Purdue Conference 2009 1. Kyoko AmanoDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Indianapolis
amano@uindy.edu
Selling 19th
Century Stories to 20th Century Readers
Many of Horatio Alger, Jr.’s stories were
originally serialized in The Student and
Schoolmate in the 1860s and 70s. Following the practice of his time, Alger
expanded these stories and published them in book form from A. K. Loring. In early 20th century, dime novel
publishers like the Street & Smith reprinted Alger’s stories. The differences between the A. K. Loring
edition and the Street & Smith’s Brave
& Bold Weekly edition of Phil,
the Fiddler; or The Story of a Young Street Musician, for example, show that the early 20th
century editors abridged Alger’s descriptions of the middle-class people’s charity
to highlight the class differences and the importance of industry in an
unsympathetic world. My study of
literary reception focuses on the editorial changes between the 19th
century Alger stories and the 20th century reprinted editions to
understand how Alger’s readers changed from 19th century to 20th
century.
Many 20th century American writers
were influenced by Horatio Alger.
Theodore Dreiser, for example, fondly remembers reading Alger as a young
boy in Indiana. Richard Wright comments
on Alger in Black Boy, and F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s play, the Vegetables, as
well as Nathaniel West’s Cool Million,
are parodies of the Alger stories. It is quite possible that the differences in
these authors’ reactions might be caused by the differences in editions. In my presentation, I will deal with reviews
from 19th century and 20th century, including
aforementioned authors’ responses to the Alger stories.
2. Hector
Amaya
Media
Studies Department,
University
of Virginia
This
article explores how political identities are expressed and enacted through
film reception by examining the Cuban critical reception in the late 1960s of
the film Lucia (1968), directed by
Humberto Solás. At the time, Solás was central to the Instituto Cubano de Artes
e Industrias Cinematográficas (ICAIC) and with Lucia, he entered the canon of the New Latin American Cinema. As
importantly, the film, which centers on the revolutionary lives of three Cuban
women, was released months after the death of “Che” Guevara in what became
known as the “Year of the Guerrilla Fighter,” and thus was received in a
political and cultural context amenable to a film about revolutionary and
guerrilla life. Analyzing these critical interpretations and the political
culture of the time forces us to recognize that critical film reception is, in
particular contexts, evidence of the political identity of critics/viewers,
including the ways of publicly performing these identities through their
writings. I believe that the relationship between film interpretations and
political identities is mutually constitutive, and thus I ask: how do normative
ideas about political identities structure modalities of reception and
interpretive techniques? Using Foucault’s theories of technologies of selfhood,
I propose a new approach to reception studies that recognizes that the
hermeneutical life of viewers is distinctly shaped in social contexts where
self-formation is important. Interpreting Lucia
was both an exercise of socially established modalities of reception and an
exercise of the viewers’ political lives in their striving to become proper
political subjects.
3. Mark Amsler,
English
Department
University of
Auckland,
Where’s Neo? –
Sovereignty and Multilingualism in Medievalism and Neo-Medievalism’
Nineteenth- and
twentieth-century medievalisms have been deeply imbued with a nostalgia for a
lost cultural coherence or artistic vision. Alternatively, contemporary social
policy theorists have adopted the idea of ‘neo-medievalism,’ in concert with
neo-liberalism, to describe post-nation state political, economic and social
situations. Eco (‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’) used the backward glance of
critical historiography to imagine postmodern futures. Holsinger proposes that
contemporary medievalism has authorised torture, capital punishment, and other
violent forms of biopolitics to subvert liberal democratic institutions and
norms and reinstall the west/east cultural-religious opposition of the Crusades
era. In this paper, I discuss these different medievalisms and receptions of
the Middle Ages as historical fact and imagined future in terms of how they
position sovereignty and multilingual politics in a fluid context of past,
present and future. The multiple contexts within which modern medievalisms have
emerged suggest not only that the past is not stable, which will hardly be
surprising to many, but more importantly, that what’s regarded as past is just as
likely to be a projection of a desired or feared future as it is a prior and
completed phenomenon. A medievalism marks a fold or crease within the presumed
field of modernity. Post-1800 receptions and deployments of medievalisms in
discursive spaces displace ‘modernity’ as a stable or even knowable
temporality.
