Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera

“To be continued . . . Whether these words fall at a season-ending episode of Star Trek or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. Jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre—one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, comics, and advertisements of the twentieth century, serials are loosely linked by what may be called “family resemblances.These traits include intertwined subplots, diverse casts of characters, dramatic plot reversals, suspense, an such narrative devices as long-lost family members and evil twins. Hayward chooses four texts to represent the evolution of serial fiction as a genre and to analyze the peculiar draw that serials have upon their audiences: Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend, Milton Canif’s comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and the soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live. Hayward argues that serial audiences have developed active strategies of consumption, such as collaborative reading and attempts to shape the production process. In this way fans have forced serial producers to acknowledge the power of the audience. This remarkable study gives us, for the first time, the full story of serial fiction from the point of view of its audiences. By taking the long, historical view, Consuming Pleasures shows what we have missed in focussing on the local, short-term evolution of serial genres. Many of the cherished assumptions of genre criticism may need to be revised in light of this book\u27s findings. —Andrew Ross, New York University An excellent and much-needed study. . . . an important contribution to the study of genre as an interaction between texts and their readers. —Choice Hayward\u27s section on Dickens is of substantial importance to readers of Dickens. —Dickens Quarterly Hayward\u27s work breaks new ground in discussing the serial text. —JASAT Hayward aims to establish common features of mass-market serials across historical eras and genres, and to counteract scholarly dismissal of mass culture forms like soap operas, by elucidating audiences\u27 active roles. She succeeds in both aims. —Nineteenth-Century Literature Hayward\u27s thesis is a provocative one . . . a strong case is made here for the value of studying popular fiction in all its forms. —Ohioana Quarterlyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/1008/thumbnail.jp

Subjectility : On Reading Artaud

The notebooks in which Artaud constantly worked in the final years of his life (1946–48) bring together writing, drawing and attacks on the very materiality of the paper. In bringing together these three regimes – visual, textual, material – the notebooks represent the culmination of Artaud’s complex ontology. They also continue to pose a unique set of problems for his readers. These three regimes come together on what Artaud calls the “subjectile”, yet as he uses this word only three times, approaching it asks that we traverse his entire oeuvre. Framing this thesis is the question of how reading Artaud, especially the notebooks, might engage we readers as ourselves subjectiles; how “reading” must be understood in an expanded sense to take in textual, drawn and material elements at once. Artaud’s writings have an unparalleled importance in continental philosophy of the “long twentieth century”: perhaps most inalienably in Deleuze & Guattari’s appropriation of the figure of the “Body without Organs”, and in Derrida’s career spanning interest in Artaud’s writing and drawing. This thesis will forge critical responses to how these writers accommodate and appropriate Artaud into their systems. What is at stake in responding to their highly original literary philosophical readings is not merely a philological pedantry concerning Artaud. Rather, I propose to both examine elements of these philosophies in order to scrutinise, appropriate and respond to the modes of reading Artaud which underlie their projects, and to trace how the themes which they identify are taken up within Artaud’s own oeuvre: to find both critical responses to and productive lines from their work. On the one hand, this concerns the aleatory formation of subjectivities in Deleuze and Guattari, through which they imbricate Artaud in a Spinozist project; on the other hand, Artaud’s own ideas on ontological anteriority and the methodology of case-studies runs against Derrida’s deconstruction. As such, rather than using Artaud to illustrate a philosopher’s ontology, I will engage with Artaud as a metaphysician and metontologist in his own right – one whose project is deeply embedded in materiality, thought and causation. Central to this proposition is close examination of Artaud’s articulation of the “subjectile” in relation to matter, in particular following his journeys to Mexico and Ireland, and his development of what I will call his lucid materialism

The Paradox of Competition: Power, Markets, and Money - Who Gets What, When, How?

