Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of Media

October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 157 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Screen

The essay considers Serge Daney's transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated by the possibilities of the small screen and the status of cinema as an old medium. Looking in the “rear-view mirror,” Daney challenges foundational film theory that situates cinema at the forefront of technological and cultural modernity, and he introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s, Daney began to chronicle the experience of watching cinema on television, with old and new media spiraling into each other and the critic engaged in a process of archaeology focused as much on absent or damaged images as the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Tweedie's essay frames the critic's work as a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it counters both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding the digital revolution in the years just after his death, with new media in the vanguard once occupied by cinema. Instead of recomposing this familiar narrative of innovation, succession, and obsolescence, Daney constructs a retrospective and intermedial theory of film, with the act of watching cinema on television revealing both the diminution and the persistence of its most utopian ambitions.

Serge Daney, Zapper

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Screen ◽  
Over Time

This chapter considers Serge Daney’s transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated with the possibilities of the small screen and status of cinema as an old medium. Daney challenges foundational film theory and introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s he chronicled the experience of watching cinema on television and engaged in a process of “archaeology” focused on absent or damaged images rather than the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Daney’s work at the threshold between media provides a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it questions both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding new media. Daney instead constructs a retrospective theory of film that reveals its diminution over time and the persistence of its utopian ambitions.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

The Sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim

AJS Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Daniel Reiser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Culture ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractThe sanctification of Yiddish in hasidic society occurred primarily in the first half of the twentieth century and intensified in the wake of the Holocaust. The roots of this phenomenon, however, lie in the beginnings of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. The veneration of Yiddish is linked to the hasidic attitude towards vernacular language and the status of the ẓaddik “speaking Torah.” Hasidism represented—and represents—an oral culture in which the verbal transfer of its sacred content sanctifies the language spoken by its adherents, in this case, Yiddish. This article presents a theological and sociological examination of the various stages of the sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim from the movement's early stages to the late twentieth century.

The Boy Brahms

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Boman Desai
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Original Story ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

During the late twentieth century, the veracity of a particular aspect of Johannes Brahms's boyhood came under challenge. Had he played the piano in Hamburg's dockside bars as many of his biographers had recorded, or had he not? The two sides of the story were debated in the spring 2001 issue of 19th-Century Music. Jan Swafford, Brahms's definitive biographer in English, provided the case for the status quo, citing all the known instances of times when Brahms himself had mentioned the story to friends and biographers. Styra Avins, a translator of many of Brahms's heretofore untranslated letters into English, provided evidence to the contrary by saying all the friends and biographers were mistaken. Swafford's inventory of sources is complete, but there remained more to be said. In "The Boy Brahms" I have attempted to show how Avins's evidence is strictly circumstantial and speculative. At this remove from the incidents in question it can be nothing more. I have attempted to refute the conclusions she has drawn from the young Brahms's handwriting, the testimony of neighbors, and the laws governing attendance in the bars, among other things. I have also attempted to show inconsistencies in Avins's arguments that throw into question her thesis and support the veracity of the original story.

Late Twentieth-Century Controversies in Sexual Ethics, Gender, and Ordination

2019 ◽  
pp. 317-332
Author(s):  
Lesley Orr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Women's Ordination ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
The Church

During the second half of the twentieth century, a seismic shift in outlook, norms, behaviours, and laws transformed Western societies, particularly in relation to sexuality and gender relations. These changes were characterized and facilitated by escalating rejection of dominant sources of moral authority, including organized religion. This chapter considers the Church of Scotland’s response to the ‘permissive society’. It attempted to grapple theologically with questions concerning marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and women’s ordination, confronted unavoidably with profound questions concerning gender, power, and sexuality. These debates generated controversy and division as the moral consensus fractured. Fault lines opened up between conservatives who defended the validity of Christian moral certainties, and others who embraced more liberal and contextual interpretations of Scripture and tradition. Previously silenced or subordinated voices emerged, challenging but failing to provoke radical institutional change at a time of rapid declension in the status and cultural influence of the national Church.

scholarly journals The Postcolonial Crescent

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-150
Author(s):  
Deonna Kelli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Islamic Identity ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. Withconcepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedentedcultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age givesway to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a greatdeal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact onContemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiateidentity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The bookuses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteractmodernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporaryworld. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporaryIslamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;this work at least softens that absence.The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The SatanicVerses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchangebetween religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playingin postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadlyacceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached byinterrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role ofindividual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specificcultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concernsthat the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...

