Pub Date : 2023-11-17DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10817053
András Kiséry, David Nee
New media played an important but largely understudied role in the formation of literary studies as a discipline. The dominant tradition of literary criticism has implied that literature was superior to and fully distinct from competing media and that the methods and concepts of literary scholarship were untouched by the emergence of new technological media. This introduction surveys some of the ways in which modern literary scholarship was in fact entangled with new media: from the revolutionary effect of the photostat on textual studies, to the rise of the concept of “orality” in tandem with new techniques for transcribing sound, to twentieth-century literary scholars’ extensive experiments with film and video as novel pedagogical aids. Along with the contributions to this special issue, this introduction shows that revisiting the false starts and dead ends of media-attuned literary scholarship during this formative period can help us defamiliarize our own convictions and open up alternative visions for the place of literary studies in a media-saturated world.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-17DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10779273
András Kiséry
Karl Kerényi is now mostly remembered for his monographs on Greek mythological figures in the Bollingen Series and for his collaboration with Carl Gustav Jung from the 1940s on. The radical approach to mythology reflected in this work was Kerényi’s solution to what he perceived as a crisis of the humanities: a disciplinary fragmentation combined with the growing influence of the social sciences in the study of culture. Before he would have turned to the study of myth, Kerényi proposed media history as the foundation for the renewal of classical studies and the humanities in general. In a series of essays written in the 1930s, Kerényi theorized the media of ancient texts as central to cultural hermeneutics. His understanding of textual media as expressive of the essential characteristics of a culture was underpinned by a conservative-humanist critique of modernity. It shows strong affinities with the work of such figures as the cultural theorist Oswald Spengler. Offered as an alternative to what Kerényi considered the scientistic preoccupations rampant in modern academe, this vision is also clearly at odds with most later media-historical research and its interest in the affordances and social ramifications of the materiality of communication technologies.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-17DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10779255
Sonja Drimmer
Between 1929 and 1930 a feud over the legitimacy of reproductions of works of art erupted in the pages of the culture periodical Der Kreis. Later dubbed the Hamburg Facsimile Debate, the dispute involved many of the day’s most eminent curators and academics in art and art history and became a focal point for emerging ideas about authenticity and the educative impact of the replica in the Weimar Republic. Even as the intelligentsia were publicly quarreling over the epistemological stakes of the facsimile, four nuns at Eibingen Abbey were meticulously hand-copying the most renowned illuminated twelfth-century manuscript of Hildegard von Bingen’s visionary summa, Scivias. This essay pits the Facsimile Debate against the facsimile craft of the Eibingen nuns, situating both within the context of new reproductive technologies devised specifically for representing medieval artifacts. It argues for a historicizing approach to the notion of authenticity, which bears on how we think about mediation and the surrogate in our research and teaching today.
1929 年至 1930 年间，在文化期刊《Der Kreis》的版面上爆发了一场关于艺术品复制品合法性的争论。这场争论后来被称为 "汉堡复制辩论"，当时艺术和艺术史领域最著名的策展人和学者都参与其中，并成为魏玛共和国关于真伪和复制品教育影响的新观点的焦点。就在知识分子公开争论摹本在认识论上的利害关系时，艾宾根修道院的四位修女正在一丝不苟地手抄十二世纪最著名的希尔德加德-冯-宾根（Hildegard von Bingen）的幻想总纲《斯基维亚》（Scivias）的彩饰手稿。这篇文章将 "摹本辩论 "与艾宾根修女的摹本工艺对立起来，将二者置于专为表现中世纪文物而设计的新复制技术的背景下。文章主张用一种历史化的方法来看待真实性的概念，这关系到我们在今天的研究和教学中如何看待中介和替代品。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-17DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10779237
Jonathan Foltz
This article explores the overlapping histories of close reading and mass media by attending to the late-career film and television experiments of I. A. Richards. A lifelong critic of the entertainment industry and (arguably reactionary) media theorist, Richards also spent decades experimenting with the exacting and humbling realities of media production. Spanning his abandoned collaboration with Disney, a series of Basic English teaching films (made with the artist and filmmaker Len Lye), his two educational television programs on poetry, and a number of unrealized television adaptations of Plato and Homer, this article surveys the extensive and ambivalent record of Richards’s ventures into media production. It details his painstaking efforts to reimagine and remediate the experience of poetry and the act of reading in terms of complex multisensory channels of audiovisual stimuli, positioning film and television as ideal media for poetry and as unlikely saviors of a Western humanism in crisis. Literary history, Richards suggests, can no longer be considered merely literary; if it survives, it will do so only as part of an evolving history of media.