4. Lisa
Arnold
Department of English
University of Louisville
lisa.arnold@louisville.edu
Troubling
the Discipline(s):
Gender Trouble’s “Complex
Historicity” and Feminist Theory
In
“Afterlife: Texts as Usage,” John Frow argues that reception studies can
conceive of a text’s production as an “open-ended chain” that moves linearly –
backwards and forward in time – as well as “laterally” – across the various
audiences that put the text to use (20). “These multiple temporalities,” Frow
writes, “constitute the complex historicity of the text” (20). This
presentation describes a reception study that illustrates the “complex
historicity” of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity as framed by her
seminal work, Gender Trouble,
especially as it relates to the evolution of feminist theory. Butler’s theory
of performativity marked a major shift in feminism’s understanding of gender
and identity and carried significant political and ideological implications –
the most important and contested of which is the possibility that the gendered
subject has agency in his/her own identity construction.
Since its
publication, Gender Trouble has not
only “troubled” feminist theory, but has influenced many other academic
disciplines as well: The Arts and Humanities Citation Index, for example, cites
the text 3,853 times. In this presentation, I locate the work at the
intersection(s) of feminist, queer, and cultural theory in order to describe
how the concept of gender performativity has shaped, and at the same time
exceeded, feminist theory. I argue that tracing the history of an idea both
linearly (backwards, forward, and even at the same time as a text’s
publication) and laterally (across, within, and among disciplines) – can
likewise illuminate the “complex historicity” of disciplinary formation,
particularly in its limitations and possibilities.
5. Derek W. Attig
Department of HistoryUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigndattig2@illinois.edu
Bookmobility
People cannot read books unless those books actually
move, and yet scholars too often ignore those textual peregrinations. Both histories of reading and theories of the
public sphere frequently refer to the circulation of texts without actually
talking about circulation; reading is
privileged, leaving its very conditions of possibility frequently
unanalyzed. Books seem to appear
suddenly, unbidden, into the hands of readers.
Analysis of the bookmobile, however, provides an ideal opportunity to
consider the social, ideological, and political stakes of print circulation in
twentieth-century America. While its
share of such circulation was proportionally small, the bookmobile captured the
public imagination and thus achieved an unrivaled iconicity in the realm of
print-distribution. Because the
bookmobile both transported books and metonymically represented the
transportation of books in general, it also provides an ideal occasion for
evaluating the mutually constitutive relationship between representations and
practices of print circulation. How, for
example, did the fact and image of the bookmobile make it possible to imagine
strangers brought together in new intimacies around the shape of the book? When it comes to understanding readers’
relationships to text, we must pay attention to “scenes of circulation”—both
the real occasions of textual circulation and those moments in texts that
rehearse the ideal circumstances of their own distribution and acquisition—as
much as “scenes of reading.” Using the
bookmobile as an exemplary case, this paper ultimately asserts that we must
rethink reception—by recollecting circulation—to fully understand the way print
culture works to construct readers’ identities and communities.
6. Timothy Aubry
Baruch College
“Amazon and the Politics of Cross-Cultural Empathy”
The Amazon customer reviews of Khaled Hosseni’s The Kite Runner reveal a strange contradiction between the tragic, violent, ethnically divided world that the book depicts and the utopian feelings of human solidarity that readers apparently experience
as they encounter this world. An obvious satisfaction that contemporary fiction provides for American readers is the chance to participate in an imagined community of empathy, and, as the exuberant reviews of The Kite Runner testify, Amazon serves as a scaffolding and virtual embodiment of this community. That is to say, it allows readers to confirm the otherwise private fantasy that they are not alone in their feelings of sympathy, sorrow, and so forth. But at least in the case of The Kite Runner, such responses seem dependent upon representations of war, ethnic conflict, and human catastrophe, and this dependency raises questions about the utopian promise that some readers ascribe to their own capacity for compassion. Moments of purportedly cross-cultural empathy described by Amazon reviewers seem only to alleviate or mitigate but never to abolish what they see as the tragedy of global politics, a tragedy upon which these moments are predicated. The customer reviews thus provide an opportunity to re-examine the ongoing debate among literary scholars about the political efficacy of sentiment insofar as they provide a trace of its operation among actual readers. My paper challenges the tendency within this debate to view sentiment as categorically conservative or progressive by foregrounding the variety of competing political functions and positions that sentimental responses to The Kite Runner support, thus illuminating both risks and opportunities entailed by the interpretive communities that Amazon fosters.
7. Mimi
Iimuro Van Ausdall, Ph.D.
