Interpretation, 1980 And 1880

This article reviews recent methodological interventions in the field of literary study, many of which take nineteenth-century critics, readers, or writers as models for their less interpretive reading practices. In seeking out nineteenth-century models for twenty-first-century critical practice, these critics imagine a world in which English literature never became a discipline. Some see these new methods as formalist, yet we argue that they actually emerge from historicist self-critique. Specifically, these contemporary critics view the historicist projects of the 1980s as overly influenced by disciplinary models of textual interpretation models that first arose, we show through our reading of the Jolly Bargemen scene in Charles Dickens\u27s Great Expectations (1860 61), in the second half of the nineteenth century. In closing, we look more closely at the work of a few recent critics who sound out the metonymic, adjacent, and referential relations between readers, texts, and historical worlds in order sustain historicism\u27s power to restore eroded meanings rather than reveal latent ones

Shakespeare and media ecology: beyond historicism and presentism

This article proposes media ecology-a combination of media studies and performance studies with literary and cultural history-as a research perspective for Shakespeare studies. In contrast to a hermeneutics of renewal-as evinced in both New Historicism and what has been called presentism-media ecology combines a sense of historical alterity with an awareness of the continuing transformations of Shakespeare in changing media settings: from manuscripts and printed texts to theatrical performances, music, opera, cinema, and new media. As an example, the article focuses on the masque in The Tempest, which poses obvious difficulties for a hermeneutics of renewal and is often cut from performance. Productions and adaptations frequently extend the spectacular qualities of the masque to The Tempest as a whole and ignore the skepticism about theatrical illusion that is voiced by Prospero in the play. In the case of The Tempest, cultural productions ranging from theatrical performances to the closing ceremony of the London Olympics of 20 12 are difficult to conceptualize in the framework of adaptation studies (which relies on the precedence of an original over its derivations). The article argues that media ecology can help scholars map out such connections and differences between performances and cultural phenomena relating to Shakespeare as cannot be fully grasped either in a historicist or presentist perspective

EVERY \u27ONE\u27 AND EVERY \u27THING\u27 CAN BE LOVED : A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF NETWORKED SELF-REPRESENTATION BY THE OBJECTùM SEXUALITY COMMUNITY

Using rhetorical criticism informed by actor-network theory (ANT), in this dissertation I explore the emergence of queer identity and queer community building within the Objectùm Sexuality Internationale Web site (OSI)--the largest source of information related to a community of over 300 hundred individuals who experience emotional and romantic desire towards objects. My goals in this study are (1) to identify and understand how rhetorical strategies are emergent and networked (rather than individually enacted) within the OSI Web site; and (2) how these emergent rhetorical strategies promote multiplicity of sexual desire and identity through the challenging of heteronormative and anthropocentric binaries and normativities via queer posthuman forms of love and connection. Using an ANT informed rhetorical criticism, I identified four layers of communication that facilitate the emergence of actor networks within the OSI Web site: (1) translation--the process by which human actors depict experience in texts); (2) enactment--the process by which actors (human and object) interact in ways that create networks of action and agency); (3) representation--the process in which certain macroactors (actors that appear as recurring and stable categories) present the interests of other actors within the network); and (4) teleaction--the movement of representations from place to place and over time through memory and text. Within these layers, I identified four categories of translation, thirteen macroactors, and four types of teleaction. The translations that emerge on the OSI Web site include how objectùm sexuality became a term and community, what it means to be objectùm sexual, how people who identify as objectùm sexual have come to make sense of their experiences, and public pleas for acceptance regarding objectùm sexuality. The macroactors that emerge include people, communication devices, purposes of OSI, orientation, animism, sensuality/intimacy, nonverbal communication, love, gender, attraction, marriage, medicalization, and the Red Fence. The processes of teleaction that emerge include verbal, nonverbal, hybrid, and symbolic actors. These four layers then led to the emergence of four higher-level rhetorical dimensions. These include: (1) terminological dimension-- the interrelationship between terms and the OS community; (2) ontological dimension--the emergence of a higher-level philosophy about the existence of beings and the meanings and modes of being, existing, living, and loving for OS; (3) axiological dimension--the emergence of criteria for ethical values and judgments in relation to OS; and (4) epistemological dimension--where the dimensions of ontology and terminology meet and the nature and scope of knowledge about OS is represented. Together, these four transcendent levels facilitate the rhetorical construction of the OS community and critiques of heteronormative/anthropocentric frames of love, desire, and sexuality. Overall, these various strategies lead to two larger rhetorical moves: (1) OSI communicates and adapts to internal and external audiences; and (2) OSI rhetoric moves from specific meanings to larger paradigmatic shifts that reveal is function as a social movement within a single rhetorical text. This process of rhetorical strategy building positions OS within intelligible frameworks of understanding in order to: (1) provide information about OS that will mitigate fear and sensationalism and facilitate acceptance; (2) construct an OSI community identity and human-object desire more generally; and (3) direct people away from heteronormative and anthropocentric worldviews and toward a queer posthuman worldviews of love, desire, and connection

The Phone, the Father and Other Becomings: On Households (and Theories) that no longer Hold

