Abstract:Nicholas Winding Refn regularly appears to offer men as his audience's main point of identification. Yet these men are predominantly transgressive characters who frequently, if not constantly, frustrate spectator-identification and consequently linger on the periphery of cinematic paradigms. In three stages, this article analyses how Refn's violent male characters affect spectatorship. First, it considers the unstable subject mechanisms for spectator-identification afforded by classical Hollywood cinema. Second, it examines Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical theorization of the abject and outlines the relevance of her concepts to Refn's narratives. Third, it conducts a close textual analysis of Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011), arguing that the disregard for symbolic order demonstrated by Refn's male protagonists and their concomitant embrace of the death drive inhibit spectator-identification. This analysis ultimately aims to demonstrate the import of Kristeva's theories to a more comprehensive understanding of the abject's complex relationship to Refn's œuvre and to spectator-identification in cinema.
{"title":"Nicholas Winding Refn's Abject Male: Inhibiting Spectator-Identification in Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011)","authors":"Barry Nevin, Aoife M. O’Connor","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Nicholas Winding Refn regularly appears to offer men as his audience's main point of identification. Yet these men are predominantly transgressive characters who frequently, if not constantly, frustrate spectator-identification and consequently linger on the periphery of cinematic paradigms. In three stages, this article analyses how Refn's violent male characters affect spectatorship. First, it considers the unstable subject mechanisms for spectator-identification afforded by classical Hollywood cinema. Second, it examines Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical theorization of the abject and outlines the relevance of her concepts to Refn's narratives. Third, it conducts a close textual analysis of Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011), arguing that the disregard for symbolic order demonstrated by Refn's male protagonists and their concomitant embrace of the death drive inhibit spectator-identification. This analysis ultimately aims to demonstrate the import of Kristeva's theories to a more comprehensive understanding of the abject's complex relationship to Refn's œuvre and to spectator-identification in cinema.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41297046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Though we forget most of the fiction that we read, something remains. This essay asks what forms that "something" might take in readers' memories, a question that recurs in the work of the Australian writer Gerald Murnane. When a novel's plot lines and visualized incidents have faded away, there may still linger an atmosphere peculiar to it, which is evoked by its title.
{"title":"Reading's Residue","authors":"Peter Schwenger","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Though we forget most of the fiction that we read, something remains. This essay asks what forms that \"something\" might take in readers' memories, a question that recurs in the work of the Australian writer Gerald Murnane. When a novel's plot lines and visualized incidents have faded away, there may still linger an atmosphere peculiar to it, which is evoked by its title.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46554797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography by Paolo Magagnoli (review)","authors":"Kamil Lipiński","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45813343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nearly twenty years after SubStance devoted a special issue to the contemporary French writer (and translator) we know as Antoine Volodine, we are thoroughly pleased to be publishing in this issue the opening of Dondog, a novel that Ben Streeter has translated with inspired exactitude and brilliant tonal precision. In English or in French, entering Dondog is not unlike entering any other “post-exotic” text (I will come back to this label shortly). One has to learn how to orient oneself to the ruination of Modernity, within the dysfunctional memories of post-traumatic subjects, between dark humor and luminous despair, in the liminal space between life and death, between humanity and animality, and, in the odd beauty of a language that gives transmissible form to the experience of our contemporary hellscape. Post-Exoticism has a soft spot for odd numbers, especially palindromes, and it was fitting that, in 2003, SubStance devoted its Issue 101 to Volodine. At the time, his highly singular literature was barely known in the United States. In France, the “happy few” who had discovered Volodine through his early Science Fictional trilogy in the mid-1980s had grown into a solid general readership. Volodine had theorized his fictional literary movement in 1998 and he started publishing post-exotic texts in the name of his three heteronyms, Ellie Kronaeur, Manuela Draeger, and Lutz Bassman, becoming the object of significant, albeit dispersed, academic curiosity. In 1999 and 2000, Post-Exoticism gained clear critical recognition when his Des anges mineurs (later translated as Minor Angels) was awarded a couple of important awards (the Prix Wepler and the Prix du livre Inter). In the U.S., though, the post-exotic readership was limited to a few Francophones in the know, and to the lucky readers who had stumbled upon Volodine’s Naming the Jungle, the only post-exotic novel
