pain of the \"rat hole of evil.\"Arguing how Harvey Dent emerges as the central figure of the film, and how both Batman and The Joker promote ultimately untenable visions of the good requires an in-depth analysis of evil and villains. I begin by building on Umberto Eco's 1972 essay 'The Myth of Superman,\" which I update by articulating why the figure of Batman has become increasingly important in the twenty-first century, replacing Superman as a focal point in our culture. I then analyze how Nolan depicts evil in the movie, focused on three kinds of villains: mobsters, The Joker and Two-Face. In order to make sense of the variety of villains, I turn to Immanuel Kant's conception of evil as a way of understanding the importance of The Joker, and then review Paul Ricoeur's conception of fallibility in order to make a case for Harvey Dent as the heart of the film. It is by emphasizing Dent's character that the movie makes its grandest moral statement, undermining the heterodirected nature of superhero logic that permeates other films and graphic novels in order to present the human capacity for autonomy and freedom.Heterodirection and the Myth of SupermanScholars throughout the humanities find that our worldviews are both undergirded and reinforced by the cultural artifacts that we unthinkingly consume: although we seek out meaningless diversions as a way to relax after a tiring week, the products provided for us are not offered with neutral intentions. What the Frankfurt School critics understood in terms of culture industry still holds true: at root, we as consumers remain a means to an end and not ends in ourselves. Cultural products always leave a residue that continues to frame and influence consumers long after the product itself has disappeared.Umberto Eco's essay \"The Myth of Superman\" acknowledges the power that something as seemingly trivial as comic books has over its readers. This essay is particularly important as, thirty years after it was written, superheroes have transitioned from a niche market to become a dominant part of the entertainment industry. The seemingly inexhaustible stream of superhero movies, sequels and remakes, combined with the marketing tie-ins including action figures","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122973488","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}
IntroductionReading religious history, ethics, biblical scholarship, along with a host of other disciplines, what one discovers is a consensus that there is no value free, objective, non-interpretive experience of the world. Hermeneutics in particular raises consciousness of the complexity of human engagement with the world.1 While hermeneutics has been focused on the understanding of texts, authors, and readers, the field of hermeneutics need not be limited in this way. Forrest Clingerman ("Interpreting Heaven and Earth"), for example, has taken hermeneutics into nature where interpretation of place and oneself in relation to place is a broadening of the hermeneutical enterprise. Hermeneutics as an art and science of interpretation opens up understanding and meaningfulness as one takes in and makes meaning out of our reality as we see it.The "as we see it" is important. Interpretation does not happen by simply taking in data. Interpretation comes within the context of the values and perspectives already present to a person, as Gadamer (Truth and Method) pointed out, each person has a hermeneutical horizon. Moreover, as seen in the work of thinkers such as John D. Caputo (More Radical Hermeneutics), each person's horizon is distinct, which creates a gap between one's own horizon and that of the other. Living in the world requires sorting through the information constantly being received, and the only way to do that is through the lens already given to each person. This unfolding of interpretation is the creation of narrative.This narrative is one's worldview. One does not simply interpret individual bits of information but unfolds them in relation to each other, into the story that shapes one's identity. Narrative, then, is how one experiences the world. Each of us has a narrative identity, to borrow a phrase from Ricoeur {Oneself as Another). Each person understands him or herself through the way that person unfolds the interpretation of history, the present, and the possibilities for the future in constant interaction with the other. As Philip Davies describes it:Stories are never innocent of point of view, plot, ideology, or cultural value. We tell our stories of the past in a historical context, looking at the past from a particular point: the present. We cannot be objective, neutral observers. We ourselves are in history, in the sense both of events happening and of the stories (news, gossip, history books) that interpret these events- not to mention our own memories. {Memories 11)Our narrative identity is not simply the past of ourselves, it is culturally constructed-what Davies calls cultural memory and others (including myself) call sacred history. Within the life of a person who considers him or herself religious, there is a particular quality to the narrative, and that is the relationship with the holy or sacred as the driving force of the narrative. In such narratives, everything is at stake. The unfolding of one's story in relation to
