scholarly journals Small Talk and the Cinema: Conversation, Philosophy and the Case of Sullivan's Travels

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-94
Author(s):  
Cooper Long
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Small Talk ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Relative Value ◽  
Visual Expression ◽  
Philosophical Project ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to bring small talk about cinema – the type of conversation that can begin with the question “Have you seen any good movies lately?” – into the analytical ambit of cinema and media studies. In order to do so, I argue that such conversation is relevant to the philosophical project of Stanley Cavell. Throughout his attempts to wed film analysis and philosophical reflection, including his seminal studies of Hollywood genres, Cavell has remained committed to the idea that philosophy is not a search for objective absolutes or momentous conclusions. This is a characteristic inconclusiveness that small talk shares. While small talk is often derided as unimportant on account of this very inconclusiveness, the work of Cavell provides a propitious framework for appreciating small talk's underacknowledged philosophical stakes and for reconsidering assumptions about the relative value of communicative practices. In order to better illustrate this relation between small talk and philosophy, this article cites the cinematic example of Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941), a film that not only dramatizes small talk but also, in its final moments, gives striking visual expression to small talk's constitutive non-achievement.

Kommentare zu gesellschaftlichen Themen und ihre charakteristischen Züge in ausgewählten polnischen Tageszeitungen

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-139
Author(s):  
Iwona Szwed ◽  
Zofia Bilut-Homplewicz ◽  
Agnieszka Mac
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Text Linguistics ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
Writing Culture ◽  
Do So

Summary Commonly, press comments lie at the border between media studies and text linguistics. In this contribution, we focus on press comments and their main characteristics by devoting our analysis to press-based social commentaries deriving from Polish daily newspapers. Aiming at highlighting differences that are present in the writing culture of German and Polish philology, we first discuss specificities apparent in the research of both philologies. In the second part of this contribution, we discuss the results of our analyses. We do so by emphasising the structure of the textual whole and – by using numerous examples – pointing out evolving syntactical and lexical characteristics. Over the course of this study, the differences in regional and local press are of particular interest.

scholarly journals “Outside the Box” – Another View on Modern and Contemporary Art.” Book Review: Nikola Dedić, Između dela i predmeta: Majkl Frid i Stenli Kavel između moderne i savremene umetnosti [Between Artwork and Object: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell Between Modern and Contemporary Art], Beograd: Fakultet za medije i komunikacije, Univerzitet Singidunum, 2017.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelisaveta Mojsilović
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Outside The Box

Book ReviewHow to cite this article:Mojsilović, Jelisaveta. "“Outside the Box” – Another View on Modern and Contemporary Art.”  Book Review: Nikola Dedić, Između dela i predmeta: Majkl Frid i Stenli Kavel između moderne i savremene umetnosti [Between Artwork and Object: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell Between Modern and Contemporary Art], Beograd: Fakultet za medije i komunikacije, Univerzitet Singidunum, 2017." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.243 

Transmediality and the End of Disembodied Semiotics

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A Bateman
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Major Topic ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Contemporary Media

The phenomena of mixing, blending, and referencing media is a major topic in contemporary media studies. Finding a sufficient semiotic foundation to characterize such phenomena remains challenging. The current article argues that combining a notion of ‘semiotic mode' developed within the field of multimodality with a Peircean foundation contributes to a solution in which communicative practices always receive both an abstract ‘discourse'-oriented level of description and, at the same time, a biophysically embodied level of description as well. The former level supports complex communication, the latter anchors communication into the embodied experience. More broadly, it is suggested that no semiotic system relevant for human activities can be adequately characterized without paying equal attention to these dual facets of semiosis.

scholarly journals Avuncular Listening: The Unsuspected

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
John Mowitt
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Do So

This essay approaches the topic of translation through the motif of “transmutation”, Roman Jakobson’s term for a modality of translation understood to be inter-semiotic as opposed to either intra or inter-linguistic. Instead of developing transmutation as a re-wording of “adaptation” (for example, the elaboration of a novel as the screenplay for a film), this text brings transmutation into contact with “remediation”, a concept used within media studies to describe how, as McLuhan famously put it, media are always comprised of other media. More specifically, and with an eye toward the particular tension between radio and film, this text shows how remediation repeats with a difference what Raymond Williams meant by “residualism”, the survival within the cultural dominant of politically charged cultural technologies and practices from an earlier moment. Key here is the rivalrous character of this tension, that is, the fact that media that include other media typically do so by subjecting them to their own formal and narrative logics. Here is explored this dynamic through a reading of Michael Curtiz’s The Unsuspected from 1947, a film that narrativizes the rivalry between radio and film.

scholarly journals The Politics of Privacy—A Useful Tautology

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-236
Author(s):  
Johanna E. Möller ◽  
Jakub Nowak ◽  
Sigrid Kannengießer ◽  
Judith E. Möller
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Data Security ◽  
Thematic Issue ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Organizational Information ◽  
Group Information ◽  
Media Research ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Communicative Actions

While communication and media studies tend to define privacy with reference to data security, current processes of datafication and commodification substantially transform ways of how people act in increasingly dense communicative networks. This begs for advancing research on the flow of individual and organizational information considering its relational, contextual and, in consequence, political dimensions. Privacy, understood as the control over the flow of individual or group information in relation to communicative actions of others, frames the articles assembled in this thematic issue. These contributions focus on theoretical challenges of contemporary communication and media privacy research as well as on structural privacy conditions and people’s mundane communicative practices underlining inherent political aspect. They highlight how particular acts of doing privacy are grounded in citizen agency realized in datafied environments. Overall, this collection of articles unfolds the concept of ‘Politics of Privacy’ in diverse ways, contributing to an emerging body of communication and media research.