Money is a mystery and financial institutions are often regarded as guardians and promoters of the mystery. These sketches are designed to help any reader interested in, but not technically trained in economics, understand markets, money, credit and the evolution of a mass market system set in the rich context of its political environment and society. We all want a good society. What is a good society is given by our joint vision, mutual respect and social concern but the implementation of the vision calls for the use and understanding of money, markets and finance. The efficient functioning of a dynamic economy calls for the presence of money and financial institutions. The great variety of financial institutions in any advanced economy requires an understanding of what the whole looks like. Verbal description provides an overarching view of the mixture of history, law, philosophy, custom, habit, and political structure that supplies the background for the functioning of the economy. This has been vividly illustrated by Adam Smith, his teacher the Reverend Francis Hutcheson and his close friend David Hume. There are two different but highly allied themes covered here. The first explains the worth of economic theory and its importance while connecting it with the world of politics in which the economy dwells. The second is the application of economic thought to the operating problems of every society. The first theme is covered in the first nine chapters. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 supply the rich context of history, society, polity and law in which every economy is embedded. These chapters require no symbols or technical depth to be understood. In contrast Chapters 4 to 9 offer a reasonably nontechnical exposition of some of the considerable development in formal economic theory pertaining to money and financial institutions as economics becomes more scientific, balancing quantitative measures with qualifications that help to explain what the numbers mean. The second theme is developed in Chapters 10-13 where economic theory with all of its abstractions has to be connected with social and political reality before it can be of use. This calls for both and understanding of physical and social facts, and an appreciation of the role of moral sentiment. Chapters 13 and 14 consider some alternative scenarios that we face in the near future

Bowdoin Orient v.121-122, no.1-21 (1991-1992)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1990s/1003/thumbnail.jp

The Moral Self in Eighteenth-Century Poetry: A Study in the Poetics of Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper and Yearsley

This thesis explores one aspect of the ‘inward turn’ that is a significant feature of English poetry in the later eighteenth century. It claims that a representative group of poets construct an authorial ‘self’ in which the personal pronoun ‘I’ becomes an authoritative guarantor of social and moral judgements. It suggests that this move was a response to Lockeian ideas of personal identity and economic individualism which were subsequently refined and developed by theoreticians such as David Hume and Adam Smith such that the ‘self’ was conceived not merely as the site of the sensorium but also the site of moral judgement. It identifies Thomas Gray as the initiator of this development, arguing that his earlier poems, and particularly his Elegy, were revolutionary in their attempts to accommodate Locke’s ideas as a means of combating both the fissiparous nature of the literary market place and the hegemonic practices of the aristocratic class. The reception of the Elegy led Gray to believe he had failed, but his construction of the ‘swain’s’ dual identity who both judges and is judged was to resonate in the persona of Goldsmith’s narrator of The Deserted Village. Goldsmith’s essentially conservative outlook meant that this poem was fractured and it was not until Cowper’s The Task that a fully coherent realisation of Gray’s poetics was achieved. The thesis finally considers Ann Yearsley’s work, arguing that her construction of a ‘self’ as narrator and social judge was fraught with difficulty both because of her position as a female labouring-class poet, and because of the repressive response to the French Revolution. The concluding chapter draws together the implications of the preceding chapters

Bowdoin Orient v.126, no.1-23 (1997-1998)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1990s/1010/thumbnail.jp

Bowdoin Orient v.107, no.1-23 (1977-1978)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1970s/1008/thumbnail.jp

Multi-perspective modelling for knowledge management and knowledge engineering

ii It seems almost self-evident that “knowledge management ” and “knowledge engineering” should be related disciplines that may share techniques and methods between them. However, attempts by knowledge engineers to apply their techniques to knowledge management have been praised by some and derided by others, who claim that knowledge engineers have a fundamentally wrong concept of what “knowledge management” is. The critics also point to specific weaknesses of knowledge engineering, notably the lack of a broad context for the knowledge. Knowledge engineering has suffered some criticism from within its own ranks, too, particularly of the “rapid prototyping ” approach, in which acquired knowledge was encoded directly into an iteratively developed computer system. This approach was indeed rapid, but when used to deliver a final system, it became nearly impossible to verify and validate the system or to maintain it. A solution to this has come in the form of knowledge engineering methodology, and particularly in the CommonKAD