English 575 -- Seminar in Literary Criticism @ kutztown.edu

Want to participate in a grad conference?

Jennifer — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:06:00 +0000

I just saw this link on UPenn’s CFP (Call for Papers) site. If you’re going to be sticking around in English studies, this is a mandatory resource for you!

Here’s what they’re looking for (if you have any questions, feel free to email me):

The Artfulness of Play: Bridging Creative and Theoretical Discourses (Sept 25 – 27, 2009)

full name / name of organization:

University of Western Ontario, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism

contact email:

theoryconference@gmail.com

cfp categories:

african-american

american

classical_studies

cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches

eighteenth_century

ethnicity_and_national_identity

film_and_television

gender_studies_and_sexuality

graduate_conferences

international_conferences

poetry

popular_culture

postcolonial

renaissance

rhetoric_and_composition

romantic

science_and_culture

theatre

theory

twentieth_century_and_beyond

victorian

Children, athletes, actors, and musicians all play. Can academics play too? What do we play? Numerous currents of contemporary thought, from Wittgenstein to Baudrillard and Derrida, highlight play as a site worthy of inquiry. However, play does not (cannot?) have a precise sense or definition, and therefore our aim will be to put ideas into play, to play with them.

Graduate students and artists are invited to participate in an interdisciplinary conference regarding the concept of play. Academic papers, artwork (visual and performance), and film (short and feature length) are welcome.

The conference will take place between Friday, September 25th, and Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. We are particularly interested in proposals which engage our topic in relation to Politics, Aesthetics, and Psychoanalysis, although applicants need not be limited by this suggestion.

Abstract submissions of 150 – 200 words are due May 15th, 2009. We are also accepting proposals for panel topics. If submitting a panel suggestion, please provide 3 sub-topics for a single panel in addition to recommending 3 coinciding abstracts.

Please send abstracts, along with your name, e-mail address, and institution to theoryconference@gmail.com. Please note that artworks and films must be submitted digitally, along with a description of the work. Presentations will not be required for artworks or films.

Compact disks for film and visual art proposals may be sent to conference organizers c/o Melanie Caldwell-Clark, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, Somerville House, Rm. 2345A, London, Ontario N6A 3K7

For further information, please visit http://www.uwo.ca/theory/News/Conferences.html

Females in Movies

sheaja02 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:18:54 +0000

Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” goes over how women are depicted in movies and film. She notes three ‘looks’ that a female gets in films: the first is how a man sees the female, the second is that of the audience, and the third is male audience’s perception of the female character as his own sex object.

The reason I chose to write about this particular article is because I’m hoping it’ll help me put together some more content for my final paper. These three looks can be seen for various characters throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There are the female characters McMurphy brings into the asylum and the different nurses, particularly the head nurse. The female characters McMurphy brings into the asylum are there simply to liven up the party and get one of the characters laid to which the head nurse then emasculates him for doing such a thing. Within mere moments women are depicted as easy and emasculating. The male viewer does see women in this movie as either sexually beneficial to men or oppressive to men. So even though the head nurse is an emasculating figure, she is still a sex object as she is taking that element away from the male character. Whether it is the audience or the reader, the depiction matches Mulvey’s outlook as the female character is scene in a negative light as a shallow character with not much substance.

Rock on Walter

eric_fritz — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:49:04 +0000

I guess it’s only fitting that I present on Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” on the eve of our final meeting since it’s the first piece I was familiar with prior to enrolling in our seminar since my last presentation on Adorno in Week 2 of our class.