Purdue
University
Department
of English
“Literature and
Revolution: Lesbian Readers Remember the Seventies”
Throughout the 1970s, tens of lesbian feminist
presses such as Naiad, Daughters, and Diana came into being. These presses indicate goals ranging from
producing “new images of women—images of strengths, images of rebellion”
(Shelley 121) to “mak[ing] revolution” (Nicholson and Desmoines in Shelley
126)). Indeed, lesbian presses were
invested in creative works that went beyond expressing gay sexuality, works
overtly engaged with political ideas.
Many wanted to inspire readers to become activists. Moreover, as Bonnie Zimmerman has documented,
the very purpose of lesbian literature of the time was “to say, this is what it
means to be a lesbian, this is how lesbians are, this is what lesbians believe”
(20-21). Indeed, even today, many young
lesbian read Rita Mae Brown’s seminal Rubyfruit
Jungle (1973) as part of their coming-out process. In the tradition of feminist, reception study
critics like Janice Radway and Patrocinio Schweickert, I propose performing an
estimated twenty on-line and phone interviews of lesbians who read these small
press novels in the 1970s to get a sense of whether the literature achieved the
presses’ goals of “rebellion” and/or “revolution.” To what extent, if at all,
was there a relationship between reading these novels and activism? How did these novels influence readers’ lives
or shape/change their idea of what it meant to be lesbian? And, even more basically, how were these
novels distributed and read/discussed?
Such a project will contribute to our retrospective understanding of the
lesbian and gay liberation movement and to broader debates regarding the
relationship between literature and social and personal transformation and
between social movements and their cultural production.
8. Harry Benshoff,
University of North Texas,
“’Way Too Gay to be Ignored’: David DeCoteau’s Beefcake Boutique Horror Films”
The films of David DeCoteau signal an interesting development in the history of queer horror films. His most recent films—including The Brotherhood tetralogy (2000, 2001, 2002, 2005), Voodoo Academy (2000), The Frightening (2002), and Leeches! (2003)—are all low-budget, straight-to-DVD offerings that campily recycle the tropes of earlier horror films. What distinguishes them from most other low budget horror films is the way that DeCoteau uses generic horror tropes as an excuse to fill his screen with sexy young men, placing them into various homoerotic situations as the particular narrative demands.
The reception of DeCoteau’s films is almost more interesting than the films themselves. They have developed a cult following among some women and gay men, while they are also the target of homophobic outrage from straight male viewers. In short, DeCoteau’s horror films make the queer elements of the genre too pronouncedly gay, and those elements often turn off straight male viewers accustomed to seeing “Bikini-Clad-Babes-Drenched-in-Blood.” As one such viewer commented about Leeches!, the film is “a heterosexual male’s nightmare,” ostensibly for the ways in which male bodies are repeatedly attacked by rather phallic-looking giant leeches, but also for the way that Leeches! is just “way too gay to be ignored.”
9. Amy Blair,
Department of English
Marquette University
"Rereading Race for the Great White Way: Show Boat's Reception as Novel and Musical."
This paper will look at two moments in the reception of Edna Ferber's _Show Boat_ (1926) first as a best-selling novel, then as the first true American "musical play." The study will focus initially on the transposition of the miscegenation plotline from novel to stage, particularly in the balance between the Julie-Steve romance and the Magnolia-Ravenal romance. I'm wondering whether the relationship between Julie and Magnolia can explain the profound popularity of this text among women readers, and will look for any reception that marks the difference between the versions, and how the "readers" place themselves with regard to Ferber for editing her own text.
10. Jason Bryant
Dept. of English
Arizona State University
Discriminating Tastes: Reception of
Amazon’s Top Customer Reviewer
This paper
will examine the reception of Amazon’s top customer book reviewer, Harriet
Klausner, as it appears in web commentary by her fellow Amazon reviewers and in
articles published in the mainstream press. Lauded as a noteworthy tastemaker
in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine, Klausner serves as the
token representative of online reviewers for “professional” critics. But Klausner
is denigrated by many of her fellow customer reviewers because they find her
readings efferent, avoiding heuristics to analyze a book’s quality for its
potential readers. Because the traditional media reception of Klausner and her
practices is much more cordial, her peers fear a larger devaluation of the
online non-professional reviewing community. The discrepancy of the two
receptions underscores a process wherein definitions of “legitimate” book
criticism are formed. Klausner seems to provide a red herring for
“professional” discourses, in which critics celebrate the idea of citizen
critics, all the while devaluing the legitimacy of those online tastemakers.