"Preamble: Modes of engagement The reader may engage with this article in several different modes. It could be approached in straightforward, if quirky, sociological mode as an exploration of the idea that the literature on post-divorce arrangements and step-families, and especially literature that attends to children’s contact with their non-resident fathers, can be re-read in order to consider the issue of contact via communication technologies (predominantly the telephone but also other forms of communication), a form of parent-child contact not captured in the ways that ‘contact’ is measured in present studies. Of interest in itself, perhaps, this point of entrance opens up onto further questions about the management of human affect, and how rearrangements in lines of affect have reverberations beyond those captured by an Oedipal model, insofar as they are not about contact and severance but are various kinds of displacement for all involved. In particular, I am concerned here with the rearrangement of affect for the fathers as their role becomes dispersed, shared and intermittent, a set of problematics that also includes the various ways in which the very body of the mother is removed or circumvented. On a second level the article speaks to a different literature, in that it is an elaboration of the notion of the network as a dispersed hybrid that entails both human and non-human entities, within which any absolute distinction between human and non-human is to be problematised but, I wish to argue, without losing the specificity of human interaction, that is, the questions of human emotion, human desire and human ethics. This elaboration moves toward a critique of the very ubiquity and endless utility of the network idea through the suggestion that its appeal may conceal moments and movements where more unexpected effects are taking place. Indeed, I suggest that there may be some twists in the familial dynamics of ‘households that no longer hold’, where some selected thoughts from a reading of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically around the notion of ‘becoming’, may lead one to read other stories than that proffered through the master trope of the network, ones that are maybe closer to some of the original impulses behind actor-network theory. And thirdly, the article may be engaged as a reflection on contemporary ways in which familial life is governed in contemporary Britain. The family as both a site of economic arrangements and a site of the arrangement of human affect-sexuality-reproduction, are held together and in tension through forms of contemporary government of the family. Contemporary rationalities of familial morality seek to make its members responsible parents without intervening to the extent that they would seek to make them responsible spouses , seen here in the implication that fathers' economic responsibilities for children are not co-extensive with their emotional connections to women. As opposed to any other familial figure – such as the pater familias or the mother of Donzelot’s thesis – who may have been the link between family and government, it is through the promotion of the figure of the child that familial life is presently and predominantly governed. It is my contention here that it is through the promise of non-government that a notion of an ethical parent (it is predominantly the non-resident father who is being targeted here) is promoted, whose duties to his children and his nation-state should mean that the former should not need to be dependent upon the latter. Alongside other policies that seek to simultaneously promote familial life and paid work-life through the notion of the ethical citizen, and the attendant judgements of those dependent on welfare state provision (see Rose, 1999), contemporary policies surrounding the household that no longer holds expose the various and contradictory modes by which families are ‘made up’ within contemporary regimes." (Excerpt, opening paragraph)

Considering the Human and Nonhuman in Literary Studies: Notes for a Biographic Network Approach for the Study of Literary Objects

In recent years critical projects spanning philosophy, the social sciences, science studies, and nearly everywhere that has employed the term ecology have engaged in thinking humans and non-humans together as collectively producing outcomes, where objects do work beyond how humans perceive or make use of them. Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as its focus, this thesis explores how this reorientation might contribute to literary studies and to literary criticism more specifically. The thesis considers a notion that novels constitute objects with biographies running “against” the biographic material of their authors, mobilizes actor network theory as a manner of mapping that biographic assemblage, and tentatively develops a biographic network approach as one alternative to traditional literary interpretative practices. Attending to the novel as an actor shifts critical focus away from its interior – the “text” or content – and expands traditional literary criticism’s default practice – interpretation – and logic – mimetic representation – in hopes of facilitating a discussion of Zelda’s novel in a manner which destabilizes the overdetermined themes that continue to scaffold her imaginary. Ultimately, this work argues that a biographic network approach can prove instructive as a “method” for dealing with other texts which remain relatively obscured at the margins of literary consciousness

Agency, identity and learning at turning points in women's lives: A comparative UK-Italian analysis

This paper discusses the ways in which women aged 50, in two different cultural contexts (United Kingdom and Italy) narrate and portray turning points in their life course. Particular emphasis is put on the relationships between identity, learning and agency that emerge through work, family and life experiences. The reference paradigm is adopted from Narrative Learning Theory and the approach is qualitative and comparative in analysing the participant\u2019s voice. For the UK sample, the data sources are 16 semi-structured interviews, including drawings representing the life course, selected from the study deposited in the UK Archives Data under the \u201cSocial Participation and Identity\u201d project; for the Italian sample, the data sources are 28 semistructured interviews and drawings, based on the same selected items of the UK interviews and provided by women living in the North-East of Italy. This study will show how women\u2019s representations of their life course and of turning points in their lives reveal different propensities to reflect on and learn from their own lives. The comparative perspective highlights, through two-level analysis (micro and macro) and by contrasting cultural, relational and social contexts, variations in ways these women are enabled or restricted in moving their lives forward. The research also contributes to methodological insight into the use of drawings in elucidating life course narratives

Ritual Studies and the Study of Rabbinic Literature

In the last two decades several important studies have been published that focus on ritual in rabbinic literature, and consider ritual to be a critically important conceptual and analytical category in approaching rabbinic texts and rabbinic culture. This article provides an account of the intersection of Ritual Studies with the study of rabbinic literature, surveys key works and significant developments and shifts in the field, and identifies the central challenges in and benefits of examining rabbinic texts through ritual lenses. The article pays special attention to the complex relations between texts about rituals and ritual performances, as well as to the blurry boundaries between law and ritual in the realm of rabbinic halakhah