From Wile E. to Wall-E: Computer-Animated Film Comedy

Chapter Eight argues how comedy is worked into the stable, solid genre elements of the computer-animated film in particular ways, leading to a range of comedic orthodoxies that both define, and are defined by, the specificities of these specific screen worlds. Building on pre-existing typologies of animated comedy, and scholarship on the evolution of the American cartoon during the 1940s, this chapter introduces the exceptional comic arsenal of computer-animated films that often departs from ‘crazy’ disruptions of spatio-temporal unity and unorthodox patterns of ‘cartoonal’ behaviour. The chapter argues that in the computer-animated film, exaggerated degrees of physical distortion and degradation of the animated body operate outside the agenda of a Luxo world. The genre instead establishes a new comic modality rooted in other common features: a tendency towards cross-species couplings as a reinvigoration of the “bi-racial” buddy movie popular in 1980s Hollywood; the enhanced role of verbal comedy through performative connections with “comedian comedy” and casting practices of stand-up comedians; and the comic role of multi-faceted personality types in relation to theories of character structure derived from twentieth-century psychiatric therapy and biogenetics.

Action as a form of temporal unity: on Anscombe’s Intention

The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive exercise of reason. I argue that to comprehend the proposed alternative requires an account of the temporality of events in general. An event does not simply have a position in time, but is itself temporally structured. With the inner temporality of events in view, the Anscombean conception of action as a specifically self-conscious form of temporal unity is made available for critical reflection.

Merely Comparative

When one has so general and comprehensive an intention one can at first do nothing.—Erich AuerbachComparison was once supremely a matter of method. ernest renan in his pensées de 1848 called comparison “the great instrument of criticism” (296). Echoing the sentiment some two decades later, Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett asserted that “we may call consciously comparative thinking the great glory of our nineteenth century” (76). Comparison had been extensively deployed as an analytic tool before the nineteenth century—to produce, for instance, the massive taxonomies that lay the foundations for natural history and in the gathering of the concordances and chronologies of universal histories. What sharply distinguished the comparative method, what made it in effect a specific method, for nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century scholars, by their own account, was the principle of development. This underlying temporal unity allowed for the most disparate entities to be set into meaningful relation. In words from an 1871 lecture by an early and enthusiastic proponent of comparative literature:[T]he method in which this study can be best pursued is that which is pursued in anatomy, in language, in mythology…, namely, the comparative. The literary productions of all ages and peoples can be classed, can be brought into comparison and contrast, can be taken out of their isolation as belonging to one nation, or one separate era, and be brought under divisions as the embodiment of the same aesthetic principles, the universal laws of mental, social and moral development (Shackford 42)

Pleasure and Duty

Three obvious, superficially simple but actually intensely complex questions embodied in the title immediately confront the reader of Dagmar Herzog's important new book. First, what do we mean by the ‘sexuality’ that constitutes the subject matter? Second, what is demarcated by the Europe that provides the geo-political boundaries of this study? Third, does the ‘twentieth century’ provide a useful temporal unity for the narrative and analysis that is at the heart of the book? Such questions are not mere scholarly nit-picking or academic point scoring, but a tribute to the problematising of the body in space and time that has been a hallmark of the deconstructive and reconstructive energy of recent scholarship on the sexual, and that is now making a welcome entry into mainstream history.

Perception and Multimodality

The article presents some findings concerning multimodality, and the philosophical implications of these findings. One of the findings is that crossmodal illusions show that perception involves interactions among processes associated with different modalities. Patterns of crossmodal bias and recalibration reveal the organization of multimodal perceptual processes. Multimodal interactions obey intelligible principles, they resolve conflicts, and they enhance the reliability of perception. Multimodal processes also demonstrate a concern across the senses for common features and individuals, for several reasons such as the intermodal biasing and recalibration responsible for crossmodal illusions requires that information from sensory stimulation associated with different senses be taken to be commensurable. The commensurable information from different senses shares, or traces to, a common source since conflict resolution requires a common subject matter. One important lesson of multimodal effects is that an analog of the correspondence problem within a modality holds between modalities. Spatio-temporal unity, objectual unity, and integration are tied to the capacity to detect constancies and solve correspondence problems across modalities. Solving crossmodal correspondence problems requires a common modal or multimodal code that is shared among modalities.