scholarly journals Time, Moment, Eternity: Hieroglyphs and Meditations in Yakov Druskin’s Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 252
Author(s):  
Andrey S. Menshikov
Keyword(s):  
Main Part ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Time Moment ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Minor Error ◽  
Philosophical Project ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Existential Problem

In this article, the author explores the interest of the interwar intellectuals in “time, death, God”. This focus on temporality as an existential problem engendered some major philosophical projects, which aimed at complete revision of how philosophy should be done, including Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Franz Rosenzweig. The main part outlines a philosophical project of Yakov Druskin who addressed the problem of temporality in a highly original manner. Druskin combined philosophical reflection on time in its existential meaning with the search for intellectual methods and linguistic techniques to transcend our ordinary reality. Among these methods, in Druskin’s works present at least two major modes—meditation and “hieroglyphs”—can be identified. Both methods, however, aim at “transforming rather than informing” and at enabling us to linger in a “certain equilibrium with a minor error”.

scholarly journals Crossing the Theory-Practice Divide

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Willemien Sanders ◽  
Daniel Everts ◽  
Bonnie Van Vugt
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Skills ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Interactive Narratives ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
Do So

Scholars are increasingly expected to share their knowledge through different media besides the written publication but struggle to do so. How might they teach their students the skills to do so? This article argues that Practice as Research, developed by practitioners venturing into academia, provides a useful framework to shape research outcomes into, for instance, video essays or interactive narratives. It is especially valuable to undergraduate students aiming to increase their knowledge and understanding of media through practical work, as it trains both practical and academic skills. This gives Practice as Research an added value in academic media studies curricula. This article is based on a case study of an advanced practical course for film and television students at Utrecht University and relies on course assignments, feedback conversations and auto-ethnography. As this article was authored by the course lecturer and two students, it provides insight from multiple perspectives.

scholarly journals Thinking with Cavell about (His) Death

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-153
Author(s):  
Eric Ritter
Keyword(s):  
Special Issue ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
Bear Witness

I am grateful to David LaRocca for inviting contributors to this special commemorative issue on the life and thought of Stanley Cavell. What follows is a brief philosophical reflection on what it means to think through the death of someone like Cavell, whose life and work continue to live on in so many respects and within so many people, as both this special issue and my experience in Stanley Cavell’s study bear witness to. I would argue that it is difficult to think through Cavell's death adequately (that is, to get the right sort of concepts in play). The cause of this difficulty is a productive tension within the extraordinary ordinariness of the concept of death itself: between the fact of cessation of biological life and the various respects in which Cavell has not ceased to exist, especially within the hearts and minds of so many. I aim in this piece to think with Cavell— that is, using tools he has provided—about (his own) death, thus performing the very productive tension which is the subject of the essay. I interweave some anecdotes from the past year spent working with the Cavell family to inventory and organize Cavell’s papers at the family’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Media Education and the Limits of Assessment

2006 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian McDougall
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Further Education ◽  
Media Education ◽  
Relative Value ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Media Learning ◽  
Further Education Colleges ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Distinguishing Features

This paper is concerned with subject identity and assessment in the case of contemporary English (UK) Media Studies. It explores the relationship between the ‘spirit’ of Media Studies, notions of its relative value and its institutionalised version, ‘Subject Media’ (its authority, as administered by examiners). The case study given attention is the first examination of a new specification for AS (Advanced Subsidiary) Media Studies, held by the English awarding body, OCR, in 2000. The AS level is taken after GCSE and before the full A Level (A2), usually by students aged 16–17 in school sixth form or further education colleges. The paper suggests, through analysis of examiner discourse, that the assessment of media learning is not yet organised into a ‘vertical discourse’ (Bernstein, 1996), although examiners will it to be so. These findings set up the possibility that the distinguishing features of Media Studies in England might be over-stated.

Technological remembering/forgetting: A Faustian bargain?

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
YONI VAN DEN EEDE
Keyword(s):  
Storage Capacity ◽  
Human Memory ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Related Idea ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Do So

Ever since computers have been developed, people have dreamt of technological memories. Human memory exhibits crucial limitations with respect to storage capacity, retrievability and transferability - limits that should be overcome by technology. Yet today we are starting to experience the limitations of overcoming these limitations. Pleas are now made to build a certain mode of forgetting into our technologies. As it stands, we are struggling with the tension between technological remembering and forgetting. This article makes an attempt at a deeper philosophical reflection on this tension. First, we sketch a few ideals of technological memory, that have been proposed throughout the last century. Yet lately, different voices have arisen, that point out the dangers and disadvantages of perfect technological remembering. Second, we discuss one of these perspectives and contrast it with the positions in favour of remembering. But this leads us, thirdly, into a discussion on the distinction between technological memory and 'human' memory: these two appear not so easily delineated. How to make sense of, at the same time, the resemblances and the differences between the two? In the ending section, fourthly, we attempt to do so, by way of Marshall McLuhan's theory of technologies as extensions, and Neil Postman's related idea of technology as a 'Faustian bargain'. Technological memory cannot simply imitate human memory, for every technology causes effects we cannot control. But if the 'extending of remembering' makes us eventually regret our greater capabilities and revert to technological forgetting, this 'extending of forgetting' will have its unforeseen consequences as well. In this doubled Faustian bargain, we must ask ourselves towards which of the two sides we have been biased, and how we can reach a balance that combines enforcement with - consciously sought-after - limitations.

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