What I love about Benjamin, and in fact all cultural criticism is that it deals with art in a political way (or politics in an artful way). Very often we’re led to believe they are unrelated and separate pursuits however I find that they are so closely related that to mention one without the other is almost worthless. Certainly when discussing political art this seems fairly obvious. It’s art that is used in the dissemination of a political ideology. However what I believe Benjamin is speaking of is that all art is a product of a specific time and place. It is a cultural creation that embodies the beliefs of that particular time/place continuum or space. Not only this but it is also a product of the collective influences that had exerted their force on that culture up to and including that point in time. To reproduce a work of art is rob it of that essence, or as he puts it, its aura. I love it because it gets back to this whole idea of the culture industry that we discussed. By commodifying a piece of art we essentially kill that art. By becoming a product it ceases to be a work of creativity. Of course Benjamin, unlike his fellow Frankurt school member Adorno, did not see the mechanical reproduction of art as an entirely bad thing. Because while it would rob art of its creative essence it would also destroy the elitism that art embodied.

I’ve read responses (not from this class) that seem to paint Benjamin as only being scared of increasing technology and its effect on art. That our ability to incorporate technology into art some how would have eased Benjamin’s fears. I’m just not so sure that would have been enough. I’m not all that convinced that he was merely worried that technology and art wouldn’t be able to coexist. I think he was warning us that the culture industry originating from the mechanized reproduction of art would sound the death knell of art as we know it. And it could be that maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Benjamin wasn’t as deathly afraid of the cultural bankruptcy that would result from the growth of the culture industry as I am. Then again, he had the privilege of dying before the premieres of American Idol and Rock of Love.

I wanna write a novel that has “grabability”!

pirateblogger — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:41:39 +0000

I really never thought of the publishing end of writing. To me, if I did think about it it would entail a little bit of editing and a little bit of marketing. However, I really never thought of it as having so much bearing on the text and the conveyance of the text as Rachel Malik expressed in “Horizons of the Publishable: Publishing In/As Literary Studies.” At one point she discusses how different categories of publishing actually support and continue certain genres. For instance she describes the particulars of the publishing of celebrity memoirs or crime stories or educational books. It seems to me that publishing or the publisher is this “gateway” or passage by which the writer connects with the audience and it is much more complext than printing the book and putting it on the shelf. It was interesting to get the insight into what makes one genere popular at one point in history and what makes another popular at some other point. It seems along with the particular audience and culture that publishing and the way a certain period of authors are presented in published form does affect the popularity and readability of the works. Although I definitely see the influence of publishing and was not aware of the extent it does affect works and, for that matter, whole periods of works, I still have a tendency to elevate the text itself. But, this still creates a problem in deciding what exactly is the text. It goes back to Barthes as the text vs. the work ideal. I try to be open-minded; however, I still find myself coming up against the post-modern thought process where meaning is relative or in flux. In a sense, I would like to think that my beloved works of literature have a determined set meaning –values, ideals, and inspiration, with some room for interpretation.

I thought Yampbell’s article about “Juding a Book by Its Cover…” was interesting and it seems logical that an attractive cover would attract more attention. However, I was surprised to see how much it really mattered. It sort of reminds me of how I have to adapt to teaching literature in a day that is dominated so much by graphics. At times I accept my role and come up with new creative ways to entice students to read and discuss literatue. There are Internet web quests, video-making presentations, character my-space pages, etc. At other times I think, Just read the damn book! I am a language arts teacher not a graphic arts teacher, and re-packaging great literatue in a more tolerable, attractive medium is much like hiding a pill in a slab of meat so the dog will swallow it with ease.

e-Horizons: The Internet and publishing

devonk7 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:39:17 +0000

When I was reading Rachel Malik’s article “Horizons of the Publishable,” it made me think of Internet publishing. Malik doesn’t touch specifically on this topic, but I believe, especially as a wrap-up to our semester, it deserves a closer look. Malik argues that publishing is at the center of literary studies (707); in the case of Internet writing this is certainly true. The Internet has broken down the final barrier to the publishable; anyone (with access, of course) can automatically switch from reader to author. Wikis, actually, accomplish just that since anyone can edit the text they are reading. Imagine if we were reading Great Expectations (to borrow Malik’s example) in Wiki form and we didn’t like how Dickens wrote a passage; we could simply change it. If all writing were to occur on the Internet eventually, would we even have classics anymore? We might even have to change our definition of an author.

