Encyclopaedic Fiction, Cultural Value, and the Discourse of the Great Divide

<p>Recent postmodern work on cultural evaluation, such as Barbara Smith's Contingencies of Value (1989), argues that cultural value cannot be treated as an inherent or objective quality of cultural products. Instead, cultural value must be understood as "value for": relative, that is, to the identities and interests of particular cultural consumers and producers. Theorists (for instance, John Frow in his 1995 study Cultural Studies and Cultural Value) have employed similar relativist logic in their analyses of the putative "structures" or institutions that supposedly give shape to Western culture-as-a-whole: "high" culture, "popular" culture, "mass" culture and so on. This "postaxiological" strain of cultural theory undermines the real-world integrity of those categories by suggesting that they (the categories) are merely contingent effects of critical / evaluative discourse. Other archetypically "postmodern" arguments in literary and cultural studies have focused on charting or advocating both the demise of the modernist "great divide" between "high" and "low" culture, and its replacement, in cultural production and criticism, with more permissive and socially egalitarian modes of interplay between "high" and "low" culture. Some critics and critically aware cultural producers have treated these two projects as though they are complementary facets of a general "postmodern" turn. Yet contesting or reversing obsolete hierarchies of cultural value does not necessarily lead critics to contemplate the status of "high"/"low" categories themselves. A meaningful refusal of the logic of the modernist "great divide" would obligate critics and producers to reflect on the contingency of those categories and their own interests with respect to those categories. Juxtaposing an "encyclopaedic" modernist text renowned for its interspersion of "high" and "low" cultural elements (James Joyce's Ulysses) with a postmodern text that seems knowingly to do the same (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest), two case studies illustrate the inseparability of readings or narratives that are couched in "high"/"low" terms from the particular interests of cultural producers and consumers.</p>

Encyclopaedic Fiction, Cultural Value, and the Discourse of the Great Divide

<p>Recent postmodern work on cultural evaluation, such as Barbara Smith's Contingencies of Value (1989), argues that cultural value cannot be treated as an inherent or objective quality of cultural products. Instead, cultural value must be understood as "value for": relative, that is, to the identities and interests of particular cultural consumers and producers. Theorists (for instance, John Frow in his 1995 study Cultural Studies and Cultural Value) have employed similar relativist logic in their analyses of the putative "structures" or institutions that supposedly give shape to Western culture-as-a-whole: "high" culture, "popular" culture, "mass" culture and so on. This "postaxiological" strain of cultural theory undermines the real-world integrity of those categories by suggesting that they (the categories) are merely contingent effects of critical / evaluative discourse. Other archetypically "postmodern" arguments in literary and cultural studies have focused on charting or advocating both the demise of the modernist "great divide" between "high" and "low" culture, and its replacement, in cultural production and criticism, with more permissive and socially egalitarian modes of interplay between "high" and "low" culture. Some critics and critically aware cultural producers have treated these two projects as though they are complementary facets of a general "postmodern" turn. Yet contesting or reversing obsolete hierarchies of cultural value does not necessarily lead critics to contemplate the status of "high"/"low" categories themselves. A meaningful refusal of the logic of the modernist "great divide" would obligate critics and producers to reflect on the contingency of those categories and their own interests with respect to those categories. Juxtaposing an "encyclopaedic" modernist text renowned for its interspersion of "high" and "low" cultural elements (James Joyce's Ulysses) with a postmodern text that seems knowingly to do the same (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest), two case studies illustrate the inseparability of readings or narratives that are couched in "high"/"low" terms from the particular interests of cultural producers and consumers.</p>

Geochemical exploration for buried sandstone-hosted uranium mineralisation using mobile U and Pb isotopes: case study of the REB deposit, Great Divide Basin, Wyoming

Mobile radiogenic lead isotopes (206Pb, 207Pb, 208Pb, and 210Pb) represent products of radioactive decay of their parental uranium and thorium isotopes (238U, 235U, 232Th), and are considered potential geochemical pathfinders of the buried sandstone-type uranium deposits. Soil samples collected along a geochemical traverse intersecting buried uranium roll front mineralisation at the REB deposit in the Great Divide Basin, Wyoming, USA were studied. Mineralisation of this deposit is hosted in weakly lithified arkosic sands, at a depth of 120 - 200 metres, without a strong surficial expression of its presence at depth which makes discovery of this deposit type difficult, slow, and expensive. All soil samples have been analysed for ratios of the mobile long-lived Pb isotopes and their parental U and Th isotopes, determined from partial leach products obtained using a weak acid leaching technique. The samples were also analysed for trace elements, assayed both in the partial leach products and using conventional whole soil sample assays. Ratios of the mobile radiogenic Pb isotopes to their parental U and Th isotopes (206Pb/238U, 207Pb/235U and 208Pb/232Th) determined in the partial leach products exhibit anomalous contents in the soil samples collected above the uranium rolls. The anomalous values are several times greater than background values, to lateral distances of 350-400m outside of the roll fronts. Notably, conventional whole soil assays have failed to detect the anomalies which were detected using mobile Pb isotopes. Supplementary material:https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5610980