Palimpsests of the romantic

This articles offers a longue durée perspective to illustrate that just as romanticism was a necessary, though not single-handedly sufficient condition for nationalist movements of the 19th century, an understanding of later cultural and political phenomena – including contemporary neo-nationalisms – benefits from an appreciation of the romantics’ continuing, albeit often unacknowledged legacy. Empirically, we make this argument through select and carefully contextualized Polish and Austrian discursive ‘snapshots’. Conceptually, we propose that new theoretical terminology is needed, which we find in what we describe and analyse as palimpsests of the romantic. Key assumptions and sentiments that defined romanticism are thereby shown to be re- and over-written, under novel social conditions and by later generations of political and cultural actors in both Poland and Austria

Charting Literary Urban Studies

Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities – and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory – and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe – such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city' – really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts

Masha and Bear(s): A Russian Palimpsest

When stories are scraped clean and re-written, how much of the original shines through later tales? This paper offers a palimpsest analysis (palímpsestos, “scratched/scraped again”) of the story Masha and the Bear based on a Russian folktale, Tolstoy’s tale The Three Bears, and the transformed folk world in the contemporary cartoon series Masha and the Bear. A palimpsest analysis of a text reveals different layers of readers’, listeners’, and viewers’ expectations, allowing them to challenge the story. Bringing together different versions of a tale with seemingly very similar characters and plot lines, where each subsequent story is regarded as a palimpsest, adds new features to each story’s interpretation. Considering the tale of Masha and the Bear, told differently in Russian folklore, literary tradition and modern media, demonstrates juxtaposition of textual layers that produces a variety of effects, from tragic to comic

TV times: archive, mood, media

Today, television is spreading centrifugally: it no longer requires a broadcasting schedule nor the furniture traditionally associated with it (the ‘box’ in the corner of the front room). In this age of Television-after-TV one phenomenon that is particularly important is the increasing access and ease of access to the televisual past. This article investigates (sometimes in a speculative manner) how these changes are forming and transforming popular historical consciousness: the ordinary sense that we have of living at a particular moment that is connected with and disconnected from what came before

Charting Literary Urban Studies

Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities – and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory – and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe – such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city' – really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts

Cultural Hauntings: Narrating Trauma in Contemporary Films about the Iraq War

Societies come to terms with the “unfinished business” of past wars through obsessive retellings of their traumatic histories (Bronfen 2012). Combat films therefore are a powerful cultural arena wherein collective memories are negotiated. While movies about twentieth-century wars have received much public attention as meaning-making cultural artefacts, Western academia has to date largely neglected films about a defining conflict of the twenty-first century: the Iraq War (2003-2011). This paper addresses how American and Iraqi films contribute to debates on war memory by depicting ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ as a harrowing and inconclusive conflict. Specifically, the article examines how Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Mohamed Al-Daradji’s Son of Babylon (Syn Babilonu, 2009) incorporate the rhythms of traumatic memory into their narrative fabric. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of hauntology, I argue that the central structuring device of repetition compulsion creates complex trauma palimpsests which present war as a never-ending and ever-returning experience. Ultimately, this study’s examination of the interdependencies between film narrative, trauma, human precariousness and empathy sheds a new light on Iraq’s and America’s intricately intertwined histories of violence

The Knossian Kamares Style as Transgenerational Memory

This paper introduces a new perspective on the constitutive role of material culture for memory using the Knossian Kamares pottery style as a case study. It challenges prevalent approaches in mainstream memory studies, which confine memory to individuals’ brains or minds, suggesting a deeper relationship between material culture and memory. Presenting a novel methodology rooted in cognitive archaeology to study the long-term making of Knossian Kamares decorations, I suggest that the Knossian Kamares pottery style is a transgenerational memory that enabled generations of artisans to remember, learn, and update technological skills and knowledge. I also claim that, in assuming this distributed, enactive, and non-representational stance on style as memory, it becomes evident that remembering is something we do: an active engagement that emerges with and through material culture in specific sociomaterial settings