This paper will integrate Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic capital and
his definitions of barbarous and aesthetic tastes in order to reveal how
professional critics subtly disparage the works of their online counterparts.
In doing so, this paper points towards the need for non-professional reviewers
to resist the mainstream misappropriation of their acts of reception.
11. Steve Carr
Indiana
Purdue University at Fort Wayne (IPFW).
“Eichmann TV”
Much attention has focused upon the televised war crimes
trial of Adolf Eichmann as a watershed moment in the mediated representation of
the Holocaust, if not more generally in its focal point within modern cultural
awareness. While a number of histories
such as Jeffrey Shandler's While America
Watches: Televising the Holocaust have thoroughly explored the importance
of this televised event in shaping public response to the representation of the
Holocaust, this paper considers the trial in a different light.
Although not as fully explored, coverage of the Eichmann
trial portends what one might call the globalization of Holocaust mediated
representation. Rather than develop into a coherent mode of representation,
television coverage of the Eichmann trial already indicated the fragmentations,
paradoxes and problems of representing the Holocaust for a globalized audience. Directed by leftist and blacklisted radical
filmmaker Leo Hurwitz, the program was never seen by an audience in Israel due
to the lack of a broadcasting infrastructure.
Israelis heard the broadcast on radio. When a small media conglomerate
of local affiliates Capital Cities, which would go on to purchase the ABC
network in the 1980s, won an exclusive contract to cover the trial, they made
footage available to audiences in the United States via satellite. However, rather than offer a live feed, Capital
Cities offered news stations edited footage, either in the new videotape format
or in the more standard 16mm film many stations still used. Within the year, a
budding Ted Koppel had completed his Masters thesis on newspaper coverage of
the trial.
12. Leo Tak-hung CHAN
Professor and former Chair,
Department of Translation,
Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
Through a Glass: The Mediated Reception of Translated
English Fiction in China, from the Eighties to the Present
The present paper seeks to grapple with the difficulties of
really knowing the tastes, idiosyncrasies and overall configurations of the
general readers of translated fiction in the Chinese context. Surveying
available information on fiction-reading in China in the latter part of the
twentieth century, one must conclude that sales figures or print runs of books
are of little help. Neither can translators’ selection of English novels for
translation be used to construct the “real” readers of translated fiction in
China. Ironically, while readers’ choices and preferences should be the focus
of reception histories, available sources point more to the choices and
preferences of government officials, publishers and academics, in addition to
those of the translators. This means that the reception history of translated
fiction heavily mediated—as much as, if not more than, original fiction.
Difficult as it is to characterize accurately a reading community of readers,
it is almost impossible to reconstruct the historical readers of even two
decades ago. Although thousands of modern English novels have successfully
crossed linguistic borders in the twentieth century, the task of gauging how
they were received by the uninformed reader (as opposed to translation critics)
remains daunting.
A range of translated novels will be chosen for analysis from
the perspective of book history studies as championed by Robert Darnton (1982)
and Andrew Elfenbein (2006), among others. Of special interest are famous
feminist fiction (by Virginia Woolf and Maxine Hong Kingston) and popular
bestsellers (by Margaret Mitchell and Dan Brown), as translated with great
enthusiasm by a new generation of Chinese translators appearing on the scene
since the mid-1880s. It will be shown that, despite the intervention of a
number of interested parties in the reception process, reading translated fiction
remains an exciting “border-crossing experience” as readers feel they are moved
from one semiotic realm to another, from the familiar to the strange. Of course
their encounter with the foreign is not a direct one; in effect, they are
looking “through a glass” at Anglo-America. But reading translated fiction does
enhance the Chinese readers’ cross-cultural knowledge, as the Self meets the
Other and the Unknown breaks into the realm of the Known.
