I was watching the 1933 film adaptation of The Invisible Man last night, and Danielle the other day had mentioned something about how film being born around this time might have influenced the way Victorians were thinking about reality and realism. I think I can parallel the "special effects" in the film with the crisis of seeing and knowing that the characters have in the narrative when confronted with the Invisible Man.
In the same way that the villagers in Wells' narrative cannot handle the fact that seeing does not correspond to knowing and being, spectators of James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) experience a more pleasurable horror when thinking about the film's ability to represent reality. These spectators judge the extent to which special effects in a film can alter reality as it is represented on screen. When Jack Griffin removes his head bandages for the first time, for example, one might cast a discerning gaze on his "face" to see if there are any traces of filmic trickery or illusion. When he, while only wearing a white shirt, dances in the air, a spectator of the film might try to find the "strings" that hold up that shirt, that assure us that the shirt is just a shirt and does not have an invisible man inside. Alternatively, when a scene like this is well done and the "strings" are undetectable, the spectator derives pleasure from entertaining the possibility of an unconventional reality.
It is TECHNOLOGY that allows filmmakers in 1933 to extend the boundaries of reality.
I need to do research on how the special effects were done in the film and what technology existed in the 1933 film industry.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Prospectus Section 1: Basic Aims and Proposed Argument
Part 1:
The roots of science fiction, as with all genres, have no clear origin, but one might point to the late Victorian period as one possible point of origin. Popular fiction of this period right around the turn of the century, while not identifying itself as part of a singular genre called science fiction, combined the scientific and the supernatural in a way not previously done.
The novel across Victorian England, of course, both high brow and low, exhibited a complicated hybridity of genres; genres that stand alone in other literary periods become, in the Victorian age, modes competing against other modes in a single text. Strains of the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, the Romantic, the melodramatic, etc., all circulated simultaneously and fluidly. This heteroglossia of genres in the novel fostered a literary environment in which the complex relationship between the scientific and the supernatural could precipitate. Novels during this time did not imitate the Gothic or other genres that had previously engaged and employed the supernatural, but rather they mutated in reaction to numerous and significant developments in science, technology, psychology, economics, and sociology. To some, whose preoccupation is with taxonomy and categorization, this relationship might mark the birth of science fiction.
But the aim of this dissertation is not to identify the origins of the science fiction genre or engage at all in such a debate. It will instead look at a set of closely related texts that have, in studies in Victorian literature, only recently been regarded as part of the period's literary canon, particularly when considering mainstream fictional realism. Situating these texts in their very specific literary history will then open up questions about several much larger histories - the history of the novel as a genre and a form, the history of genre in general, the history of science fiction, the history of realism, and the history of supernatural vs. scientific discourse. By examining these texts not to construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period but to synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, I hope to show that these popular novels, commonly essentialized as anti-realist, can contribute to a dialogue on realism. In many ways I will show that late Victorian popular fiction must participate in conversations about realism.
The roots of science fiction, as with all genres, have no clear origin, but one might point to the late Victorian period as one possible point of origin. Popular fiction of this period right around the turn of the century, while not identifying itself as part of a singular genre called science fiction, combined the scientific and the supernatural in a way not previously done.
The novel across Victorian England, of course, both high brow and low, exhibited a complicated hybridity of genres; genres that stand alone in other literary periods become, in the Victorian age, modes competing against other modes in a single text. Strains of the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, the Romantic, the melodramatic, etc., all circulated simultaneously and fluidly. This heteroglossia of genres in the novel fostered a literary environment in which the complex relationship between the scientific and the supernatural could precipitate. Novels during this time did not imitate the Gothic or other genres that had previously engaged and employed the supernatural, but rather they mutated in reaction to numerous and significant developments in science, technology, psychology, economics, and sociology. To some, whose preoccupation is with taxonomy and categorization, this relationship might mark the birth of science fiction.
But the aim of this dissertation is not to identify the origins of the science fiction genre or engage at all in such a debate. It will instead look at a set of closely related texts that have, in studies in Victorian literature, only recently been regarded as part of the period's literary canon, particularly when considering mainstream fictional realism. Situating these texts in their very specific literary history will then open up questions about several much larger histories - the history of the novel as a genre and a form, the history of genre in general, the history of science fiction, the history of realism, and the history of supernatural vs. scientific discourse. By examining these texts not to construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period but to synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, I hope to show that these popular novels, commonly essentialized as anti-realist, can contribute to a dialogue on realism. In many ways I will show that late Victorian popular fiction must participate in conversations about realism.
Possible Chapters
1. The Invisible Man (1897)
2. The Time Machine (1895)
3. Sherlock Holmes (1902) and Dracula (1897)
4. The Woman in White
[Green on my exam comments, talking about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula "....miss an opportunity to locate the novels more specifically within literary history. What difference might it make that these novels are both specifically from teh end of the century, and that they are both in the idiom of popular literature (Stevenson's famously written as a "shilling shocker") and not within the mainstream idiom of fictional realism..."