I wonder in what ways would (or does) literary criticism study Internet texts? I know we haven’t discussed many different approaches to analyzing web writing and I wonder if lit. crit. examines them at all. With the proliferation of the Internet, we may begin to study these texts more than we do now. Because anyone can be his own publisher on the web, I think Internet writing is devalued because the “gatekeeping” function of the publisher is lost. But, is it possible that a story, published on a website, become a classic in the future? How do we determine what is quality and what isn’t?

Sorry about all the questions–I don’t have answers to some of these issues, but they are interesting to think about. Where will books and publishing will go in the future? I for one, hope that print books never dissapear, (ah, the feeling, the smell!) but am willing to integrate them with technology.

Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” in “American Beauty”

Nick Roman — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:49:11 +0000

(Spoilers to “American Beauty” ahead, just in case you haven’t seen it. In which case, where have you been the last ten years?!)

“The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (1176)

Here, Mulvey seems to be taking the Hollywood genre movie to task for its conception of the female form as a scopophilic commodity. In reading Mulvey and her theories on feminine depiction in film and masculine reaction to the feminine object (male fantasy-as-it-intersects with diegesis), I was reminded of this scene from the film “American Beauty.”

Kevin Spacey is going to a basketball game with his wife to watch their daughter cheer. However, his fixation with his daughter’s friend (played by Mena Suvari), interrupts what had, up to that point, been the story of a man with no self-esteem, a dead-end job, a stale marriage, and a daughter that hated him. With the alien presence of a sexualized object being inserted into the narrative, the story shifts to where it is now about Spacey wanting to possess that object. The constant dream visions of Suvari’s character envisioned by Spacey throughout the film serve to fetishize the sexualized object so that “it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (1177). However, at the film’s conclusion (which I couldn’t find online), right when he is about to possess her wholly, she reveals that she is a virgin. In effect, the sexual object is stripped of its mysticism, as up until that point Suvari had given the impression of being a sexually-experienced vixen of sorts, which informed Spacey’s perception of her, a perception that allowed for him to fetishize her.

I’ve tried to think of other movies that pull this sort of thing off as effectively as “American Beauty” and, outside of the few Hitchcock films Mulvey mentions in her article, I can’t think of any. Any know of any other films that implement the techniques Mulvey mentions? If those movies are any thing like “American Beauty,” I’d really like to know so I can check them out. Love that movie to pieces.

Cloverfield

brian00reider — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:34:02 +0000

Benjamin says “the camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole.” I love this because it is the foundation of modern video. I don’t even say cinema because I feel true expression is found in the armature realm these days. The camera is just as important as any actor on the screen. The camera becomes its own character that may have its own narrative. There is even no guarantee that the camera’s narrative is even congruent with the narrative of the story. It is fashionable these days, in modern film, to include that “home movie” moment in a film. We first saw this with The Blair Witch Project and again more recently with Cloverfield. Some decry this as bad camerawork but I feel it does make the spectator see the subject matter from a new point, even if the camera’s “life” seems to work against the story being told on screen.

“I can’t see the monster!” people cry.

“Yea well, that’s the point,” I reply.

Benjamin also says that the audience identification with the actor is really identification with the camera. The acting in Cloverfield may have been top notch but if the audience is just getting sickened by the camera, they’re going to end up disliking everything.

Laura Mulvey, A Clockwork Orange, and My Declining Mental Health

loriberryman — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:47:37 +0000

4/19/09 – Lori Berryman

I’ve spent the last couple weeks sorting through mounds of Aesthetic criticism and watching/re-watching A Clockwork Orange while also reading/re-reading both the British version and American version of the novel for my final paper. So forgive me if I seem a little pre-occupied with the movie version as I attempt to relate Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey to the movie version.

