scholarly journals Beyond Darwinian Distance: Situating Distant Reading in a Feminist Ut Pictura Poesis Tradition

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Marie Rhody
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Sister Arts ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Ut Pictura Poesis

The challenge facing “distant reading” has less to do with Franco Moretti's assertion that we must learn “how not to read” than with his implication that looking should take the place of reading. Not reading is the dirty open secret of all literary critics-there will always be that book (or those books) that you should have read, have not read, and probably won't read. Moretti is not endorsing a disinterest in reading either, like that reported in the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts' Reading at Risk, which notes that less than half the adult public in the United States read a work of literature in 2002 (3). In his “little pact with the devil” that substitutes patterns of devices, themes, tropes, styles, and parts of speech for thousands or millions of texts at a time, the devil is the image: trees, networks, and maps-spatial rather than verbal forms representing a textual corpus that disappears from view. In what follows, I consider Distant Reading as participating in the ut pictura poesis tradition-that is, the Western tradition of viewing poetry and painting as sister arts-to explain how ingrained our resistances are to Moretti's formalist approach. I turn to more recent interart examples to suggest interpretive alternatives to formalism for distant-reading methods.

National Endowment for the Arts

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 110-110
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Dance Companies

The National Endowment for the Arts awards grants for projects related to the arts, and makes grants to museums, theatres, dance companies, and educational institutions in the United States to help support and improve their programs. Because of the Endowment's organization it was not possible to compile a list of Africa-related grants.

Source Theatre Company and the Mandate of the NEA: a Case Study

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (42) ◽  
pp. 128-134
Author(s):  
Mary C. Resing
Keyword(s):  
Public Funding ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
The Public ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
The University

The controversy in the United States surrounding the funding of ‘offensive‐ and ‘pornographic‐ works by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has centered on whether or not the organization should espouse a morally conservative outlook in regard to the public funding of artistic works. However, the NEA arguably already pursues conservative policies rooted in its vision of the form, function, and outlook of the arts it exists to serve. The appointment of the actress Jane Alexander as chair of the NEA may have indicated that the organization would become more liberal in its moral stance, but the question remains: can government-supported art be anything but conservative? The following is a case study of one theatre's relationship to the NEA in the context of the Washington, DC, theatre community. The author, Mary C. Resing, is a former business manager of New Playwrights' Theatre in Washington, DC, and a former grant writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently working on her dissertation on the actress-manager Vera Kommissarzhevskaia.

scholarly journals Proliferating Panic: Regulating Representations of Sex and Gender during the Culture Wars

1970 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristyn Davies
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Karen Finley ◽  
The Arts ◽  
American Citizen ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Gender

During the culture wars in the United States surveillance of representations of the American citizen reached a particular frenzy. This article explores the moral panic that has accompanied attempts by the New Right to shape and define the American citizen as heterosexual, monogamous, white, and a believer in middle-class family values. Davies focuses on the work of performance artists Karen Finley and Holly Hughes whose work challenges hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality. They were two of those artists branded by the media as the ‘NEA Four’, practitioners whose work was considered indecent and consequently de-funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The article imagines performance art as a queer time and space; that is, not only does performance art contest normative structures of traditional theatrical performance, so too does it challenge understandings of normative subjects, and the relation of the arts to structures of power.

Dance in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Van Dyke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Financial Security ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Concert Dance

A variety of data show that men now lead the concert dance field in the United States. Not only do they receive jobs as performers and choreographers out of proportion to their representation as dance students, they also more readily achieve acclaim and financial security. Men stand out among dance artists because there is a paucity of them, giving them a professional advantage. This chapter examines funding at the state and national level, including Guggenheim Fellowships, MacArthur Grants, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships to see to whom funding goes. Various awards are also scrutinized for gender equity, including the Dance Magazine Award, Capezio Dance Award, Kennedy Center Honors Award, and the National Medal of the Arts. In addition, teaching and choreographing opportunities for men and women are compared.

Music education promotes lifelong engagement with the arts

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Elpus
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Appreciation ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
School Based ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Education Participation

The purpose of this study was to understand the effects of school-based music education on later adult engagement with the arts using nationally representative data from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. The probability of adult arts engagement as performer/creator and patron/consumer was estimated as functions of prior school-based music and arts education participation with statistical covariate control applied for demographic variables known to vary with music education status. Results suggest that both music performance and music appreciation courses are strongly associated with later arts participation as patron/consumer and performer/creator, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, sex, and race/ethnicity. Former music appreciation students were 93% more likely to attend classical music or opera performances as adults and 255% more likely to play a musical instrument as adults than were non-participants. Former music performance students were 342% more likely to play a musical instrument, 258% more likely to sing, and 186% more likely to take photographs as an artistic endeavor than were non-participants. Results of this study suggest that lifelong engagement with music and the arts is one measurable outcome of school-based music education in the United States.

Arts and The City: Policy and Its Implementation

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Ann Markusen ◽  
Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Arts Organizations ◽  
Policy Initiative ◽  
Place Making ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
City Policy ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

The United States off ers a decade-long illustration of the implementation of a major policy initiative for art and culture across the nation's cities and towns. In this article, we focus on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and its companion ArtPlace and Our Town initiative around place-making, as they have developed since 2009. We describe the challenges that almost eliminated the NEA in the 1990s, the subsequent advocacy shift towards the economic impact of the arts, and the emergence of the Our Town initiative in 2011. We analyse the policy initiatives, their rationales and implementation. We conclude with lessons and ways to improve practice in relation to the roles of artists and arts organizations covering issues of displacement, gentrification and racism (often unanticipated challenges for communities and funders); the impact of the arts in economic terms; and evaluative challenges for funders and place-makers, especially given cultural diversity and 'place-keeping' priorities.

Digital Curation, AustLit, and Australian Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Amy Cross ◽  
Cherie Allan ◽  
Kerry Kilner
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Critical Spaces ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
Digital Curation ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Significant Attention

This paper examines the effects of curatorial processes used to develop children's literature digital research projects in the bibliographic database AustLit. Through AustLit's emphasis on contextualising individual works within cultural, biographical, and critical spaces, Australia's literary history is comprehensively represented in a unique digital humanities space. Within AustLit is BlackWords, a project dedicated to recording Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling, publishing, and literary cultural history, including children's and young adult texts. Children's literature has received significant attention in AustLit (and BlackWords) over the last decade through three projects that are documented in this paper. The curation of this data highlights the challenges in presenting ‘national’ literatures in countries where minority voices were (and perhaps continue to be) repressed and unseen. This paper employs a ‘resourceful reading’ approach – both close and distant reading methods – to trace the complex and ever-evolving definition of ‘Australian children's literature’.

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