Faulkner's Media Romance

Author(s):  
Julian Murphet

This book reassesses William Faulkner’s engagement with modern media technologies and transportation systems. It argues that Faulkner’s inveterate interest in figures of flight, automobiles, radio, phonographs, photographs, and other modern techno-media was secretly motivated by a profound and ongoing aesthetic tug of war in his writing. He resolved this tension between artistic modernism and the vanished worlds of antebellum romance by a recourse to tropes borrowed from the modern media system. These tropes masked his investment in romance materials, giving it a modern overlay, and allowed him to look critically upon the persistence of superannuated romance within the modern media ecology itself. This economical and generative strategy allowed Faulkner to “eat his cake and have it” as regards those romance materials and to make entirely novel moves in the rapidly changing form of the novel between 1929 and 1936.

Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (001) ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Yelena GORYACHEVA

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 486-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett R. Caraway

This article outlines a socio-political theory appropriate for the study of the ecological repercussions of contemporary media technologies. More specifically, this approach provides a means of assessing the material impacts of media technologies and the representations of capitalist ecological crises. This approach builds on the work of ecological economists, ecosocialist scholars, and Marx’s writings on the conditions of production to argue that capitalism necessarily results in ecological destabilization. Taking Apple’s 2016 Environmental Responsibility Report as a case study, the article uses the theory to analyze Apple’s responses to ecological crises. The article asserts that Apple’s reactions are emblematic of the capitalist compulsion for increasing rates of productivity. However, unless the matter/energy savings achieved through higher rates of productivity surpass the overall increase in the flow of matter/energy in production, ecological crises will continue. Ultimately, capital accumulation ensures continued ecological destabilization.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312199953
Author(s):  
Paul K Jones

Political communication studies has a long tradition of ‘crisis talk’ regarding the fate of public communication. Now, however, the field itself faces a kind of existential crisis as its core assumptions of ‘normal’ political communication are daily undermined. This ‘liberal normalcy’ shares much with orthodoxies in populism studies, most notably a tendency to bracket out demagogic communication, both in historical fascist regimes and democracies. Yet correcting these failings is not simply a matter of rejecting liberal models for left-populist ones. Rather, both fields need to broaden their historical parameters and deepen their theoretical frameworks. The article draws on the Weberian conception of modern demagogy and its revision in the wake of 'modern media' by Shils and Adorno. It further argues that a critical reworking of Hallin and Mancini’s media systems approach could benefit both fields. For Hallin and Mancini’s socio-historical use of Weberian ideal-typification complements Worsley’s never-completed plan for an ideal-typification of modes of populism and demagogic leadership.


Bibliosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 56-63
Author(s):  
V. Yu. Bal

The article discusses modern audioformats – audiobook, audio series and audio podcast. Now these formats have gained great popularity and demand, considerable market weight with their own segment, the growth of which experts note. The research material is audio products of the modern market, which reflect the trends in the development of audio literature in the current media environment. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the consideration of an audiobook, an audio series and an audio podcast in the context of a new stage in the development of audio culture. The problem of popularity of the studied audio products is considered in direct dependence on audio reading. It is understood as a modern modification of auditory reading, as a reader’s practice due to the qualitative changes in the material and technical base for creating audio records, for their copying and use. The analysis of audio formats in the informational, sociocultural and cognitive aspect of the modern media consumption allows the determination new editorial approaches to the work with audio texts. Conclusions are as follows: one can observe the tendency to transit from voicing printed texts to creating texts specially for voicing; there is a reduction in the novel form, stories become popular; the editing of audio books and audio series requires support from sound design principles; the editorial and director’s task on preparing podcasts is associated with the compositional alignment of several voices of storytellers, forming a single ideological and thematic field.


Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.


Author(s):  
Anthony M. Nadler

This concluding chapter discusses the intellectual resources of critical media studies and applies them to debates about the future of news. The changes taking place in news media concern not only content but the very modes through which people engage the media in everyday life, as well as the ways media connect individuals to larger communities. Although interactive media is not inherently destined to level hierarchies of power, it is certainly possible that societal appropriations of new media technologies could mean a reworking of the infrastructure that regulates which ideas and visions circulate from point to point in the media system. The issue lies in how crucial decisions at this critical juncture will be made and what course they will set for the years to come.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Bruns

As the Journal of Media Innovations comes into existence, this article reflects on the first and most obvious question: just what do we mean by “media innovations”? Drawing on the examples of a range of recent innovations in media technologies and practices, initiated by a variety of media audiences, users, professionals, and providers, it explores the interplay between the different drivers of innovation and the effects of such innovation on the complex frameworks of contemporary society and the media ecology which supports it. In doing so, this article makes a number of key observations: first, it notes that media innovation is an innovation in media practices at least as much as in media technologies, and that changes to the practices of media both reflect and promote societal changes as well – media innovations are never just media technology innovations. Second, it shows that the continuing mediatisation of society, and the shift towards a more widespread participation of ordinary users as active content creators and media innovators, make it all the more important to investigate in detail these interlinked, incremental, everyday processes of media and societal change – media innovations are almost always also user innovations. Finally, it suggests that a full understanding of these processes as they unfold across diverse interleaved media spaces and complex societal structures necessarily requires a holistic perspective on media innovations, which considers the contemporary media ecology as a crucial constitutive element of societal structures and seeks to trace the repercussions of innovations across both media and society – media innovations are inextricably interlinked with societal innovations (even if, at times, they may not be considered to be improvements to the status quo).


2021 ◽  
Vol 273 ◽  
pp. 09006
Author(s):  
Diana Volkova ◽  
Elena Sklyarova ◽  
Inna Topchiy ◽  
Evgeniya Kosyanenko

The article discusses the development prospects of media technologies in the communication space in the context of the evolution of the education system, public health and museology in Russia and abroad. Basing on an interdisciplinary approach, historical-genetic and comparative research methods, the features of the use of modern media technologies and museology in the transition to a system of distance education and telemedicine are analyzed. While the XVI century had become a period of transition from manuscripts to printed editions, XIX century became the era of the industrial revolution, the beginning of the XXI century will go down as the "electronic-distance revolution", implemented by the graduates of the universities of the USSR, China, Denmark and the USA. It is concluded that in the context of the pandemic, a radical transformation of the education system, museology and health care has taken place. With the transition to distance education and telemedicine, the importance and demand for those universities, hospitals and museums has increased, which in a timely manner switched to the active use of modern media technologies. The importance of medical museology as a new branch of humanitarian knowledge, which determines the prospects for the progressive development of healthcare in the modern communication space, increases as well.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document