By Harry E. Shaw
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
"In the last twenty years or so, anything approaching dialogue has been largely absent in discussions of realism. Despite some promising recent developments, the realist novel has taken a beating. David Lodge captures the central impetus of this attack on realism when he suggests that "Post-structuralist criticism, especially that which derives from teh work of Roland Barthes, has identified the 'classic realist text' as an instrument of ideology, a genre founded on bad faith, on the pretense that bourgeois culture is 'natural,' using the dominance of the authorial voice over all the other discourses in the text to limit meaning in the interests of control, repression, and privilege." Lodge himself takes a more generous view. Yet he inadvertently reveals how deeply what has become of the standard critique of realism has taken root when, a few sentences later, he suggests that "part of the problem is that realism is a literary effect that works by disguising its own conventionality" (Shaw 8). [He goes on to say that you can't assume that just because a novel isn't being meta-fictional that it is trying to disguise its conventionality or something else.]
Interesting....Shaw gets as defensive about realism and the realist novel as I and other critics do about popular fiction not considered realist. He makes a point to argue that in high culture realism gets a bad rap; writers don't want their work to be considered realist. This might be something to acknowledge in my writing. I should say that instead of defending one or the other, because clearly that isn't even concrete (who the underdog in literary criticism is ambiguous or debatable), why not throw out the binary all together?
"What has become the standard case against realism rests on objections that may be grouped under two heads. Realist representation is said to be naively transparent and malignantly totalistic. On the one hand, realism supposedly promises its reader a "direct' mirroring of reality, one that provides "literal transcriptions of reality, forms in which, as it were, reality writes itself." On the other hand, realism supposedly attempts to make the world of the bourgeoisie seem "natural" and "full," thereby giving its vision of reality a peremptory power over our imaginations" (Shaw 9). [the quote here is footnoted as Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979, 24).
Showing posts with label secondary source reflection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label secondary source reflection. Show all posts
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
HG Wells: Modernity and the Movies
Keith Williams.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.
Technology (esp. film) was treated by Victorians with the same supernatural awe as Sherlock Holmes' powers of deduction...."visual conjuring." "By the autumn of 1896 stage magician Georges Melies was experimenting with deliberate visual conjuring made possible by editing and 'stop motion effects'"(Williams 4).
Williams uses the term "realist of the fantastic" to describe Wells. He attributes this term to a letter Joseph Conrad wrote in 1898.
The dissolve = being in two places at one time.
The time traveller's invention resembles visual gadgets of the time, like the kintetoscope. "It's posssible, as Terry Ramsaye argued in 1926, that Wells's machine is more like Edison's kinetoscope: its motion is controlled by a lever not unlike the kinetoscope's crank and it gives a 'private', individual view (although not a miniaturised one). The kinteoscope also afforded the entertainment novelty of seeing ordinary actions temporally speeded up or reversed" (Williams 27-28).
The Time Machine questions human perception of time and The Invisible Man questions human perception of space! (Film questions both of these things....inspiration?)
Edmund Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of th Fallacies of Perception (London: Walter Scott, 1897). *****CHECK THIS OUT
"Even more so than the simulacral moving picture, the perfection of the synchronised soundtrack was promoted as a guarantee of the medium's faithful mimiesis of a bodily reality, an extension of the tendency to offer representations as unmediated perceptions, as Armstrong documents. It was argued that whereas film-images can never be anything more than illusions of movement in three-dimensional space, projected from static frames on a two=dimensional surface, recorded sound when played back was an actual vibration of air layers authentically apprehended by the ear..."(Williams 57).
"Suffice it to say that, in the 1890s, the striking convergences between Wells's scientific romances and stories and the new visual technology established a slender but vital critical synergy between literature and the upstart, popular medium, which much two-way traffic has re-energised ever since" (Williams 48).
"Thus Wells' initial coup as COnrad's 'realist of the fantastic' explicitly focuses on the very boundary between virtualism and reality, just as that ambiguity would come to characterise the visual culture of modernity exemplified by cinema. Similarly, like the medium as it evolved, Wells's machine is, as Bignell puts it, 'a curious mixture of scientific experiment and fairground thrills.' The Time Traveller describes the invention's motion as a kind of 'switchback' (TM 19). (Pioneer director D.W. Griffith would use exactly the same metaphor for the interruption of temporal continuity in cinematic narrative by the past.) Thus the connection between Wells and Paul is a perfect illustration of Jean-Louis Baudry's argument that cinema grew out of a cultural desire 'to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions'." (Williams 30).
