Modernism and the Media History of Obscenity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Media History ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Lady Chatterley's Lover ◽  
The Way

This chapter surveys the history of obscenity in English jurisprudence, from the invention of obscene libel as a crime in the eighteenth century through the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and its 1959 reform. It draws on Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler to argue that the invention of obscenity, and its subsequent definitions and redefinitions, reflect changes in media ecology and technology. It begins by examining the 1960 trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, before surveying the history of obscenity, and concluding with readings of the way the technologically mediated character of obscenity is reflected in both James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

scholarly journals Successful Paranoia: Friedrich Kittler, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and the History of Science

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-131
Author(s):  
Henning Schmidgen
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Media History ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Hermann Von Helmholtz ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer ◽  
History Of The University ◽  
The Media ◽  
Historical Accounts

With studies like Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler contributed significantly to transforming the history of media into a vital field of inquiry. This essay undertakes to more precisely characterize Kittler’s historiographical approach. When we look back on his early contributions to studies of the relationship between literature, madness and truth – among others, his doctoral dissertation on the Swiss poet and writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer – what strikes us is the significance that Jacques Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis had in shaping the orientation of Kittler’s later studies. His intensive engagement with Lacan galvanized Kittler’s concern with the question of sex and/or gender in the evolution of the humanities as well as his concern with the media history of the university. At the same time, Kittler’s reliance on Lacan led him to a kind of history that is interested above all in the internal logic of discourse. As we see, for instance, in Kittler’s anecdotic treatment of 19th-century physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, this historiography does not involve any original research in archives and/or museums. Rather, it builds upon existing historical accounts and focuses its analyses on the issue of symbolic structures. Instead of investigating the history of the material culture of science and technology, what is thereby ultimately reinforced is a philosophical idealism in which knowledge and paranoia become superimposed in and by means of an ‘original syntax’ (Lacan).

Between History and Nature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Hermeneutic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.

scholarly journals Remix in the age of ubiquitous remix

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652199445
Author(s):  
Abby S. Waysdorf
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
Accepted Part ◽  
The Media ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Way

What is remix today? No longer a controversy, no longer a buzzword, remix is both everywhere and nowhere in contemporary media. This article examines this situation, looking at what remix now means when it is, for the most part, just an accepted part of the media landscape. I argue that remix should be looked at from an ethnographic point of view, focused on how and why remixes are used. To that end, this article identifies three ways of conceptualizing remix, based on intention rather than content: the aesthetic, communicative, and conceptual forms. It explores the history of (talking about) remix, looking at the tension between seeing remix as a form of art and remix as a mode of ‘talking back’ to the media, and how those tensions can be resolved in looking at the different ways remix originated. Finally, it addresses what ubiquitous remix might mean for the way we think about archival material, and the challenges this brings for archives themselves. In this way, this article updates the study of remix for a time when remix is everywhere.

Solace in sound: Glenn Gould’s electronic solitude

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Steven Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
General Systems ◽  
The Media ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Media Environments

Inspired by Marshall McLuhan, pianist Glenn Gould dedicated his career to polemics against the concert hall tradition. Through radio/television broadcasts, written works and contentious recorded catalogue, Gould advocated adoption of the new electric media environment of the mid-twentieth century, challenging musical traditions of centuries past. Gould also used telephonic technology to mediate contact with the outside world. Gould has been acknowledged by such authors as Paul Théberge as putting into practice the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. In this study, I follow Robert Logan’s work in media ecology and general systems and investigate Gould’s polemics through systems theory. In particular, I employ Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, offering a model of society through which we may observe the effects of electric technology via the notion of functional de-differentiation of social systems as discussed by authors such as Erkki Sevänen. I suggest that Gould’s polemics are not just commentary on musical tradition but the media environments in which those traditions arose and show how we too can find solace in sound.

Continuity and Intuition in Eighteenth-Century Analysis and in Kant

2020 ◽  
pp. 158-186
Author(s):  
Daniel Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Analysis ◽  
The Continuum ◽  
Interesting Account ◽  
The Way

This chapter considers the status of geometrical and kinematic representations in the foundations of 18th century analysis and in Kant’s understanding of those foundations. It has two aims. First, relying on relatively recent reassessments of the history of analysis, it will attempt to bring forward a more accurate account of intuitive representation in 18th century analysis and the relation between British and Continental mathematics. Second, it will give a better account of Kant’s place in that history. The result shows that although Kant did no better at navigating the labyrinth of the continuum than his contemporaries, he had a more interesting and reasonable account of the foundations of analysis than an easy reading of either Kant or that history provides. It also permits a more accurate and interesting account of how and when a conception of foundations of analysis without intuitive representations emerged, and how that paved the way for Bolzano and Cauchy.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
The Media

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.

“Picture it all, Darley”

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Altschuler
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Media History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Current Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Representational Limits ◽  
History Of Race

Sari Altschuler “‘Picture it all, Darley’: Race Politics and the Media History of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 65–101) This essay adresses two related questions. First, how did George Lippard’s The Quaker City develop from a multimedia story told through newspaper conventions, illustration, and two plays into the novel that appeared in May 1845? And second, how did Lippard’s white-seduction narrative come to pivot around the nightmare of an ambiguously raced Devil-Bug? Joining these questions of form and content, I argue that the media history of The Quaker City is inextricable from its history of race. In the wake of the almost riot around the mid-serialization of his Philadelphia play, Lippard moved away from fictionalizing current events toward the “grotesque-sublime” through a broader critique of Philadelphia less open to charges of libel. This shift took place through the transformation of Devil-Bug, a character Lippard rapidly developed in the middle installments until he was complex enough to carry the new story. Turning the once-black Devil-Bug into his protagonist, however, required character developments that necessarily complicated the story’s representation of race, a process that occurred concurrently with events related to the work that highlighted the systemic oppression of African Americans. In winter 1844, troubles with two stage productions and his illustrator highlighted the problems of representing race. After a several-month hiatus, Lippard published new installments vituperously condemning the representational limits of these nonprose forms and turned to prose to develop his antislavery position through Devil-Bug. As a result of these confluent developments, The Quaker City became an antislavery text through the process of opening Devil-Bug’s character up to its own hybridity and interiority.

scholarly journals John Brown's Description of the Lake at Keswick: New Clues and Clarifications

The Library ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-474
Author(s):  
Christopher Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Lake District ◽  
English Lake District ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article reports on the discovery of hitherto undocumented printings of John Brown’s Description of the Lake at Keswick. Brown’s Description has long been recognised as a foundational document in the development of interest in the English Lake District during the eighteenth century. The history of the Description, however, has not been fully documented, and this lack of documentation has led to a number of mistaken assumptions. The present article, therefore, not only updates the bibliographical record, but also clarifies a few inaccuracies in previous discussions of Brown’s account. In the process, the article explains how the early versions of the Description add a new dimension to the reception history of the text and shift our understanding of the way the private circulation of unpublished print informed eighteenth-century appreciations of the Lakes region. The article includes an appendix, which presents a copy of the early printings of Brown’s text.

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