"Wild worship of a lost and buried past" : enchanted archaeologies and the cult of Kata, 1908–1924

Histories of archaeology traditionally traced the progress of the modern discipline as the triumph of secular disenchanted science over pre-modern, enchanted, world-views. In this article I complicate and qualify the themes of disenchantment and enchantment in archaeological histories, presenting an analysis of how both contributed to the development of scienti c theory and method in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. I examine the interlinked biographies of a group who created a joke religion called “The Cult of Kata”. The self-described “Kataric Circle” included notable archaeologists Harold Peake, O.G.S. Crawford and Richard Lowe Thompson, alongside classicists, musicians, writers and performing artists. The cult highlights the connections between archaeology, theories of performance and the performing arts – in particular theatre, music, folk dance and song. “Wild worship” was linked to the consolidation of collectivities facilitating a wide variety of scienti c and artistic projects whose objectives were all connected to dreams of a future utopia. The cult parodied archaeological ideas and methodologies, but also supported and expanded the development of eld survey, mapping and the interpretation of archaeological distribution maps. The history of the Cult of Kata shows how taking account of the unorthodox and the interdisciplinary, the humorous and the recreational, is important within generously framed approaches to histories of the archaeological imagination. The work of the Kataric Circle is not best understood as the relentless progress of disenchanted modern science. It suggests a more complicated picture in which dynamics of enchantment and disenchantment stimulate and discipline the imagination simultaneously. I conclude with a reexamination of the politics of an emphasis on playfulness and enchantment

Rejecting the empowered reader: re-claiming authorial agency in twenty-first century, avant-garde fiction

This dissertation analyzes twenty-first century British avant-garde fiction and argues that a defining literary issue is the shifting dynamic between writers and readers. In particular, the dissertation examines avant-garde authors and the ways in which they conceptualize their readers and their own positions in the literary market place. Contemporary avant-garde writers often claim that their authority has been transferred to an empowered reading public. I explore how material changes including new publishing trends and digitization have re-defined and even blurred the distinctions between authors and readers. I then contextualize these concerns by historicizing anxieties about control, readers, and the marketplace to better show how notions of authority are contingent upon shifts in publishing practices, the expansion of the reading public, and the economic conditions of authorship. In order to demonstrate how these evolving dynamics impact literature, I use the novels of Gabriel Josipovici, Jeanette Winterson, and William Self to show how writers use their fiction to both critique empowered readers and to restore their authority. My study makes the following critical interventions: First, scholarly works on members of the avant-garde have long argued that these authors ignore writing about “real” issues in favor of abstract ideas about literature, beauty, and art. I counter these claims by illuminating how contemporary avant-garde writers are in fact responding to the same economic and cultural pressures as those authors who write for mass audiences. Second, the dissertation contributes to an emerging discussion about literary trends after the millennium. Critics recently have observed that contemporary British writers are aligning themselves with Modernist aesthetics and ideologies. My dissertation suggests that we can only understand this return to Modernism by juxtaposing Modernist and post-Postmodernist concerns about the influence of mass culture on literature and authorial agency

Netmodern: Interventions in Digital Sociology

The techno-economic grid of the Internet looks set to fulfil its autopoietic potentials as a global and multi-dimensionally immersive knowledge and memory archival network. This research project moves through a series of Digital Sociology case studies that mimic the changes in paradigms of the WWW from 2005-2010 in the forms of Web 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond to augmented reality and the cloud. Netmodern social theory is an emergent and speculative product of the research findings of this thesis and the subjective experiences of the researcher in experiencing and explaining digital realities in the research. All of the case studies employ practice-based approaches of original investigation through digital interventions completely immersed in particular waves of innovation and change. The role of the researcher shifts from administrator to mediator and observer as the very fabric of the social web transforms and evolves. The suggestion of the research findings is that you need to actually look at everything differently in order to study the research objects of emergent social agency and forms in digital media. Existing forms of critical analysis and methodological frameworks, particularly those concerned with conceptual models of media literacy or collective intelligence are insufficient as explanatory methods. Studying media literacy is most concerned with ‘how’ we create and interact in online social life beyond issues of simple accessibility. The focus of collective intelligence research is ‘what’ knowledge is available for interaction and a canvas for relationships between agency and knowledge forms. All of the case studies in this research project speak to and critique the intersections and relationships of emergent social agency and forms prevalent in Digital Sociology. The collective case studies explore online academic communities (BlogScholar), agency and popularity in the Twitter social network (Twae) and a variety of representations of collective intelligence in action (Web 2.0 cases studies). The research results suggest that the Internet is not so much intersecting with as it is being culture, economy, and technology