I think I might make this a central question to the dissertation. And that will solve my but these are all short novels problem. Trying to build a bridge between popular novels (or novellas) and classic realist novels (which we always think of as being longer). Are these texts dismissed as not novels because they aren't realist? Maybe scholars assume that the same experiments in realism and narrative representation don't happen in the novels I'm talking about because they are shorter than, say, Middlemarch.
I added Dracula here because I forgot that on my exam I tried to argue that Van Helsing relies on science to defeat Dracula. Green then pointed out that he does a mixture of science and superstition, such as garlic and stakes through the heart. This falls in line with the supernatural and scientific discourses coinciding in the same text in order to comprehensively get at realism (i.e. questioning the nature of what is real or reality).
2. The Time Machine (1895)
3. Sherlock Holmes (1902) and Dracula (1897)
4. The Woman in White
[Green on my exam comments, talking about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula "....miss an opportunity to locate the novels more specifically within literary history. What difference might it make that these novels are both specifically from teh end of the century, and that they are both in the idiom of popular literature (Stevenson's famously written as a "shilling shocker") and not within the mainstream idiom of fictional realism..."
I think I might make this a central question to the dissertation. And that will solve my but these are all short novels problem. Trying to build a bridge between popular novels (or novellas) and classic realist novels (which we always think of as being longer). Are these texts dismissed as not novels because they aren't realist? Maybe scholars assume that the same experiments in realism and narrative representation don't happen in the novels I'm talking about because they are shorter than, say, Middlemarch.
I added Dracula here because I forgot that on my exam I tried to argue that Van Helsing relies on science to defeat Dracula. Green then pointed out that he does a mixture of science and superstition, such as garlic and stakes through the heart. This falls in line with the supernatural and scientific discourses coinciding in the same text in order to comprehensively get at realism (i.e. questioning the nature of what is real or reality).
A way of narrowing down the short list.
Caroline Levine focuses on The Moonstone, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Adam Bede, and the Lifted Veil, and her major controversial argument (or at least the argument that I sense she was expecting to be scandalous in the field at the time) was that Wilkie Collins was in fact a realist. Thus, I think I should stay away from Collins, or rather mention him as Levine's pet and build from there. I guess Dickens would also be off limits because of this.
That leaves:
Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes (but which ones?)
and
HG Wells - The Time Machine and The Invisible Man
But then there still remains the novella problem. Should I keep Woman in White to bridge the gap between sensation novel and horror/SF novella?
That leaves:
Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes (but which ones?)
and
HG Wells - The Time Machine and The Invisible Man
But then there still remains the novella problem. Should I keep Woman in White to bridge the gap between sensation novel and horror/SF novella?
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Wow, that actually started to sound like chapter summaries.
Hmm...could this be a sign that I've narrowed down my texts from that slightly overweight list I provided earlier?
I think I still need Dickens to get my foot in the door, and I really don't want to let go of Wilkie Collins.
The other tricky thing here is that both of those potentially excluded authors would provide the works with female protagonists - Laura from The Woman in White and Esther from Bleak House. Would I really have to get into a whole gender discussion to acknowledge that I've chosen three novels written by white men about white men? I mean, it could easily be explained that the archetype of the "man of science" was presumably male...
I think I still need Dickens to get my foot in the door, and I really don't want to let go of Wilkie Collins.
The other tricky thing here is that both of those potentially excluded authors would provide the works with female protagonists - Laura from The Woman in White and Esther from Bleak House. Would I really have to get into a whole gender discussion to acknowledge that I've chosen three novels written by white men about white men? I mean, it could easily be explained that the archetype of the "man of science" was presumably male...
How does the supernatural or anti-realist fiction contribute to the realist project?
This dissertation will argue that works from genres historically considered to be anti-realist - the Victorian Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, and horror - are in fact taking up the same realist project as more readily accepted realist novels. One might assume that since a particular work does not overwhelmingly attempt to mimetically represent reality, to be objective, it then does not actually say anything about the process of representation. I would argue that the opposite is in fact true and it is precisely because many of these works contain strains of the "realistic" and the "fantastic" that they are able to reflect back upon a debate surrounding one's ability to capture reality, to perceive it and represent it in conventional ways. The realist project as recast by critics such as George Levine does not just attempt to produce the real but rather questions its very nature. It is a generative and volatile process rather than rote mimetic representation.
It is no coincidence, then, that in several of these narratives, figures of objectivity are the protagonists at the very center. Jack Griffin, Sherlock Holmes, the Time Traveller, and....are all men of science who encounter cases of the supernatural.
Griffin, in testing the limits of reality, renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment; this experiment not only allegorically represents the realist project, but the very existence of Griffin as an invisible man confounds the characters around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him. He is not represented in any tangible way. The epistemological crisis HG Wells stages here speaks directly to the realist experiment enacted by other authors.