13. David
Church,
Indiana
University
churchofdavid@yahoo.com
“Of
Manias, Shit, and Blood: The Reception of Salò
as a ‘Sick’ Film”
A discursively constructed niche within the
online horror fan community champions the reputed “sickest” films (from both
within and beyond the horror genre, but typically titles coded as “underground”
or “foreign”), asserting their subcultural capital as fans by positioning this
cultified corpus of texts against “mainstream” horror consumption. Fans argue
over the primarily affective (and secondarily artistic) merit of these
semi-obscure films, including those that cannot be solely confined to low
culture. Case in point: Pasolini’s Salò
(1975), a critically acclaimed art film, routinely tops fan lists of “sick
films”—a term I adopt to suggest not only the visceral affect intended by the
films themselves, but also the stereotypes often applied and ambivalently
reacted to by their producers and consumers. This paper examines how Salò’s reputation among both sick film
fans and art film fans cues overlapping reading effects through intertextual
comparisons to films from different taste cultures—thus complicating the
appeals to (sub)cultural authenticity used by fans on both ends of the high/low
cultural spectrum. The performativity of online identities allows sick film
fans to privilege and negotiate Salò’s
displeasurable affectivity through classist and masculinist reading strategies,
upholding subcultural scripts that anticipate and prolong the anxieties and
distinctive reception practices allegedly attending the viewing experience.
Drawing on formalism/auteurism to justify their chosen objects, fans strive to
preserve their intra-subcultural standing, but their performed anxieties
ultimately reveal the fundamental instability of cultural distinctions premised
upon discursive displays of (sub)cultural capital within both horror and art
film fandom.
14. Joanna
Collins
University
of Pittsburgh
“Heaven
Just Got a Lot More Interesting:” Online Responses to Norman Mailer Obituaries
In
November 2007, notorious author-turned-celebrity Norman Mailer died, and on
April 9th, 2008, Carnegie Hall welcomed nearly two thousand grieving
fans for a two-hour memorial.
Though the
author’s death set off a flurry of obituaries, this study will be confined to
one print newspaper online, the New York
Times, and one exclusively Internet news source, The Huffington Post, as well as the Blogrunner website. By
mining two hundred article “Comments” and forty blogs, this study will attempt
to reconstruct the two-pronged pattern of response that followed the author’s
death, paying particular attention to the recurring concerns about the
obituary’s efficacy, as well as the contentious negotiation of decorum for the
dead.
In their
2008 book, Journalism in a Culture of
Grief, Carolyn Kitch and Janice Hume explore the problematic ways in which
news media arbitrate cultural values through ritualized grieving
practices. Though they rightly argue
that both journalists and audiences
together negotiate the construction of collective memory, their claims often
get lost in an overwhelming rhetoric of “death-as-unifier.”
In
Mailer’s case, I will argue that the immediate online responses to the author’s
death were far more complex than the “death-as-unifier” model allows. Mailer’s obituaries were put on trial by
online posters: they judged whether the writing was too reverent or not
reverent enough, and, moreover, they questioned the appropriateness of one
another’s discursive practices when talking about the dead. For whatever reason, the respondents saw
themselves as vested with a great deal of authority to speak on Mailer’s
behalf.
15. Andrew
Cutrofello,
Loyola
University Chicago
More things in heaven and earth: The Musical Socrates and the
Melancholy Genius
To understand the history of modern philosophy,
we need to understand the influence that Hamlet has had on European
philosophers. I argue that this influence has taken the form of a repression,
with its three classical stages of fixation, repression proper, and return of
the repressed. The object of the repression is a distinctively modern form of
melancholy exemplified by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Evidence for the repression can
be found in the ways in which philosophers have been haunted by Hamlet.
Haunting is not only the form of the return of the repressed; it is also its
content. This is because Hamlet’s melancholy is itself a way of being haunted.
In this paper I provide an overview of the main evidence for my thesis, and I
briefly indicate the specific ways in which the haunting of Hamlet figures in
the texts of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Russell, Heidegger,
and Derrida.
16. Emily S. Davis
University of
Delaware
edavis@udel.edu
"Questions of Methodology for Transnational Reception Studies: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love" as Case Study
At a conference in Cairo sponsored by the Egyptian Supreme Council for Culture, Amina Elbendary describes how “a heated debate threatened to arise [among] several participants when the chair argued that contemporary Egyptian British author Ahdaf Soueif’s novels were not part of contemporary Arab literature but of English literature, since the Anglophone Egyptian novelist writes in English.” However, while the Egyptian and diasporic Arab response to Soueif centers on her hybrid identity, her relationship to multiple literary traditions, and the appropriateness of her strategic representation of political concerns in the Middle East to a western audience, the popular response in Britain and the US has much more to do with reactions to the familiar conventions of romance and the pleasure or strangeness of consuming unfamiliar Middle Eastern history in this familiar form. In most of these reviews, Soueif is unquestionably and authentically Egyptian. In this talk I will use the very different perceptions of Soueif and her novel The Map of Love as a springboard for articulating possibilities for a more fluid transnational model for understanding both the text and the author.