After pointing out that the Time Traveller is accused by the Meidcal Man of being a conjurer ("like the ghost you showed us last Christmas?), Williams says "Film was the modern medium in which the conjuror's art became consummately invisible and it was no wonder that magic shops became frequent subjects of early British stop-motion animation. Nevertheless, as Wells acknowledged, it rendered the most fantastic impossibilities paradoxically 'hyperreal'"(Williams 45). (He's talking about this in the context of Wells' short story, "The Magic Shop" 1903.)
absent presences
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.
Technology (esp. film) was treated by Victorians with the same supernatural awe as Sherlock Holmes' powers of deduction...."visual conjuring." "By the autumn of 1896 stage magician Georges Melies was experimenting with deliberate visual conjuring made possible by editing and 'stop motion effects'"(Williams 4).
Williams uses the term "realist of the fantastic" to describe Wells. He attributes this term to a letter Joseph Conrad wrote in 1898.
The dissolve = being in two places at one time.
The time traveller's invention resembles visual gadgets of the time, like the kintetoscope. "It's posssible, as Terry Ramsaye argued in 1926, that Wells's machine is more like Edison's kinetoscope: its motion is controlled by a lever not unlike the kinetoscope's crank and it gives a 'private', individual view (although not a miniaturised one). The kinteoscope also afforded the entertainment novelty of seeing ordinary actions temporally speeded up or reversed" (Williams 27-28).
The Time Machine questions human perception of time and The Invisible Man questions human perception of space! (Film questions both of these things....inspiration?)
Edmund Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of th Fallacies of Perception (London: Walter Scott, 1897). *****CHECK THIS OUT
"Even more so than the simulacral moving picture, the perfection of the synchronised soundtrack was promoted as a guarantee of the medium's faithful mimiesis of a bodily reality, an extension of the tendency to offer representations as unmediated perceptions, as Armstrong documents. It was argued that whereas film-images can never be anything more than illusions of movement in three-dimensional space, projected from static frames on a two=dimensional surface, recorded sound when played back was an actual vibration of air layers authentically apprehended by the ear..."(Williams 57).
"Suffice it to say that, in the 1890s, the striking convergences between Wells's scientific romances and stories and the new visual technology established a slender but vital critical synergy between literature and the upstart, popular medium, which much two-way traffic has re-energised ever since" (Williams 48).
"Thus Wells' initial coup as COnrad's 'realist of the fantastic' explicitly focuses on the very boundary between virtualism and reality, just as that ambiguity would come to characterise the visual culture of modernity exemplified by cinema. Similarly, like the medium as it evolved, Wells's machine is, as Bignell puts it, 'a curious mixture of scientific experiment and fairground thrills.' The Time Traveller describes the invention's motion as a kind of 'switchback' (TM 19). (Pioneer director D.W. Griffith would use exactly the same metaphor for the interruption of temporal continuity in cinematic narrative by the past.) Thus the connection between Wells and Paul is a perfect illustration of Jean-Louis Baudry's argument that cinema grew out of a cultural desire 'to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions'." (Williams 30).
After pointing out that the Time Traveller is accused by the Meidcal Man of being a conjurer ("like the ghost you showed us last Christmas?), Williams says "Film was the modern medium in which the conjuror's art became consummately invisible and it was no wonder that magic shops became frequent subjects of early British stop-motion animation. Nevertheless, as Wells acknowledged, it rendered the most fantastic impossibilities paradoxically 'hyperreal'"(Williams 45). (He's talking about this in the context of Wells' short story, "The Magic Shop" 1903.)
absent presences
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence
By Lawrence Frank
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Frank sees Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man everywhere in Holmes. He sees Holmes' philosophy as representative of a shift in worldview post-Darwin, specifically in terms of constructing a history that has no linear origin. The evidence we have is indicative of many vectors; there's no way to unfold a neat and tidy timeline.
He also talks about Arthur Conan Doyle's loss of faith (in Christianity) and turn to agnosticism. Frank then goes on to argue that this influenced Holmes' methods.
"Darwin continued, to write of "the living machinery of nature" (p. 199), appropriating the language of Paley's Natural Theology only to mock it. He suggested that the formerly static Book of Nature was now to be read as a Book of Life that records "the incessant changes to which the organic and inorganic world has been exposed"(Frank 145). --> The "Book of Life" is Holmes' published article.
John Tyndall's "Scientific Use of the Imagination."
"By the time of the serial publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the new historical consciousness had apparently triumphed in England. Doyle would seem to acknowledge this triumph by organizing his novel upon a model that would be immediately accessible to his readers. Dr. Mortimer's walking stick, that "accidental souvenir," is akin to the comparative anatomist's fossil bone or to the geologist's pebble. Like the watch in The Sign of Four (1890), the stick becomes a piece of fragmentary evidence by which Watson, following France's Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) or England's own Richard Owen (1804-1892), reconstructs not a geological epoch or an extinct animal but a living man" (Frank 156).