{"title":"Dondog and the Post-Exotic After All","authors":"É. Colon","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Nearly twenty years after SubStance devoted a special issue to the contemporary French writer (and translator) we know as Antoine Volodine, we are thoroughly pleased to be publishing in this issue the opening of Dondog, a novel that Ben Streeter has translated with inspired exactitude and brilliant tonal precision. In English or in French, entering Dondog is not unlike entering any other “post-exotic” text (I will come back to this label shortly). One has to learn how to orient oneself to the ruination of Modernity, within the dysfunctional memories of post-traumatic subjects, between dark humor and luminous despair, in the liminal space between life and death, between humanity and animality, and, in the odd beauty of a language that gives transmissible form to the experience of our contemporary hellscape. Post-Exoticism has a soft spot for odd numbers, especially palindromes, and it was fitting that, in 2003, SubStance devoted its Issue 101 to Volodine. At the time, his highly singular literature was barely known in the United States. In France, the “happy few” who had discovered Volodine through his early Science Fictional trilogy in the mid-1980s had grown into a solid general readership. Volodine had theorized his fictional literary movement in 1998 and he started publishing post-exotic texts in the name of his three heteronyms, Ellie Kronaeur, Manuela Draeger, and Lutz Bassman, becoming the object of significant, albeit dispersed, academic curiosity. In 1999 and 2000, Post-Exoticism gained clear critical recognition when his Des anges mineurs (later translated as Minor Angels) was awarded a couple of important awards (the Prix Wepler and the Prix du livre Inter). In the U.S., though, the post-exotic readership was limited to a few Francophones in the know, and to the lucky readers who had stumbled upon Volodine’s Naming the Jungle, the only post-exotic novel","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41479782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Although Angelina Weld Grimké's 1916 play, Rachel, has historically been read as a sentimental, anti-lynching drama, such classifications might limit the play's anarchic potential. Instead of viewing the characters as responding to anti-Black violence, this paper proposes reframing the play's discussion within a context of Black maternity and its necessary engagement with the Afro-pessimist concept of social death. Such reorientation suggests that Rachel works within the theater's very materiality in order to explore the effects of anti-Blackness on Black life. Specifically, this paper argues that the play's performances of abiological Black maternity—and, particularly, the titular character's performances—fugitively evade the natal alienation of social death. Furthermore, such performances link past, present, and future stage productions as well as character representations, recreating kinship formations within Black social life to stage spatio-temporal disruptions on the equation of Blackness as social death. In this way, Rachel offers modern scholars an understanding of how older works might yet be read in light of the more recent theoretical work of radical Black feminist and Afro-pessimist scholars.
{"title":"The Death of Social Death: Im/possibility of Black Maternity in Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel","authors":"Kym Cunningham","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Although Angelina Weld Grimké's 1916 play, Rachel, has historically been read as a sentimental, anti-lynching drama, such classifications might limit the play's anarchic potential. Instead of viewing the characters as responding to anti-Black violence, this paper proposes reframing the play's discussion within a context of Black maternity and its necessary engagement with the Afro-pessimist concept of social death. Such reorientation suggests that Rachel works within the theater's very materiality in order to explore the effects of anti-Blackness on Black life. Specifically, this paper argues that the play's performances of abiological Black maternity—and, particularly, the titular character's performances—fugitively evade the natal alienation of social death. Furthermore, such performances link past, present, and future stage productions as well as character representations, recreating kinship formations within Black social life to stage spatio-temporal disruptions on the equation of Blackness as social death. In this way, Rachel offers modern scholars an understanding of how older works might yet be read in light of the more recent theoretical work of radical Black feminist and Afro-pessimist scholars.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43007914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The 87,000 metric tons of non-biodegradable plastic bits gathering in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch occupy the very zones known in the Age of Sail as the doldrums—the “dead calm,” where ships would be stranded for weeks at a time, as famously described in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, some of Melville’s writings and Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. To re-read these texts today is to have the haunting experience of seeing petrochemical debris collect silently, as if retroactively, in the very doldrums that fossil-fuel-powered speed was believed to have transcended.