17. Matthew
Davis
University
of Oklahoma
Matthew.Davis-1@ou.edu
“In the light of history and experience”: Charles Chesnutt, The Colonel’s Dream and the Problems of
Audience
This essay analyzes problematic issues of
audience within Charles Chesnutt’s novel The
Colonel’s Dream. Much of the recent scholarship on Chesnutt’s book seems to
read the novel through the lens of a monolithic white audience in order to
interpret the social mission of the text. I incorporate a reading of the novel
with the content of some of Chesnutt’s journal entries to illustrate his
concern with how complex and conflicting ideas are interpreted and understood
by the individual subject. He notes that “[a] harmonious, healthy mental
development requires the friction of mind upon mind” (Journals 137).
I argue
that the parallel notions of the conflicted self and understanding through
conflict and reasoned argument can inform much of the complexity of the text by
providing the opportunity for multiple readings. This approach foregrounds an
appreciation for audience debate and conflict as opposed to a one-to-one
correspondence between text as communicator and audience as receiver. At
various points in the text, multiple readings present at once challenge the
reader to consider complicated issues in the novel as they are represented,
specifically in terms of the audience’s ability to negotiate issues of race,
class, and North-South relations. My approach is additionally supported by a
comparison of contemporary and modern reviews of the novel in order to
articulate multiple and competing discourses on race at the turn of the 20th
century. This context is important for identifying Chesnutt’s participation in
racial discourse of the time and his resistance and challenges to that
discourse.
18. Shlomi Deloia,
Ben Gurion University,
"Jewish Authors, Mainstream Readers, and the Shaping of the the Jewish American 'Problem Novel' of the 1920s"
This paper will trace shifts in the popularity of Jewish American immigrant fiction between the 1910s and the 1920s in relation to the upsurge of anti-immigrant sentiment of this period. Mainstream readers' responses helped to shape the Jewish immigrant novel from its early manifestation as an "assimilationist" narrative, to its more subversive development as the "Jewish Problem Novel." By tracing changes in mainstream audience expectations and responses to Jewish American fiction, I will explore the complex interplay between Jewish authors and readers who were both fascinated by and anxious about the grounds of Jewish identity in the post-WWI period.
19. BILJANA DJORIC-FRANCUSKI
English Department
Faculty of
Philology
University
of Belgrade
“Reception of the Novels by British Nobel Prize-Winners in Serbia”
In the course of more than fifteen years
spent in thorough investigation of the reception of British novelists in
Serbia, the author of this paper has noticed some rules and tracked down
certain changes in the developments in that sphere. One of them is a peculiar
shift from copious reception of high-class works almost a hundred years ago
towards a flood of low-quality translations and reviews regarding some marginal
authors at the turn of the century. An illustrative example is certainly the
case of Nobel prize-winners, hence this paper proposes to elucidate the facts
regarding the reception of novels by three such authors, namely: John Galsworthy (who received the Nobel
prize in 1932), William Golding (1983), and Doris
Lessing (2007).
To
give just a hint of the findings, it suffices to highlight that prior to Galsworthy’s winning the prize his opus had been
reviewed by Serbian critics for twenty years, totaling over thirty articles in
our literary magazines,
periodicals and dailies. Golding’s novels had also been received in our country for twenty years before he won the prize,
with a somewhat more modest total of almost twenty articles. This decline was
speeded up at the end of the twentieth century, thus the critical reception
of Lessing’s works – thought it had
started half a century ahead of her being awarded the highest prize for literature – at that moment
included just six reviews.
The reasons for such a strange phenomenon
are numerous, and among them the most important one is the fact that a hundred
years ago just a handful of learned people in Serbia could speak the English
language and read literary works written by English authors, so the persons who
selected the works to be translated from English into Serbian, as well as those
who translated them and wrote about both the originals and their translations,
were precisely the best-educated Serbian scholars of that epoch. Nowadays, on
the contrary, too many young people are convinced – but usually without any
right reason – that they know English sufficiently to be able to translate
high-class literary works, sometimes even such complicated ones as the novels
written by Lawrence Durrell, Angela Carter and David Lodge are! Most often,
these brave individuals are not even ‘intellectuals’ in the sense that they
never studied English language and / or literature, so
they are neither real translators nor erudites as far as fiction is concerned.
