Narrating the Present-Past in Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Laski
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Theory ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
First Century ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Black Equality

This chapter finds in Frederick Douglass’s final autobiography a case study for what it means to narrate the present-past. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass points backward to bondage, bringing the author face to face with his former master. For nineteenth- and twenty-first-century readers alike, the tableau of the ex-slave sharing a sentimental moment with the man who once abused him suggests that the radical abolitionist had become a reactionary. But this chapter advances a different interpretation of the signal episode. By underscoring the elisions, revisions, and omissions that distinguish this moment in Life and Times from contemporaneous news coverage of the event, and by deploying narrative theory to illuminate both accounts, the chapter argues that Douglass’s work enacts the challenge of fighting for black equality amid a political landscape that posed the forgetting of bondage as the condition for national reunion.

“Is an Archive Enough?”: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-165
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Fest
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Rachel Blau Duplessis ◽  
Film And Video

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis's various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis's work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext's phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.

The significance of aesthetic landscape appreciation to modern geotourism provision

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Hose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Lake District ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Lake District ◽  
European Engagement ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Nineteeth Century

Many of the stakeholders involved in modern geotourism provision lack awareness of how the concept essentially ermeged, developed and was defined in Europe. Such stakeholders are unaware of how many of the modern approaches to landscape promotion and interpretation actually have nineteeth century antecedents. Similarly, many of the apparently modern threats to, and issues around, the protection of wild and fragile landscapes and geoconservation of specific geosites also first emerged in the ninetheeth century; the solutions that were developed to address those threats and issues were first applied in the early twentieth century and were subsequently much refined by the opening of the twenty-first century. However, the European engagement with wild and fragile landscapes as places to be appreciated and explored began much earlier than the nineteenth century and can be traced back to Renaissance times. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a summary consideration of this rather neglected aspect of geotourism, initially by considering its modern recognition and definitions and then by examining the English Lake District (with further examples from Britain and Australia available at the website) as a particular case study along with examples.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Linda Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
The Face ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Unknown Case

The introduction explains the crucial significance and “agency” of various media to the debates over the vote and to suffragists and antisuffragists, arguing that print newspapers and magazines are not merely sources of information about the movement, although this is largely how news coverage has been treated by historians and rhetorical scholars. The introduction uses a relatively unknown case of a Missouri suffrage paper to exemplify suffragist experiences, illustrating both their strategic creativity in the face of money problems and their decision making regarding when to abandon their suffrage organ. Then, a twenty-first-century website named for one of the earliest suffrage periodicals is used to show the contemporary postfeminist depoliticization of suffrage politics. In the end, suffragists’ flexibility and adaptability, their willingness to experiment, and their openness to working with an array of reform-minded partners were probably all crucial to their eventual victory.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 223-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenio Cusumano
Keyword(s):  
Security Policy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Security Policies ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
International Norm ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Traditional Sense ◽  
Twenty First Century

The Conclusion examines the nature and scope of diplomatic security policies worldwide, the factors underlying their variations, their effectiveness in securing diplomats, and their implications for the conduct of diplomacy. It provides novel insights into the study of security and diplomacy alike. Most notably, it underscores the importance of organizational interests and cultures in shaping protective arrangements, conceptualizes diplomatic inviolability as an international norm, and posits the existence of a trade-off between effective diplomacy and effective diplomatic security. Arguing that diplomacy in a traditional sense has partly lost its importance has become commonplace. States’ reluctance to close missions in dangerous locations, arguably the most effective security policy available, vindicates the enduring importance of traditional, face-to-face diplomacy in the twenty-first century.

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