***Mantell's The Wonders of Geology (1838). "The geologist and the detective -- for Mantell can be seen as both -- inhabit a world of signs that to the unseeing eyes of others do not exist. Each performs an act bordering on the magical to conjure up meanings out of objects and traces that seem to point to some historical process or succession of events. It is not surprising that Watson, returning from his club after Dr. Mortimer's visit, has an almost hallucinatory experience....The geologist and the detective are sorcerers, part philologists, part Poe-esque cryptographers, living after Babel, who consult literal and figurative documents no longer written in a single, unchanging language"(Frank 162).
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Frank sees Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man everywhere in Holmes. He sees Holmes' philosophy as representative of a shift in worldview post-Darwin, specifically in terms of constructing a history that has no linear origin. The evidence we have is indicative of many vectors; there's no way to unfold a neat and tidy timeline.
He also talks about Arthur Conan Doyle's loss of faith (in Christianity) and turn to agnosticism. Frank then goes on to argue that this influenced Holmes' methods.
"Darwin continued, to write of "the living machinery of nature" (p. 199), appropriating the language of Paley's Natural Theology only to mock it. He suggested that the formerly static Book of Nature was now to be read as a Book of Life that records "the incessant changes to which the organic and inorganic world has been exposed"(Frank 145). --> The "Book of Life" is Holmes' published article.
John Tyndall's "Scientific Use of the Imagination."
"By the time of the serial publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the new historical consciousness had apparently triumphed in England. Doyle would seem to acknowledge this triumph by organizing his novel upon a model that would be immediately accessible to his readers. Dr. Mortimer's walking stick, that "accidental souvenir," is akin to the comparative anatomist's fossil bone or to the geologist's pebble. Like the watch in The Sign of Four (1890), the stick becomes a piece of fragmentary evidence by which Watson, following France's Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) or England's own Richard Owen (1804-1892), reconstructs not a geological epoch or an extinct animal but a living man" (Frank 156).
***Mantell's The Wonders of Geology (1838). "The geologist and the detective -- for Mantell can be seen as both -- inhabit a world of signs that to the unseeing eyes of others do not exist. Each performs an act bordering on the magical to conjure up meanings out of objects and traces that seem to point to some historical process or succession of events. It is not surprising that Watson, returning from his club after Dr. Mortimer's visit, has an almost hallucinatory experience....The geologist and the detective are sorcerers, part philologists, part Poe-esque cryptographers, living after Babel, who consult literal and figurative documents no longer written in a single, unchanging language"(Frank 162).
Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siecle
By Andrew Smith
New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.
This book turned out to be a lot less helpful than I would have thought. Some of the historical context might be useful to return to, as Smith starts out with Nordau and Lombroso and then names almost every other doctor/sexologist/scientist who had relevant theories.
Smith's overall argument is that a lot of these scientific theories (which, like all scientific theories, we can read as cultural narratives or ideologies), reflected or responded to anxiety about middle class professional masculinities at the end of the century. (Cue Oscar Wilde's scandal.) He tries to tie together issues of gender, sexuality, nationalism, and science, and I think it just ends up being too much (he even admits that his project was too ambitious in his conclusion...weird).
One idea that was helpful for me was the link between all this cultural context and the figure of the scientist. All the scientist characters I'll be talking about are male, and I'm going to have to address that somehow. In his Doyle chapter Smith argues that Holmes both represents the conflation of rationality and masculinity but also operates outside the bounds of what is culturally acceptable (i.e. he is not interested in heterosexual romance or domestic bliss).
New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.
This book turned out to be a lot less helpful than I would have thought. Some of the historical context might be useful to return to, as Smith starts out with Nordau and Lombroso and then names almost every other doctor/sexologist/scientist who had relevant theories.
Smith's overall argument is that a lot of these scientific theories (which, like all scientific theories, we can read as cultural narratives or ideologies), reflected or responded to anxiety about middle class professional masculinities at the end of the century. (Cue Oscar Wilde's scandal.) He tries to tie together issues of gender, sexuality, nationalism, and science, and I think it just ends up being too much (he even admits that his project was too ambitious in his conclusion...weird).
One idea that was helpful for me was the link between all this cultural context and the figure of the scientist. All the scientist characters I'll be talking about are male, and I'm going to have to address that somehow. In his Doyle chapter Smith argues that Holmes both represents the conflation of rationality and masculinity but also operates outside the bounds of what is culturally acceptable (i.e. he is not interested in heterosexual romance or domestic bliss).
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