Therefore the quality of such translations is worthless, while on the other
hand those ‘unskilled experts’ prefer to translate works of lesser value since
these are generally written in a more simple style which it is much easier to
render into the mother tongue.
In addition to this, another important
reason which has lead to the flood of low-quality writing in recent years
regards financial motives of publishers
who try to earn more by paying less for translations and critical texts, no
matter whether these pertain to the best writers or only to the marginal ones.
Besides, they most often demand that such jobs be done quickly, in order to
cash in on readers’ interest while it is at its peak, so even the
experienced translators and critics do not have enough time to finish their
work properly, not to mention those who are not at all up to the task they have
embarked upon.
It only remains to be hoped that such a
tendency will be curbed into the opposite direction in future!
20. Angelica Duran
English and Comparative Literature
Purdue University
duran0@purdue.edu
John Milton, Englishman: “Of the Devil’s Party” per the Spanish
Inquisition
This paper is based on research conducted
in Spain and the U.S. of texts in Latin, Spanish, and English, which is
important given that geographical and linguistic contexts are the background
for this exploration of the differing and changing reception of entries on the
British poet-politician John Milton (1607-1674) in the series of
religio-political prose works known as the Spanish Catholic Inquisition’s Index Librorum, the list of books and
authors censored or prohibited in Spain from the fifteenth to mid-eighteenth
centuries. The primary division between types of reception are not between the
Renaissance and today but rather between languages and by extension
nationality, in which 1) contemporary Anglophone scholarly critical work
perpetuates the early modern, primarily British reception of the Inquisition’s Index Librorum as fearsome and worthy of
derision; and 2) current Hispanophone reception focuses on Milton primarily as
a politician rather than as the great epic poet of Paradise Lost (1667), just as the Index Librorum represented him.
Both institutional censorship
and external criticisms are mechanisms for the constructions of personal and
national identities, and for notions of the aesthetic and the religious.
Reviewing how these mechanisms operated with Milton provide pithy correctives
to some notions about how much they inform reading practices. Just a few
outcomes to be explored. 1) We are able to dispel the general conflation of the
Roman Catholic Inquisition and the Spanish Catholic Inquisition by showing
how much earlier (in 1707) and the distinct reasons that Milton showed up on
the latter. 2) We can appreciate how
linguistic diversity and commercial availability interact with literary
exchange and authorial representation in what we might think of as the closed
system of the Spanish Catholic Index
Librorum by noting that the first appearance of Milton’s poetry on that
list, in 1844, is for an Italian translation of Paradise Lost. 3) Finally, we can correct the too-easy notion that
prohibiting works might incite an increased market for those very illicit and
therefore alluring works, by seeing that Milton’s works have continued to be
generally ignored by Spanish readers.
21. Stacy
Erickson
Manchester
College
SLErickson@manchester.edu
Talking Back to the Canon: Reading Shakespeare and Milton in the
Digital Age
Since
their initial printings centuries ago, editors have worked hard to make lengthy
and complicated texts like Paradise Lost
and The Complete Works of Shakespeare
approachable and accessible for readers.
These texts have long been framed by extensive prefaces and historical
and biographical information, serving to clarify and explain but also,
inevitably, to highlight the distance between readers and these “important”
works. As they continue to help readers
negotiate their interactions with these oft-studied texts, editors and teachers
wary of the top-down, canonical approach to literature are recognizing the
unique benefits of multimedia technologies – specifically the ways they
encourage active reading and foster multiple interpretations.
In this
paper, I consider how hypertext editions open up long-famous works for a new
generation of readers. I focus in
particular on digital versions of Milton and Shakespeare’s texts found in the
expansive online Literature Network – a medium that invites extensive
interaction in a way not possible in a material text form. Through the addition of student-centered
forums, lengthy introductions, reader blogs, and extensive pop-up notes that individual readers - whether “student, educator, or
enthusiast” - may use
or disregard according to purpose or need, these texts become fluid and
collaborative; reader empowerment and agency is thus not only encouraged but
required. This conscious breaking down
of the established hierarchy of author, editor, and reader is, I propose,
something that Milton and Shakespeare would have supported wholeheartedly.
These texts cater to the needs of their audiences in the twenty-first century
yet also stay true to these authors’ own overarching goals for their works in
their original contexts: creating active and independent readers and citizens.
