scholarly journals Editorial

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 5-7
Author(s):  
Jakob Lien ◽  
Solveig Daugaard ◽  
Ragnild Lome
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Doctoral Student ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Double Blind ◽  
Honorary Doctor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Philosophy ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Gender

”Since Sputnik, the planet has become a global theatre under the proscenium arch of man-made satellites. Our psyches acquire thereby a totally new rim-spin.” (Marshall McLuhan, Culture is our business, 1970) With these words by Marshall McLuhan, you are hereby welcomed to the second issue of Sensorium Journal. This issue includes papers from the Geomedia conference in Karlstad 2017, about skywriting, singing birds, satellites and airplanes. In a media archeological vein, works on (artifical) flatness are featured, the sympoiesis of comic books is discussed and a section is reserveed for reviews of challenging new theoretical titles by Tung-Hui Hu, Anna Tsing and Mark Seltzer. The essay “Notational Iconicity” by professor of language and media philosophy at Freie Universität, Sybille Krämer, is translated into Danish by our editor Solveig Daugaard. Krämer, who is an honorary doctor at Linköping University, visited Östergötland in 2017 to discuss a series of texts related to her concept of “artifical flatness”, one of which we are proud to present in this issue. Krämer’s strikingly cogent take on some of the foundational questions of media philosophy regarding the intricate relations between thinking, speech and systems of written notation provide an interesting antipole to the somewhat wordier approach of many leading media theorists today. As an artistic spin to the theoretical ideas of Krämer, we confront it with an excerpt from the 1884-novel Flatland by British author and theologian Edwin A. Abbott, originally published under the witty alias “A Square” along with the visual reinterpretation of the novel by Canadian poet Derek Beaulieu from 2007, introduced by Jakob Lien. The featured image in this editorial (above) is from Beaulieus book. One of the theoretical interests of the editors of this journal is media archaeology.  We therefore approached a number of scholars in Scandinavia for this issue, who have worked with the concept, and asked them three questions we ourselves have struggled with. What is media archaeology in their view? How, more concretely have they used the media archaeological framework in their research? And how do they understand the relation between artefact and structure within media archaeology? In addition, we also asked our colleagues in the network to contribute and openly reflect on the same questions. The resultant survey gives the impression of a theoretical framework that – at least in the past decade – has played an intriguing role for media oriented aesthetic thinking in Scandinavia, and still has wide potential for exploration and further development for research in the field. * Since the last issue, Sensorium Network has organized two workshops. One on non-human languages in Umeå in 2016, and one on autopoiesis in Linköping in 2017. In addition, preparations have started, for transforming part of Sensorium Journal into a peer reviewed publication in 2018. The journal will still be a place for collective writing and artistic contributions but will in addition feature a section of articles that have gone through a double blind referee process. Make no mistake! The idea behind the journal is still the same; the mixture of peer reviewed articles and the more open main section of the journal is meant to mirror the collaborative idea behind Sensorium. The change in the structure of the journal also bear with it some very intriguing news: From the next issue on, Sensorium Journal will be equipped with a scientific board, whose members will be announced later this fall, as well as three new editors: Jenny Jarlsdotter Wikström is a doctoral student in comparative literature and gender studies at Umeå University, Johan Fredrikzon is a doctoral student in history of ideas at Stockholm University, and Per Isreaelson recently defended his thesis on the media ecologies of fantastic in literary history. We expect lots of fun, sharp and lively discussion as well as new initiatives to spring from their involvement as editors of the journal. Enjoy Sensorium Journal 2!

scholarly journals Female Musicians' Visual Gender Staging in Music Videos

Cubic Journal ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 32-47
Author(s):  
Tanja Godlewsky
Keyword(s):  
Design Analysis ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Gender Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Gender

The design analysis of the media presented in this article focuses on the representation of female musicians, looking at the ways in which they stage both themselves and their gender in music videos. According to my observation, the visual portrayal of female artists has been defined by a long history of stereotypical gender representations that have to be overcome. In the music videos published by female musicians, we can observe design strategies for self-portrayal and gender staging, as well as sources of aesthetic inspirations and trends. Different oppositional design strategies are described that either blur gender, provoke the viewer or overcome stereotypical gender representations.