阅读宗教史、伦理学、圣经学术，以及许多其他学科，你会发现一个共识，即世界上没有价值自由的、客观的、非解释性的经验。解释学尤其提高了人们对人类与世界交往的复杂性的认识虽然诠释学一直专注于对文本、作者和读者的理解，但诠释学的领域不需要以这种方式受到限制。例如，福里斯特·克林格曼(Forrest Clingerman，《解读天地》)将解释学带入大自然，在自然界中，对地点和人与地点的关系的解释是解释学事业的拓展。解释学作为一门解释的艺术和科学，当人们接受并从我们所看到的现实中获得意义时，就会打开理解和意义的大门。“在我们看来”很重要。解释不是通过简单地获取数据来实现的。正如伽达默尔(真理与方法)指出的那样，解释是在已经呈现给一个人的价值观和观点的背景下进行的，每个人都有一个解释学的视界。此外，正如约翰·d·卡普托(John D. Caputo，《更激进的解释学》)等思想家的作品中所看到的那样，每个人的视界都是不同的，这在自己的视界和他人的视界之间造成了差距。生活在这个世界上需要对不断收到的信息进行分类，而做到这一点的唯一方法就是通过已经给每个人的镜头。这种阐释的展开就是叙事的创造。这种叙述就是一个人的世界观。一个人不是简单地解读单个的信息，而是将它们相互联系起来展开，形成一个塑造自己身份的故事。那么，叙事就是一个人体验世界的方式。借用Ricoeur的一句话，我们每个人都有一个叙事身份(narrative identity)。每个人都是通过自己对历史、现在和未来可能性的解读，在与他人的不断互动中理解自己的。正如菲利普·戴维斯所描述的那样:故事在观点、情节、意识形态或文化价值上从来不是清白的。我们在历史背景下讲述过去的故事，从一个特定的角度看过去:现在。我们不可能成为客观、中立的观察者。从发生的事件和解释这些事件的故事(新闻、八卦、历史书)的意义上说，我们自己也在历史中——更不用说我们自己的记忆了。我们的叙事身份不仅仅是我们自己的过去，它是文化建构的——戴维斯称之为文化记忆，其他人(包括我自己)称之为神圣的历史。在一个认为自己有宗教信仰的人的生活中，有一种特殊的叙事品质，那就是与神圣或神圣的关系，作为叙事的驱动力。在这样的叙事中，一切都危在旦夕。一个人的故事的展开与神圣有关，与一个人的叙事身份有关，与一个人的社区，文化时期和时间位置有关。这些叙述指出了未来的叙述将如何继续展开。正如利科尔所指出的那样，解释学的过程是一种对话，是与被解释的对象(“什么是文本”)之间不断的来回对话。在个人和公共身份的情况下，一个人总是通过与世界的每一次互动来增加生命本身的故事及其目的。其他人则是我们自己故事中的人物。这篇文章的基本假设是，与世界没有非叙事的接触。一个人总是在根据已有的叙述来解释世界的过程中，并通过新的体验来增加叙述。但是这个假设有一个问题。在20世纪中后期的后现代转向中，叙事受到了挑战。在宗教叙事方面，马克C. ...
{"title":"The Demonization and Recovery of Religion: Villains and the Transformation of Narrative","authors":"V. Ehret","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1411","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionReading religious history, ethics, biblical scholarship, along with a host of other disciplines, what one discovers is a consensus that there is no value free, objective, non-interpretive experience of the world. Hermeneutics in particular raises consciousness of the complexity of human engagement with the world.1 While hermeneutics has been focused on the understanding of texts, authors, and readers, the field of hermeneutics need not be limited in this way. Forrest Clingerman (\"Interpreting Heaven and Earth\"), for example, has taken hermeneutics into nature where interpretation of place and oneself in relation to place is a broadening of the hermeneutical enterprise. Hermeneutics as an art and science of interpretation opens up understanding and meaningfulness as one takes in and makes meaning out of our reality as we see it.The \"as we see it\" is important. Interpretation does not happen by simply taking in data. Interpretation comes within the context of the values and perspectives already present to a person, as Gadamer (Truth and Method) pointed out, each person has a hermeneutical horizon. Moreover, as seen in the work of thinkers such as John D. Caputo (More Radical Hermeneutics), each person's horizon is distinct, which creates a gap between one's own horizon and that of the other. Living in the world requires sorting through the information constantly being received, and the only way to do that is through the lens already given to each person. This unfolding of interpretation is the creation of narrative.This narrative is one's worldview. One does not simply interpret individual bits of information but unfolds them in relation to each other, into the story that shapes one's identity. Narrative, then, is how one experiences the world. Each of us has a narrative identity, to borrow a phrase from Ricoeur {Oneself as Another). Each person understands him or herself through the way that person unfolds the interpretation of history, the present, and the possibilities for the future in constant interaction with the other. As Philip Davies describes it:Stories are never innocent of point of view, plot, ideology, or cultural value. We tell our stories of the past in a historical context, looking at the past from a particular point: the present. We cannot be objective, neutral observers. We ourselves are in history, in the sense both of events happening and of the stories (news, gossip, history books) that interpret these events- not to mention our own memories. {Memories 11)Our narrative identity is not simply the past of ourselves, it is culturally constructed-what Davies calls cultural memory and others (including myself) call sacred history. Within the life of a person who considers him or herself religious, there is a particular quality to the narrative, and that is the relationship with the holy or sacred as the driving force of the narrative. In such narratives, everything is at stake. The unfolding of one's story in relation to","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122023460","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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