Metaphors of Reading: Cognition and Embodiment in Contemporary Metafiction

This project brings together methodologies from sensory and cognitive approaches to literature to posit that Conceptual Metaphors of Readings mediate the experience of readers with fiction and provide an organizing framework for scholars and readers alike to consider the diverse sensory and cognitive phenomena that are used to describe the experience of reading. These conceptual metaphors are culturally and historically developed and can be used in combination with each other by authors to achieve desired effects on readers; however, there are clear patterns in metaphor blends. I demonstrate the robustness of this framework by analyzing metafictional readers, scenes of reading, and reader/writer relationships within nine metafictional novels of the modern, postmodern, and contemporary periods. In particular, I locate the figure of the metafictional reader in works of fiction as a cipher through which the actual reader presses and exerts herself and her reading practices in configuring her own experience of a text. Due to the sophisticated interplay of convention and novelty at work, the metafictional reader should be understood as an embodied metaphor of reading in which the author explores, with the actual reader in tow, an original conception of reading through a familiar configuration: the reading self. Although many metaphors of reading exist and have existed throughout literary history, in this project, I examine six that are especially relevant in contemporary works: (1) reading as an encounter with sensory bodies, (2) reading as journey, (3) reading as sexual intercourse, (4) reading as contact with the past, (5) reading as performance, and (6) reading as an encounter with nature. I organize these readings and combinations of metaphors according to four popularly touted abstract understandings of why readers read: (1) Reading as Connection, (2) Reading as Challenge, (3) Reading as Pursuit, and (4) Reading as Escape

The Science Communication Challenge

The Science Communication Challenge explores and discusses the whys – as distinct from the hows – of science communication. Arguing that the dominant science communication paradigm is didactic, it makes the case for a political category of science communication, aimed at furthering discussions of science-related public affairs and making room for civilized and reasonable exchanges between different points of view. As civil societies and knowledge societies, modern democratic societies are confronted with the challenge of accommodating both the scientific logic of truth-seeking and the classical political logic of pluralism. The didactic science communication paradigm, however, is unsuited to dealing with substantial disagreement. Therefore, it is also unsuited to facilitate communication about the steadily increasing number of science-related political issues. Using insights from an array of academic fields, The Science Communication Challenge explores the possible origins of the didactic paradigm, connecting it to particular understandings of knowledge, politics and the public and to the widespread assumption of a science-versus-politics dichotomy. The book offers a critique of that assumption and suggests that science and politics be seen as substantially different activities, suited to dealing with different kinds of questions – and to different varieties of science communication

The Politics of Experience: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s

Robert Morris\u27s oeuvre, unlike the work of most other so-called minimalist artists, is both stylistically and intellectually diverse. His range was broad: expressionist paintings, Duchamp-inspired objects, dances and performances, minimalist sculptures, large scale installations and sound environments, earth and land reclamation works, films and videos, and political acts against the museum, the labor economy, and the Vietnam war. The philosophical sources for Morris\u27s art (he was a philosophy major at Reed College in the late-1950s) are equally rich: Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jean Piaget, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Charles Sanders Peirce. As choreographer, writer of influential theoretical texts, and fine artist, Morris sharply questioned the pretensions of modernist art and culture. Extending the discourse of art history, this dissertation exposes the complex relationship between Morris\u27s work and the social and intellectual setting of the 1960s–a radical moment that witnessed a range of protest and dissent, from sexual liberation to the Vietnam war. Morris\u27s archive and writings, most of which have never before been examined, reveal his close relationship to many of these causes, political ambitions ignored by a formalist art history and criticism committed to aesthetic purity and the social removal of high art. Established readings of the minimalist movement center on more classical modernist sources such as the readymades of Duchamp, the phenomenological theories of Merleau-Ponty, and the formalist art of the Russian constructivists. At least for Morris, however, Marcuse\u27s call for the artist to reject modernism\u27s repressive demands for stylistic unity served as an important means for liberating the artist from the limited institutional boundaries of the gallery and the museum. Functioning within the contexts of performance halls, advertising campaigns, land reclamation sites, and even the streets of New York City, Morris appealed to artists and their patrons to broaden the audience for advanced art. Extending from his earliest works of the late 1950s to his mature art of the mid-1970s, the dissertation represents a test case for understanding the avant-garde\u27s intense questioning of the role of the artist and of art during a period of unprecedented social and cultural change

Teaching towards the twenty-fourth century : the social curriculum of Star Trek in the schools

My collection and analysis of Trekker teachers' narratives highlight the role of social "dialect" (Bakhtin, 1981), "collective subjective" (Gramsci, 1980), "general cultural repertoire" (Popular Memory Group, 1982), or "interpretive community" (Fish, 1980; Casey, 1993). The social self can only be understood in "relationship to the specific others with whom she is actually in conversation, and with reference to the interpretive traditions to which she has access" (Casey, 1993: 1). The self is both contextual and contingent (Goffman, 1959; Vygotsky, 1987), therefore there can be no "generic teacher." Thus, the teachers whose narratives are presented here can only impart a curriculum which is significantly shaped by a world view that utilizes Star Trek as its aegis. The Trekker teachers interviewed construct identity in an area of the southern United States known as the "Bible Belt." Their sense of (southern) place deeply structures these narrators (re)interpretations of Star Trek in relationship to technology, religion and the military. Further, all these factors influence how these narrators understand their identities as teachers