Paul Muldoon the ‘Etymological Junkie’

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-47
Author(s):  
Mia Gaudern
Keyword(s):  
Critical Practice ◽  
Paul Muldoon ◽  
Audience Responses

‘Who knew forensic derives from forum?’, Muldoon asks in a recently published poem. His compulsive etymologising challenges audiences to see both the relevance and the irrelevance of etymology to interpretation, thereby accepting that they are the ultimate arbiters of Muldoon’s linguistic forensics. Following an analysis of how audience responses to etymologies are cued in his criticism, this chapter reflects on the connection that seems to exist between etymologising and elegising in Muldoon’s poetry to characterise the effect of what Paula Blank calls the ‘“etymological moment” in contemporary critical practice’ when it occurs in the poetry itself.

Veiled Theory: The Transmutation of Anthropology in T. S. Eliot's Critical Method

Paragraph ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Trexler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Human History ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Historical Moment

While literary criticism is often seen as an unself-reflective forerunner to literary theory, this article argues that T.S. Eliot's theory of critical practice was a philosophically informed methodology of reading designed to create a disciplinary and institutional framework. To reconstruct this theory, it enriches theoretical methodology with intellectual and institutional history. Specifically, the article argues that Eliot's early critical theory depended on the paradigms of anthropology and occultism, developed during his philosophical investigation of anthropology and Leibniz. From this investigation, Eliot created an occult project that used spiritual monads as facts to progress toward the Absolute. The article goes on to argue that Eliot's methodology of reading was shaped by anthropology's and occultism's paradigms of non-academic, non-specialist reading societies that sought a super-historic position in human history through individual progress. The reconstruction of Eliot's intellectual and institutional framework for reading reveals a historical moment with sharp differences and surprising similarities to the present.

When Spring is not a Spring: Revisiting Feinstein's Tsvetaeva

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-198
Author(s):  
Christopher Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Paul Muldoon

Elaine Feinstein's translations of Tsvetaeva have acquired a near-classic status. Paul Muldoon pointed out, however, that in one case a stanza from one of the originals was omitted without explanation, and close examination of other examples reveals further unexplained omissions, reorderings, conflations, and splittings of Tsvetaeva's compositions in Feinstein's renderings. From this point, other questions are asked about how much justice is done to the Russian poems by this non-Russian-speaking translator.

Paul Muldoon: Becoming Opera

Éire-Ireland ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 252-276
Author(s):  
Julia C. Obert
Keyword(s):  
Paul Muldoon

scholarly journals ‘You wouldn’t get that from watching TV!’: Exploring audience responses to virtual reality non-fiction in the home

2020 ◽  
pp. 135485652097996
Author(s):  
David Philip Green ◽  
Mandy Rose ◽  
Chris Bevan ◽  
Harry Farmer ◽  
Kirsten Cater ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
New Media ◽  
Home Setting ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Audience Responses ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Watching Tv ◽  
At Home

Consumer virtual reality (VR) headsets (e.g. Oculus Go) have brought VR non-fiction (VRNF) within reach of at-home audiences. However, despite increase in VR hardware sales and enthusiasm for the platform among niche audiences at festivals, mainstream audience interest in VRNF is not yet proven. This is despite a growing body of critically acclaimed VRNF, some of which is freely available. In seeking to understand a lack of engagement with VRNF by mainstream audiences, we need to be aware of challenges relating to the discovery of content and bear in mind the cost, inaccessibility and known limitations of consumer VR technology. However, we also need to set these issues within the context of the wider relationships between technology, society and the media, which have influenced the uptake of new media technologies in the past. To address this work, this article provides accounts by members of the public of their responses to VRNF as experienced within their households. We present an empirical study – one of the first of its kind – exploring these questions through qualitative research facilitating diverse households to experience VRNF at home, over several months. We find considerable enthusiasm for VR as a platform for non-fiction, but we also find this enthusiasm tempered by ethical concerns relating to both the platform and the content, and a pervasive tension between the platform and the home setting. Reflecting on our findings, we suggest that VRNF currently fails to meet any ‘supervening social necessity’ (Winston, 1996, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television. British: BFI.) that would pave the way for widespread domestic uptake, and we reflect on future directions for VR in the home.

scholarly journals Making Whiteness Visible and Felt in Fairview

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Michael Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Political Context ◽  
White People ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Audience Responses ◽  
The Public Sphere

In this article I analyse how Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play Fairview makes white audience members feel white. As a play that exposes whiteness and calls white people to account for their racism, Fairview speaks to contemporary global antiracist activism efforts. Therefore, I begin by situating Fairview in the transatlantic cultural and political context of Black Lives Matter. I then discuss the theatrical devices Drury employs in Fairview in order to make whiteness felt before going on to analyse a range of white audience responses to the production at London’s Young Vic Theatre in 2019/2020. I reflect on these responses in relation to how white people react to accusations of white privilege and power in the public sphere and identify shared strategies for sustaining whiteness. In conclusion, I consider Fairview as a model of affective antiracist activism.

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