Postmodern materialism: things, people, and the remaking of the social in contemporary American narrative

This dissertation reexamines the critical orthodoxies of postmodern American literature by attending to the everyday objects that populate the worlds of narrative texts written from the 1960s to the first decade of the new millennium. Whereas the majority of literary and cultural critics, from Fredric Jameson to Linda Hutcheon to K. Anthony Appiah, argue that postmodernism can be best understood in terms of a commitment to the demystification of social arrangements that seem natural, this project proposes that what makes literature postmodern is a dedication to the ongoing material construction of the social. Beginning with the most mundane items in works of fiction by Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, John Barth, Toni Morrison, and others, "Postmodern Materialism" charts the complex interactions of vast arrays of subjects and objects in the assembly of social groups. The resulting inquiry offers two important benefits: 1) a new approach to postmodernism in general through a rereading of postmodern fiction; 2) a unique methodology for assessing the relationship between things and people that reveals the fluidity of, and thus the possibility for remaking, our social structures. By showcasing the simplest components of the social, the project of postmodernism can be seen, I maintain, as calling our attention not so much away from ourselves and our preoccupations as toward the material world that we all share. Such a shift in consideration does necessitate, however, a theoretical movement away from human essence as the gravitational center of our social relations, thus precluding an overly reductive comparison between people that more often than not results in the exclusion, alienation, or marginalization of individuals and groups based on actual or perceived differences. Along these lines, I conclude that postmodern fiction is especially well-suited for a critical remaking of the social because it is attuned to the ways in which the social is constantly being fashioned by the world of material objects

Introduction: Ways of Machine Seeing

How do machines, and, in particular, computational technologies, change the way we see the world? This special issue brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the entanglement of machines and their ways of seeing from new critical perspectives. This 'editorial' is for a special issue of AI & Society, which includes contributions from: María Jesús Schultz Abarca, Peter Bell, Tobias Blanke, Benjamin Bratton, Claudio Celis Bueno, Kate Crawford, Iain Emsley, Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Daniel Chávez Heras, Vladan Joler, Nicolas Malevé, Lev Manovich, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Perle Møhl, Bruno Moreschi, Fabian Offert, Trevor Paglan, Jussi Parikka, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Gabriel Pereira, Carloalberto Treccani, Rebecca Uliasz, and Manuel van der Veen

Building Beyond Limits : Fantastic Collisions Between Bodies and Machines in French and English Fin-de-Siècle Literature

[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : Thèses et mémoires - FAS - Département d'études anglaises]«Construire hors limite: collisions fantastiques entre corps et machines dans la littérature fin-de-siècle française et anglaise» explore un ensemble de textes qui ont surgi à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle en réponse et en réaction à la fulgurante évolution de l’environnement scientifique et technologique, et qui considèrent la relation entre l’homme et la machine en fantasmant sur la zone grise où ils s’intersectent. Les principaux textes étudiés comprennent L’Ève future de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Le Surmâle d’Alfred Jarry, Trilby de George Du Maurier, Le Château des Carpathes de Jules Verne, ainsi qu’une sélection de contes dont nous pouvons qualifier de «contes à appareils», notamment «La Machine à parler» de Marcel Schwob. Utilisant la théorie des systèmes comme base méthodologique, cette dissertation cherche à réinterpréter les textes de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle qui naviguent les limites de l’humain et du mécanique et les surfaces sensibles où ils se touchent et interagissent en les réinscrivant dans un projet plus vaste de construction d’identité qui défie le temps chronologique et les échelles mathématiques. Le lien entre la théorie des systèmes et l’architecture – comme méthode d’organisation d’espace blanc en espace habitable – est exploré dans le but de comprendre la manière dont nous façonnons et interprétons le néant à l’origine de l’identité individuelle, et par association collective, en pratiquant littéralement la schématisation et la construction du corps. Des auteurs tels Villiers et Jarry imaginent la construction du corps comme une entreprise scientifique nécessairement fondée et réalisée avec les matériaux et les technologies disponibles, pour ensuite démanteler cette proposition en condamnant le corps technologique à la destruction. La construction d’une identité amplifiée par la technologie prend donc des proportions prométhéennes perpétuellement redessinées dans des actes cycliques de rasage (destruction) et d’érection (édification), et reflétées dans l’écriture palimpsestique du texte. L’intégrité du corps organique étant mis en question, le noyau même de ce que signifie l’être (dans son sens de verbe infinitif) humain pourrait bien s’avérer, si l’on considère la correspondance entre perte de voix et état pathologique dans les textes de Du Maurier, Verne et Schwob, être une structure des plus précaires, distinctement hors sens (unsound).“Building Beyond Limits: Fantastic Collisions Between Bodies and Machines in French and English Fin-de-Siècle Literature” explores late-nineteenth-century texts that emerged in response, or in reaction to, the rapidly evolving scientific and technological environment and which specifically consider man’s relationship to the machine by fantasizing about the grey area where they intersect. The core texts examined include Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future, Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmâle, George Du Maurier’s Trilby, Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes, and a selection of short stories which we may refer to as contes à appareils, most prominently Marcel Schwob’s “La Machine à parler.” Using systems theory as its underlying structure, this dissertation sets out to reinterpret late-nineteenth-century texts that navigate the limits of the human and the mechanical and the sensitive surfaces where they touch and interact by re-inscribing them into a greater project of identity-building that defies chronological time and mathematical scale. As such, the connection between systems theory and architecture – as a method of organizing blank space into space that is inhabitable – is explored in order to understand the way in which we shape and make sense of the void at the origin of individual, and by extension collective, identity by engaging in the literal act of body mapping and building. Authors such as Villiers and Jarry set up the building of bodies as a scientific endeavor which must necessarily rely on available materials and technologies only to level this proposition by condemning the technological body to destruction. The construction of a technologically-enabled identity thus takes on promethean proportions which are perpetually redesigned in the cyclical acts of raising and razing, and reflected in the palimpsestic qualities of the texts. At stake is the integrity of the organic body, of the very nucleus of what it means to be human which, as evidenced by the equating of pathology with the loss of voice in the texts of Du Maurier, Verne and Schwob, may very well prove to be a structure which is distinctly unsound

Ephemeral Architecture in Central Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries

This collection of essays focuses on the exhibition architecture in Central and Eastern European countries, a region of fluid geo-political conception, composed of multi-ethnic countries with constantly shifting borders. The authors analyse temporary constructions erected for national and international exhibitions in the 19th and 20th centuries presenting Polish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian-Herzegovinian, Yugoslav, Romanian, Russian cases. In the papers the pavilions are considered hubs of architectural and artistic trends, political visions of this culturally heterogeneous territory. The papers demonstrate the complex political, cultural, social, economic and urban context in which the exhibition architecture was created. The complexity of the hitherto less known Central-Eastern European exhibition architecture is demonstrated not only by the variety of cases analyzed, but also by the diversity of scholarly approaches applied. In the 19th century pavilions and exhibition galleries were powerful means for nation building and mass entertainment, as well as they provided a "magic frame" for the latest technological and cultural achievements. In 20th century ephemeral constructions were often appropriated and utilized by the changing political regimes for power demonstration or for signifying their role as flagships of modernism

Art and politics in Fascist Italy : the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (1932)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1989.Title as it appeared in M.I.T. Graduate List, Sept. 1989: Art and politics in Italy; the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution.Includes bibliographical references.by Libero Andreotti.Ph.D