Fact, Fiction, and Fabrication: History, Narrative, and the Postmodern Real from Woolf to Rushdie

While most accounts of Western attitudes towards history in the nineteenth century suggest that Victorians had a faith in its origin, teleology and meaning, twentieth-century assessments of history more often suggest the opposite. Both poststructural theory and postmodern historiography in the wake of Hayden White's Metahistory present a relativist view of the possibility of either objectivity or material referentiality in historical discourse, particularly through the medium of narrative. From this perspective, historical narrative is defined as a discursive creation that obscures the material relations of its production and as an instrument of ideology and oppression. "Fact, Fiction, and Fabrication" investigates what political and ethical repercussions this attitude towards and theorization of history has and how much contemporary fiction typically labeled "postmodern" both initially reflects and ultimately denies this model. This study argues that the assessment of contemporary postmodern fiction as reflecting poststructural models of endless textuality denies an important element of the novels studied: their commitment to the possibility of accessing material reality and the importance of such access both for the construction of an ethics and for political agency. By looking closely at contemporary novels that explicitly theorize history and historiography, it becomes clear that they instead insist on a sense of the "real" at least in part because of these political concerns. These novels, which I label "postmodernist historical fiction," insist that although an inviolable origin, teleology, and even consistent referentiality cannot be obtained in historical reference, there can be a provisional referentiality and access to the real without a return to the classical history of foundationalism, immanence and teleology that contributes to hegemony. These texts are also tied together by their deployment of nonnarrative methods that counter the deformation of the real that takes place within narrative discourse according to White, among others. The primary texts considered are Art Spiegelman's Maus, Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Graham Swift's Waterland, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Studying Humanities Teaches You How to Get a Job

Forget the tut-tutting of politicians: The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search

“Corpses … coast to coast!” Trauma, gender, and race in 1950s horror comics

During the 1950s, a moral panic around youth culture and delinquency dominated the contemporary imagination. Rock n' roll and the new wave of youth-focused films seemed to critics to posit an alternative culture antagonistic to that of older generations. One cultural form sparked particular censorious intent: the horror comic book. Many critics of the 1940s and 1950s dwelt obsessively on the impact of horror comics on youthful readers. The culmination of this movement was the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency, which resulted in the implementation of a harsh new self-regulatory comics code and the end of the horror and crime genres. In this study, we argue that rather than (or perhaps as well as) promoting juvenile delinquency, horror comics served an important social function in that they presented a challenge to the dominant culture in cold war America. They corroborated the veteran experience; questioned faith in science and industry; recognised women as victims of war; and embodied, on occasion, many of the themes of the early Civil Rights movement. It was because of these countercultural impulses that the horror genre in comics was, ultimately, brought to an untimely end

Narratives of the nation in the Olympic opening ceremonies: comparative analysis of Beijing 2008 and London 2012

This paper examines the ways in which nationalism and the narratives of the nation were constructed in the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing 2008 and London 2012. The ritual of the opening ceremony represents a concentration of features, qualities and messages that combine the local and global, the culturally specific and universal, in a complex production. Using textual analysis of the telecast of the above two opening ceremonies, the study found that the Beijing 2008 opening ceremony used a grand narrative of progress, emphasising the unified identity of Chineseness, while privileging the official narrative of the nation and one collective identity. In contrast, the London 2012 opening ceremony highlighted the fragmented but diversified identity of Britishness, transpiring social inclusivity, cultural hybridity and multiculturalism. This may be related to the rise of different type of nationalism in the context of increasing globalisation. The Beijing opening ceremony represented the Sinocentric Chinese new nationalism, whereas the London 2012 counterpart, up to a point, highlighted civic‐based multicultural nationalism

Book genre and author gender: romance>paranormal-romance to autobiography>memoir

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley-Blackwell in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 20/05/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23768 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Although gender differences are known to exist in the publishing industry and in reader preferences, there is little public systematic evidence about them. This article uses evidence from the book-based social website Goodreads to provide a large scale analysis of 50 major English book genres based on author genders. The results show gender differences in authorship in almost all categories and gender differences the level of interest in, and ratings of, books in a minority of categories. Perhaps surprisingly in this context, there is not a clear gender-based relationship between the success of an author and their prevalence within a genre. The unexpected almost universal authorship gender differences should give new impetus to investigations of the importance of gender in fiction and the success of minority genders in some genres should encourage publishers and librarians to take their work seriously, except perhaps for most male-authored chick-lit

“Supposing that truth is a woman, what then?” The Lie Detector, The Love Machine and the Logic of Fantasy

One of the consequences of the public outcry over the 1929 St Valentine’s Day massacre was the establishment of a Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University. The photogenic “Lie Detector Man”, Leonarde Keeler, was the Laboratory’s poster boy and his instrument the jewel in the crown of forensic science. The press often depicted Keeler gazing at a female suspect attached to his “sweat box”; a galvanometer electrode in her hand, a sphygmomanometer cuff on her arm and a rubber pneumograph tube strapped across her breasts. Keeler’s fascination with the deceptive charms of the female body was one he shared with his fellow lie detector pioneers, all of whom met their wives – and in William Marston’s case his mistress too – through their engagement with the instrument. Marston employed his own “Love Meter”, as the press dubbed it, to prove that “brunettes react far more violently to amatory stimuli than blondes”. In this paper I draw on the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and pleasure to argue that the female body played a pivotal role in establishing the lie detector’s reputation as an infallible and benign mechanical technology of truth

The Influence of Manga on the Graphic Novel

This material has been published in The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, Stephen E. Tabachnick. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University PressProviding a range of cogent examples, this chapter describes the influences of the Manga genre of comics strip on the Graphic Novel genre, over the last 35 years, considering the functions of domestication, foreignisation and transmedia on readers, markets and forms