Exegesis : photographs and place

Photographs are used to reinforce arguments about our history, our culture, and our identity. With billions of photographs now available online, growing numbers of cameras capturing every moment, and people sharing the resulting images in an instant across the globe, what is the connection between even a single photograph and the basic truth of the reality it purports to represent? Focusing on geographic location, my research interest for my creative practice is in how photographs document and represent place. Place helps to define who we are. Place informs us about our past and about the foundations of our community and our culture. Photographs help to define place because they provide evidence for what is there, what was there, and what happened there. In my studio practice I explore the use of rephotography to highlight the differences in material form of place over time. The exhibition explores the place of the photograph in the modern world by comparing photographs taken in the past with those taken in the same places almost forty years later with a series of photographs taken in 1973 in and around Cronulla Street, south of Sydney, and rephotographs of the same scenes in 2011. They show sometimes subtle, sometimes clear, changes in our environment and behaviour that go unnoticed without photographic evidence. To better understand what the photographs in my exhibition are actually saying to us, and to explore what photographs from the past actually tell us, for my dissertation I examined a number of photographs from a more distant, nineteenth or early twentieth century past that proved to be ambiguous. On the basis of my research, I argue that the model of the nineteenth century photograph as an indexical truth, modulated by cultural interpretation, is more complex than is generally thought. Online access to substantially expanded resources through more sophisticated digital tools today shows clearly that the staged photographs should not be considered as 'false' simply because they are not documents of true events. They give us access to the way people then constructed their reality. This offers us useful information about the way they thought about themselves and their society. I also argue that online digital tools, the resources they allow us to access easily, and the opportunities provided by the internet to interact with each other change the rules significantly for Australian institutions of photographic history - galleries, libraries, archives and museums. These institutions are yet to realise the implications of these changed rules, and to embrace the opportunities provided by them to engage actively with individual researchers

Between Codes and Palimpsest: Stephanie Strickland's Dragon Logic

This article will study the impact of programming languages on poetic language in Stephanie Strickland’s print poetry collection Dragon Logic (2013). In this article, I argue that Dragon Logic not only ponders on the changes that occur in contemporary literature with the invasion of digital technologies, but it also articulates via the use of the print form certain concerns relating to the electronic, and finally helps readers reinvent the way one reads a print book. This article follows the theoretical insights provided by N. Katherine Hayles about the connection of natural language and computer code, as well as the different reading practices that are brought forward by computation. Through a selection of close readings of poems in Dragon Logic, I will discuss the layering of codes and how this layering affects the ways natural language is informed by programming language via feedback loops, a process that by extension influences not only human readers but also reading machines.

A framework for interrogating social media images to reveal an emergent archive of war

The visual image has long been central to how war is seen, contested and legitimised, remembered and forgotten. Archives are pivotal to these ends as is their ownership and access, from state and other official repositories through to the countless photographs scattered and hidden from a collective understanding of what war looks like in individual collections and dusty attics. With the advent and rapid development of social media, however, the amateur and the professional, the illicit and the sanctioned, the personal and the official, and the past and the present, all seem to inhabit the same connected and chaotic space.However, to even begin to render intelligible the complexity, scale and volume of what war looks like in social media archives is a considerable task, given the limitations of any traditional human-based method of collection and analysis. We thus propose the production of a series of ‘snapshots’, using computer-aided extraction and identification techniques to try to offer an experimental way in to conceiving a new imaginary of war. We were particularly interested in testing to see if twentieth century wars, obviously initially captured via pre-digital means, had become more ‘settled’ over time in terms of their remediated presence today through their visual representations and connections on social media, compared with wars fought in digital media ecologies (i.e. those fought and initially represented amidst the volume and pervasiveness of social media images).To this end, we developed a framework for automatically extracting and analysing war images that appear in social media, using both the features of the images themselves, and the text and metadata associated with each image. The framework utilises a workflow comprising four core stages: (1) information retrieval, (2) data pre-processing, (3) feature extraction, and (4) machine learning. Our corpus was drawn from the social media platforms Facebook and Flickr