本文通过研究 I. A. 理查兹晚年的电影和电视实验，探讨了细读和大众传媒的重叠历史。理查兹一生都在批评娱乐产业和（可以说是反动的）媒体理论家，他还花了几十年的时间来试验媒体制作的严酷和令人沮丧的现实。他放弃了与迪斯尼的合作，与艺术家兼电影制片人伦-莱伊（Len Lye）合作拍摄了一系列《基础英语》教学片，制作了两部关于诗歌的教育电视节目，以及一些尚未实现的柏拉图和荷马的电视改编作品。文章详细介绍了理查兹通过复杂的多感官视听刺激渠道重新想象和重塑诗歌体验和阅读行为的艰苦努力，将电影和电视定位为诗歌的理想媒体，以及西方人文主义危机中不可能的救世主。理查兹认为，文学史不能再仅仅被视为文学史；如果文学史能够继续存在，它也只能作为不断发展的媒体史的一部分。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-17DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10806507
David Nee
André Jolles’s Simple Forms (1929), widely regarded as a classic of genre theory, examines a range of folkloric and nonauthorial forms, such as the fairy tale, the riddle, and the joke, as part of an ambitious attempt to reground literary theory in a “morphological” approach to language inspired, ultimately, by Goethean science. This article argues that Jolles’s study should also be recognized as an important early work of media theory. Simple Forms includes a striking number of examples drawn from the mass-market newspapers of Jolles’s day. In turning to mass media, Jolles followed in the footsteps of the art historian Aby Warburg, whose Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29) similarly juxtaposed mass-media images from newspapers with works of art from earlier historical periods. The article details how Warburg’s morphological method helped Jolles expand the boundaries of literary study to include mass media by providing him with a morphological version of the motif concept that still has generative applications.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-17DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10779246
Jane O. Newman
The older and allegedly more conventional humanistic discipline of philology and the field of the “new” media of film that were emerging into their maturity in the early twentieth century are not commonly aligned. The institutional spaces they occupied—a cloistered academy and the popular “public sphere”—are seen as antithetical to one another. Letters between the contemporaries Erich Auerbach and Siegfried Kracauer suggest another story. This essay explores Auerbach’s and Kracauer’s interest in the enormous power of the cultural products they studied: the plays of seventeenth-century French classicisme and the mass-produced cinema of the early twentieth century, respectively, in critical fashion. Auerbach’s familiarity with Kracauer’s early essays may have alerted him to questions at the heart of the latter’s critique of the culture industry and helps explain the remarkable agreement between Kracauer’s account, in essays written during the mid- to late 1920s, of how a modern urban public “consumed” movies and Auerbach’s description of the audiences of early modern French tragedy in the to all appearances highly academic book The French Public of the Seventeenth Century, completed in 1933.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574846
J. Buckley
{"title":"Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater","authors":"J. Buckley","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574846","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72747573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574810
C. Scozzaro
Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia features two knights who commit instances of violent sex, for which they are sentenced to death. Ultimately, they are saved, and this essay asks why—and how—the language of self-abjection is used in the service of justice. Exploring the rhetorics of mercy and masochism, the essay examines the poetic justifications for violent sex that draw on the Petrarchan tradition. Sidney’s prose romance explores the social and narrative implications for living out the conventions of erotic poetry. His suffering lover occludes his violent actions by insisting that love is a mutual injury, and thus he is a victim too. Since it contains conventional apologies for ravishment, and provocations to touch, the blazon may also be considered a precursor to violent sex. Finally, Sidney rescues his knights, unpersuasively, with a marvelous and “strange conceit” that replaces the demands of justice with the demands of romance as a genre.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574882
Chelsea Silva
{"title":"The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships","authors":"Chelsea Silva","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574882","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85587969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10574819
Marcy J. Dinius
{"title":"To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship","authors":"Marcy J. Dinius","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574819","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84909154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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