The Hauntology of the Cinematic Image

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Standard Position ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Beginning with the belated rediscovery and canonization of the work of Walter Benjamin, this chapter considers the close relationship between his writing from the 1920s and 1930s, when he was most active as a critic, and the late twentieth century. It suggests that Benjamin’s standard position in film theory—as one of the most forceful advocates for a radical modernism closely allied with cinema—corresponds to just one of many positions he adopted throughout his career and contradicts the argument that the ruins of modernity remain a source of utopian potential even after their apparent obsolescence, a position advanced in his book on the Baroque mourning play, his fragmentary Arcades Project, and elsewhere. This chapter suggests that Benjamin’s work on the mourning play and allegory constitute the basis for his continued relevance to media studies in the late twentieth century, especially as a belated but prophetic contributor to debates about the end of history or cinema.

Stage visions and strategies of contemporary performing practices – a broadly conceived analysis of the phenomena at the intersection of theory and practice: Valentina Valentini, Worlds, Bodies, Matters: Theatre of the Late Twentieth Century

Maska ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (175) ◽  
pp. 146-149
Author(s):  
Nika Arhar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Complex Field ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The first book in the new series Thinking Through Performance offers a mental feat of a concise survey of numerous performances by various artists and theatrical and philosophical concepts, which the author, Valentina Valentini, also observes within the fields of other disciplines. Three basic lines of investigation bring forth the visions of contemporary theatre worlds, their images and the strategies of their establishment, the expansion of the field while blurring the boundaries between visual art, the performative and new media, as well as the transformation of the actor into the autonomous body of the performer and the body that becomes plural, open, hybrid, space itself. With its in-depth and wide-ranging probing of the key phenomena in contemporary performing arts, its taking into account diverse perspectives, and its fragmentary approach within a complex field, the author has created a productive foundation for new starting-points and understandings in the dialogue between theory and practice.

Lexical Root vs. Substantive Root: The Status of the Hebrew Alphabet As A Precursory System for Menaḥem Ben Saruq's Root Concept

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-434
Author(s):  
Luba R Charlap
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
The Status ◽  
Abstract Level ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Spanish Soil ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Morphological System

Abstract Menaḥem ben Saruq (Spain, tenth century) is considered to be the first scholar to write a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew - called the Maḥberet - on Spanish soil. His role in the development of Hebrew grammar, however, has not been given pride of place in the scholarly literature. Renewed interest in his theory arose only in the late twentieth century. As some scholars have noted, Menaḥem was the first to reveal the three-consonantal basis of Hebrew roots. This article will continue to establish the basis for this concept, while further elaborating on several emphases in his teaching, especially in the context of the distinction between the radical and the servile letters and their subdivision, which, in our view, led Menaḥem to formulate his root concept. Following our analysis, we note a difference between the ‘lexical root’ concept, by which he arranged the entries in his Maḥberet, and the ‘substantive root’ concept on which he based his innovation. A parallel idea can be seen in the theory of Yusuf Ibn Nūḥ, who set forth the jawhar concept, which means the basic entity of a word on the abstract level (as opposed to a word-based morphology), as Geoffrey Khan has shown. The article concludes with a clarification of the difference between Menaḥem's theory and that of Judah Ḥayyūj. Despite the enormous development made by Menaḥem, he was not able to offer a coherent morphological system, as Ḥayyūj did.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document