Maybe it’s coincidence that it just so happens that Mulvey seems to be speaking directly about A Clockwork Orange (movie version). I think specifically of the scene where Alex and his gang of cohorts are about to rape a woman whose house they just broke into. The background of this setting: bright vivid colors, interesting furniture, and oh yeah – a GIANT penis statue, all contribute to the fact that the woman is meant to be seen as an object as well. While watching this movie, you get that voyeuristic feeling, as Mulvey describes, and we see woman in the traditional role where “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their apprearnace coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked at-ness” (Mulvey 1175).

In this scene, Alex takes a scissors and cuts off parts of the woman’s clothing. First, of course, the breasts are shown, further contributing to the fact that the audience is supposed to regard her as another object in the room. As Mulvey puts it, “The woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look” (Mulvey 1177). She would also agree, that outside of the book, the movie version is far more powerful because cinema allows to go beyond “highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness” and builds upon “the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself” (Mulvey 1180).

So perhaps I’ve just been so consumed with this movie in the past couple weeks that now I’m relating absolutely everything I read to it, but I really thought that everything she was saying in her essay pertained to the movie, and directly that scene alone.

Movie Voyeurism

meganmiller1 — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:19:07 +0000

One of the interesting aspects of the Laura Mulvey essay was her assertion that the movie-going audience are just a group of voyeurs, enjoying prying into other people’s personal lives with a desire to become the images of perfection displayed on the screen. Mulvey says, “Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer” (1174).

While Mulvey’s essay deals specifically with cinema, could this idea of “scopophilia” be applied to literature as well? As readers, aren’t we offered the chance to silently enter a world that is different from our own? Filled with characters and problems, we are able to stand back and “watch”–in one sense of the word–the story that is unfolding.

But without the visual images that a book obviously cannot provide, would the audience still come away with the castration anxiety, ego libido, and the passive/active influences which Mulvey says the actors and actresses on the screen provide to the (male) audience? It seems to me that the audience of a book wouldn’t find quite the same level of psychological anxiety that they may get from a film.

The Couch Potato Blight

nancyjean47 — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 12:49:59 +0000

We seem to have come full circle in our search for truth from Plato’s dismissal of poets to Benjamin critiquing the film. Both seem to say that the masses are too unsophisticated to sift out the reality of the work. I guess I am approaching this from being trapped in my own culture (Derrida?) so I expect “the semblance of reality” to be absent from film. And I like the performances of actors who can transcend their own reality- I value the performances of Daniel Day Lewis, Kenneth Branagh, Meryl Streep because they are so far out of the mainstream.

I do agree with many of Benjamin’s views however. Last week I heard about an allegation of police brutality which had been captured on two iphones. One depicted policy brutality and another – same scene different angle- showed violence on the part of the perpetrator. So what is the truth here? Depends on how “the camera changes in respect to the performance”. A cameraman can also affect viewing with that shaky camera technique. I get so nauseous from all that spinning around that like Duhamel I feel like “My thoughts have been replaced by moving images”.

And I am concerned about research indicating that TV, video games, etc can physically affect children’s brains. Benjamin writes. “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning point of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is by contemplation alone”. These visual images really do interfer with contemplation. Did you ever get entranced with a video game so completely that you have those floating images present when you close your eyes for sleep? (This experience was too weird for me, scary- I had to cut it off cold turkey. It had to be short circuiting my brain.) Witness the video game addiction, the cell-phone fascination, the 5-7 hours of TV kids watch each day and imagine the ramifications of all those images. And we have downgraded the word contemplation- it is now synonymous with boredom.

Benjamin was concerned with fascism and communism and the use of film to quell the masses. I think the same occurs in a democracy, capitalist system. Watching TV and films “require no attention”; they make us passive, they alienate us. We need more media literacy examining our own culture.

Ok, I’ll stop-please forgive. I know I’ll be biting my tongue a lot tomorrow night in class!