Sherlock Holmes, while identifying himself as a professional detective, is one by way of science. In the first novel to feature Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays the detective as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally perpetuated assumptions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private. His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality. He also faces several seemingly supernatural cases, and his powers of deductive reasoning are often described in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic. When Watson describes an article written by Holmes, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity."
The Time Traveller of HG Wells' The Time Machine shares a similar approach to experimentation. His method is strictly scientific but manages to question the very fabric of time and our normal conceptions of how we move in space and time.
It is no coincidence, then, that in several of these narratives, figures of objectivity are the protagonists at the very center. Jack Griffin, Sherlock Holmes, the Time Traveller, and....are all men of science who encounter cases of the supernatural.
Griffin, in testing the limits of reality, renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment; this experiment not only allegorically represents the realist project, but the very existence of Griffin as an invisible man confounds the characters around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him. He is not represented in any tangible way. The epistemological crisis HG Wells stages here speaks directly to the realist experiment enacted by other authors.
Sherlock Holmes, while identifying himself as a professional detective, is one by way of science. In the first novel to feature Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays the detective as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally perpetuated assumptions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private. His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality. He also faces several seemingly supernatural cases, and his powers of deductive reasoning are often described in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic. When Watson describes an article written by Holmes, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity."
The Time Traveller of HG Wells' The Time Machine shares a similar approach to experimentation. His method is strictly scientific but manages to question the very fabric of time and our normal conceptions of how we move in space and time.
The Victorian Realist Project
[At the moment, I imagining this going in the "Current Scholarship" section of the prospectus.]
Critical debates in studies in Victorian literature have been, for several decades now, advocating for an expansion of the canon to include genres previously segregated from the classic realist novel. The high brow/low brow divide has already been questioned and to a certain extent broken, as evidenced by the critical trends in considering popular fiction in order to construct a more nuanced conception of the Victorian novel as a genre. This dissertation does not set out to simply reiterate that cry of outrage on behalf of the until recently less regarded popular novel, but rather hopes to use that as a starting point in continuing to examine how these popular genres, now that they've been invited to the table, add to critical conversations on the novel, genre, narration, realism, and representation.
Realism is at the heart of this ever-dissolving divide, and will inform all readings of Victorian novels performed here. Scholars in Victorian fiction have often taken cues from Victorians themselves, who also in their own historical moment had debates about the hierarchy of literary genres.
During the Victorian period realism and sensationalism were at times cast as a binary – some writers, such as Margaret Oliphant, would scorn sensation novels for their morally questionable plots, calling them “improper novels” and allying them with Romantic texts, and these criticisms helped to define realism against sensationalism and other non-realist genres. This is not, however, a productive way to categorize Victorian literature. As Thomas Hardy wrote in his literary notebooks, “The division of novels into sensational & anti-sen[sational] [is] a mistake – wh. Arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic & sen[sational]. A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree.” In the spirit of Hardy’s words, one should, instead of organizing Victorian literature by genre - which would imply a placement of certain works in realism and other works in sensationalism, and never the twain shall meet - use genre to place Victorian literature in the context of the ongoing intellectual and aesthetic project writers engaged in during the period, one that was constantly in flux.
George Levine is the major critic who argues in The Realistic Imagination that Victorians themselves were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today. He says, “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality.”
Other major critics to talk about:
Caroline Levine - The Serious Pleasures of Suspense
Srdjan Smajic - “supernatural realism”
Victorian critics: John Ruskin and Walter Pater
Critical debates in studies in Victorian literature have been, for several decades now, advocating for an expansion of the canon to include genres previously segregated from the classic realist novel. The high brow/low brow divide has already been questioned and to a certain extent broken, as evidenced by the critical trends in considering popular fiction in order to construct a more nuanced conception of the Victorian novel as a genre. This dissertation does not set out to simply reiterate that cry of outrage on behalf of the until recently less regarded popular novel, but rather hopes to use that as a starting point in continuing to examine how these popular genres, now that they've been invited to the table, add to critical conversations on the novel, genre, narration, realism, and representation.
Realism is at the heart of this ever-dissolving divide, and will inform all readings of Victorian novels performed here. Scholars in Victorian fiction have often taken cues from Victorians themselves, who also in their own historical moment had debates about the hierarchy of literary genres.
During the Victorian period realism and sensationalism were at times cast as a binary – some writers, such as Margaret Oliphant, would scorn sensation novels for their morally questionable plots, calling them “improper novels” and allying them with Romantic texts, and these criticisms helped to define realism against sensationalism and other non-realist genres. This is not, however, a productive way to categorize Victorian literature. As Thomas Hardy wrote in his literary notebooks, “The division of novels into sensational & anti-sen[sational]
George Levine is the major critic who argues in The Realistic Imagination that Victorians themselves were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today. He says, “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality.”
Other major critics to talk about:
Caroline Levine - The Serious Pleasures of Suspense
Srdjan Smajic - “supernatural realism”
Victorian critics: John Ruskin and Walter Pater
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