Writing American Literary History Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994–2005, £495.00). Volume One: 1590–1820 (1994, £70.00). Pp. xiii+829. ISBN 0 521 30105 [squf ]. Volume Two: Prose Writing, 1820–1865 (1995, £75.00). Pp. xviii+887. ISBN 0 521 30106 8. Volume Three: Prose Writing, 1860–1920 (2005, £80.00). Pp. xi+813. ISBN 0 521 30107 6. Volume Four: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800–1910 (2004, £75.00). Pp. x+562. ISBN 0 521 30108 4. Volume Five: Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950 (2003, £75.00). Pp. xi+624. ISBN 0 521 30109 2. Volume Six: Prose Writing, 1910–1950 (2002, £70.00). Pp. xx+620. ISBN 0 521 49731 0. Volume Seven: Prose Writing, 1940–1990 (1999, £75.00). Pp. xxiii+795. ISBN 0 521 49732 9. Volume Eight: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (1996, £75.00). Pp. viii+545. ISBN 0 521 49733 7.

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-411
Author(s):  
RICHARD GRAY
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

Each generation needs to rewrite literary history. And it may be that this generation needs to do it more than most, if only because the proliferation of schools and theories has turned what was once common critical ground into a battlefield. American books, among others, have become a site of struggle, and American writers have been among those caught in the criss-crossing searchlights of ethnic and gender studies, interdisciplinary investigations and studies of popular culture, language and communication. Just how far things have gone can be measured by the fact that every term in the phrase “history of American literature,” is now open to debate. The textuality of history and the historicity of the text have become the most contentious issues in contemporary criticism, while the question of nationhood, in particular, is under scrutiny. In a famous phrase, Walt Whitman described his work as a language experiment, an attempt to summon a nation into being through words. The slippery, plural nature of American identity and the bewildering contingencies of American history that drove Whitman to say this feed into the more challenging of the recent accounts of American writing.

The Future of the Literary Past

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith L. McGill ◽  
Andrew Parker
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Paper Machine ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Serial Publication ◽  
Technology Grant

[B]y carrying us beyond paper, the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior: they liberate our reading for a retrospective exploration of the past resources of paper, for its previously multimedia vectors.—Jacques Derrida, Paper MachineThis essay explores some of the ways that the contemporary mediascape has begun to transform the questions we can ask of our students and ourselves. Our subject derives from an undergraduate English course, Literary History and/as Media History, that we designed to address the lack of critical attention paid in the curriculum to the media of literary works. The course, whose catalog description follows, was intended to cover a lot of historical ground while highlighting theoretical questions that generally remain unasked in Norton Anthology–style surveys:Living in an era of rapid technological innovation, we tend to forget that print itself was once a new medium. The history of English and American literature since the Renaissance has been as much a response to the development of new material formats (scribal copying, printed playtexts, newspaper and serial publication, “little magazines,” radio, film, television, the internet) as it has been a succession of ideal literary forms (poems, plays, and novels). This course will survey literary works from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in relation to the history of media. What can these histories say to each other? Are they, indeed, one history?

From Spatial Turn to GIS-Mapping of Literary Cultures

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Gis Mapping ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Systemic Analysis ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Structure Of Knowledge

Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systemic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, and so on). In conclusion, the author presents the tentative results of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis’, which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyses data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between ‘spaces in literature’ and ‘literature in spaces’ has historically established a nationalized and aesthetically differentiated literary field.

scholarly journals Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies as reclamatory fan work

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. J. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City ◽  
Women’S Writing

In what ways can medieval texts be looked at as fan works? How might the rhetorical tools of fan studies or affect theory aid in further understanding of these texts? Likewise, can we use medieval understandings of literary production to look at modern fan works in order to complicate our contemporary ideas of authorship? Here I consider how Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cité des Dames) can be read as a reclamatory fan work addressing issues of representation and gender within both the texts it responds to and the larger culture within which the work is situated. Moreover, contextualizing de Pizan's work as fan work can help fan scholars by locating fan studies within a broader literary history. By reframing these earlier works of literature as part of a longer history of women's writing that also involves the works being done today within modalities of fan writing, and by reconsidering fan works as part of a historical continuum of women's writing, we, much as de Pizan herself did, create a theoretical space that historicizes, contextualizes, and indeed valorizes women writers of both fannish and nonfannish works.

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.