{"title":"In the Doldrums: Plastic, Haunting and the Sea","authors":"Thangam Ravindranathan, A. Traisnel","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The 87,000 metric tons of non-biodegradable plastic bits gathering in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch occupy the very zones known in the Age of Sail as the doldrums—the “dead calm,” where ships would be stranded for weeks at a time, as famously described in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, some of Melville’s writings and Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. To re-read these texts today is to have the haunting experience of seeing petrochemical debris collect silently, as if retroactively, in the very doldrums that fossil-fuel-powered speed was believed to have transcended.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41594092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay engages Nietzsche as a traveler who, by regularly sojourning in precariously inhabitable volcanic areas of Italy as he sought some relief for his health in propitious climes, pursued a philosophy of becoming. The firehound his Zarathustra encountered on an island reminiscent of Southern Italian landscapes that Nietzsche traveled to, famously declared that “the Earth has a skin, and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man”—a claim that Zarathustra scoffed at. And yet, the demonic animal’s claim provokes us today: as Gaia is running a fever, the question of (un)inhabitability is not just a question of space but also of time—of eternity and ephemerality posed so well by Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. I suggest that a “Nietzschean ecology” would force us to fatefully dance with the radical reckoning that the only time we can inhabit is the moment, collapsing means and ends for a new eco-ethics.
{"title":"Tellurian Nietzsche and the (Un)inhabitable Eternal Return","authors":"C. Sagan","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay engages Nietzsche as a traveler who, by regularly sojourning in precariously inhabitable volcanic areas of Italy as he sought some relief for his health in propitious climes, pursued a philosophy of becoming. The firehound his Zarathustra encountered on an island reminiscent of Southern Italian landscapes that Nietzsche traveled to, famously declared that “the Earth has a skin, and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man”—a claim that Zarathustra scoffed at. And yet, the demonic animal’s claim provokes us today: as Gaia is running a fever, the question of (un)inhabitability is not just a question of space but also of time—of eternity and ephemerality posed so well by Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. I suggest that a “Nietzschean ecology” would force us to fatefully dance with the radical reckoning that the only time we can inhabit is the moment, collapsing means and ends for a new eco-ethics.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44442634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Lascaux II was a partial three-dimensional replica of the original cave built on site, Lascaux III an international itinerant exhibit of movable panels reproducing the cave’s most famous scenes. Lascaux IV proposes a complete replica integrated within an interactive museum environment. The replication project continues: Chauvet II in 2015; Cosquer II in 2022. How these replicas were built is well documented (within the limits of trademarked secrecy). What is less clear and what this article sets out to examine, is the relation these replicas of Paleolithic sanctuaries sustain with the increasingly uninhabitable world in which they appear.
{"title":"Lascaux IV, Chauvet II, Planet B","authors":"V. Bruyère","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Lascaux II was a partial three-dimensional replica of the original cave built on site, Lascaux III an international itinerant exhibit of movable panels reproducing the cave’s most famous scenes. Lascaux IV proposes a complete replica integrated within an interactive museum environment. The replication project continues: Chauvet II in 2015; Cosquer II in 2022. How these replicas were built is well documented (within the limits of trademarked secrecy). What is less clear and what this article sets out to examine, is the relation these replicas of Paleolithic sanctuaries sustain with the increasingly uninhabitable world in which they appear.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47198582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay argues for a more methodologically diverse search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and study of habitable exoplanets that might contribute to the emergent field of critical habitability studies across the sciences and humanities. Whether or not contact is made with extraterrestrials, this effort is implicated in changing concepts of otherness at home and the ongoing work to decolonize Earth and make it more inhabitable. I examine historical efforts to think aliens philosophically in the work of Kant, to conclude with a reflection on the trope of contact between humans, nonhuman animals, and aliens in Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence.”
{"title":"Critique of Alien Reason: Toward a Critical Interplanetary Humanities","authors":"Joshua Schuster","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues for a more methodologically diverse search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and study of habitable exoplanets that might contribute to the emergent field of critical habitability studies across the sciences and humanities. Whether or not contact is made with extraterrestrials, this effort is implicated in changing concepts of otherness at home and the ongoing work to decolonize Earth and make it more inhabitable. I examine historical efforts to think aliens philosophically in the work of Kant, to conclude with a reflection on the trope of contact between humans, nonhuman animals, and aliens in Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence.”","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46943366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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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