The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Hubble
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Proletarian Literature ◽  
May Day ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lady Chatterley's Lover ◽  
And Gender ◽  
General Strike

The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question argues that British proletarian literature was a politicised form of modernism which culturally transformed Britain. Critical analysis and extended close readings of key works such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Naomi Mitchison’s We have Been Warned, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair and John Sommerfield’s May Day, are placed within a wider literary history of cross-class intersubjectivity stretching from early encounters between Ford Madox Ford and D.H. Lawrence, through Virginia Woolf’s association with the Women’s Co-operative Guild, and on to the activity of Mass Observation in the late 1930s and 1940s. The study analyses the way in which modernism and proletarian literature were related to an intersectional web of class and gender that took on a potent political shape following the 1926 General Strike and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928. The 1930s is revealed not as an atypical, isolated decade but as central to the literature of the twentieth century. Far from being the product of an inward-looking culture, British proletarian modernism is shown to be fundamentally concerned with relationships with the other and the intersubjective possibilities of more open, rewarding forms of social life than those afforded by capitalism and colonialism.

Rechtsextremismus

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Salzborn
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Right Wing Extremism

Right-wing extremism is an omnipresent topic in academia and the public sphere. But what exactly characterises right-wing extremism? How does it manifest itself? What explanations are there for the emergence of right-wing extremism? How can it be successfully combated? The fourth updated and expanded edition of this volume provides an overview of the state of research into these questions and presents the central controversies in the field of social science research on right-wing extremism. It presents the world view and history of right-wing extremism, the characteristics of its manifestations, such as political parties, movements, the media, music and the Internet, and formulates an overall assessment of contemporary right-wing extremism. In addition, the book discusses explanatory approaches at the point where the following converge and clash: extremism theory and ‘extremism of the centre’; authoritarianism, socialisation and gender; the youth protest axiom and the theories of social movement and social disintegration.

Gaia, God, and the Internet: The History of Evolution and the Utopia of Community in Media Society

Numen ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Krüger
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Model ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Gaia Theory ◽  
Promising Perspective

AbstractThe question of religious content in the media has occupied many scholars studying the relationship between media and religion. However, the study of recent religious thought offers a promising perspective for the analysis of the cultural perceptions of various media technologies. After the Internet first appeared in American households in the middle of the 1990s, a variety of religious or spiritual interpretations of the new medium emerged. The far-reaching ideas see the Internet as the first step of the realisation of a divine entity consisting of the collective human mind. In this vision, the emergence of the Internet is considered to be part of a teleological evolutionary model. Essential for the religious and evolutionary construction of the Internet is an incorporation of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's model of evolution — especially the idea of the noosphere, and its adoption in media theory by Marshall McLuhan. The connections of these ideas to James Lovelock's Gaia theory illustrate the notion of the Internet as an organic entity. The article outlines the processes of the reception of religious and evolutionary ideas which led to the recent interpretations of the Internet as a divine sphere.

scholarly journals a Literary History of Mental Captivity in the United States. Blood Meridian, Wise Blood, and Contemporary Political Discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-97
Author(s):  
Manuel Broncano Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Blood Meridian ◽  
The World ◽  
Wise Blood ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
A Chain

On July 15, 2018, US President Donald Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin held a summit in Helsinki that immediately set off a chain reaction throughout the world. By now, barely two months later, that summit is all but forgotten for the most part, superseded by the frantic train of events and the subsequent bombardment from the media that have become the “new normal.” While the iron secrecy surrounding the conversation between the two dignitaries allowed for all kinds of speculation, the image of president Trump bowing to his Russian counterpart (indeed a treasure trove for semioticians) became for many observers in the US and across the world the living proof of Mr. Trump´s subservient allegiance to Mr. Putin and his obscure designs. Even some of the most recalcitrant GOPs vented quite publicly their disgust at the sight of a president paying evident homage to the archenemy of the United States, as Vercingetorix kneeled down before Julius Cesar in recognition of the Gaul´s surrender to the might of the Roman Empire. For some arcanereason, the whole episode of the Helsinki summit brought to my mind, as in a vivid déjà vu, Cormac McCarthy´s novel Blood Meridian and more specifically, the characters of Judge Holden and the idiotic freak who becomes Holden´s ludicrous disciple in the wastelands of Arizona. In my presentation, I will provide some possible explanations as to why I came to blend these two unrelated episodes into a single continuum. In the process, I will briefly revisit some key texts in the American canon that fully belong in the history of “mental captivity” in the United States, yet to be written. Obviously, I am not in hopes of deciphering the ultimate reasons for current US foreign policy, and the more modest aim of my presentation today is to offer some insights into the general theme of our conference through a novel and a textual tradition overpopulated with “captive minds.”

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