22. Zita Farkas
University of York, United Kingdom(PH.D)
ztfrks13@googlemail.com
Taking a Stance: Jeanette Winterson's
Influence on Her Own Reception
In my presentation I shall discuss the way the writer/author can be part
of the reception of her/his work. Both Sarah Ahmed (1998) and Rita Felski
(2003) delineate a concept of the author that resurrects the vanished author of
the poststructuralist/postmodernist literary discourse by acknowledging her/his
role in the interpretation of her/his work. The author is no longer cut off
from the text and at the same time s/he is no longer the source of meaning.
Instead, the author, the 'embodied subject' (Ahmed: 123) is part of a complex
interplay between work, autobiography and socio/cultural formations that each
articulates the reception of her/his work. This concept of the author blurs the
borders between author and writer forwarding the difficulties of the exact
differentiation between the two.
Considering reception as a field of negotiation between several
(f)actors such as academia, media, publishing and university syllabi, the
author, as 'embodied subject', becomes one of the actors that takes part in
this negotiation. In order to discuss the role of the writer/author in
reception, I shall examine the reception of one British contemporary writer,
Jeanette Winterson. She formulates her own position in the literary field by
reflecting and analyzing her own work in her literary essays, on her internet
site and in the media. In my presentation I shall focus on the issue of
influence by discussing how academics relate to Winterson's self-definition.
Are they influenced in their interpretation of Winterson's? Do they neglect it
based on theoretical grounds such as the postmodern concept of the author?
23. Cecilia Konchar Farr
Professor of English and Women's Studies at St. Catherine University (email: ckfarr@stkate.edu).
“Let’s Talk About
Texts: The Evaluative Language of Everyday Readers.”
After several years of studying the reception of popular novels, the way I talk about novels has shifted—seismically. As I compare the work I do as a critic, the language I use, with what I hear from readers, getting “lost” or “entranced” is not part of my critical repertoire. This is not something I have learned to analyze or evaluate. Nor is “discussability,” the quality most often cited by book clubs as essential to their best choices. These are, however, the qualities I hear enthusiastic everyday readers use to describe the books they value on oprah.com, amazon.com and other readers’ forums. Readers want to wander off into books, isdentifying with characters and being swept away to different times and places; they want to have something to talk about when they’re done, turning the solitary act of reading into a social opportunity; and (my “aha” moment) readers want to learn something new. They want to close a book smarter than they were when they started it.
In a study my students and I conducted of local book clubs and in my analysis of reviews and book discussions on oprah.com and amazon.com, these three terms—absorption, discussability, and learning—or versions of them, surfaced over and over among devoted readers. This paper will assess the disconnect between what everyday readers talk about when they talk about novels and what aesthetic theorists are trained to notice and value.
24. Laurie
A. Finke,
Department of
Women’s and Gender Studies
Kenyon College,
finkel@kenyon.edu\
[with Schichtman]
‘Medieval
Hauntings: Rituals of the Ku Klux Klan’
The Arthuriad
was (and is) always a project in medievalism, always glancing backward
nostalgically to lost dreams--of insular unity, of hypermasculine brotherhood,
of genealogical purity, of imperial ambition. For
25. Elizabeth
A. Flynn
Department
of Humanities
Michigan Technological University
eflynn@mtu.edu
“Receiving” the Lost Girls of the Sudan
A number of books have appeared recently
documenting, in vivid detail, the sufferings endured by the Lost Boys of the
Sudan. Some of these accounts are first-person narratives by the lost boys
themselves (Ajak, Deng, Deng, and Bernstein; Dau) while others have been
written in the third person about the lost boys (Makeer, Hecht, Bixler,
Williams and Christie, Eggers). The Lost Girls of the Sudan have received
considerably less attention, no doubt because their circumstances were
considerably different, and far fewer survived and made it to the U.S. This
paper discusses the ways in which the Lost Girls have been represented in
written accounts and in other media. It begins by defining representation as
reception or “receiving” and focuses especially on the ways in which these
accounts reveal perspectives on race.
26. Jackie
Gold
Department
of History
Emory University
jagold@emory.edu
“The Adventure of Empire: Women's Responses to Colonial India on British Screens, 1935-1948"
Between
1929 and 1939 British cinemas screened at least fifteen feature films about
India. While typically including a
‘token’ female love interest and a romantic subplot, “India films” tended to be
homosocial, telling stories of small bands of British soldiers and adventurers
living in the outposts of the British empire.
This group of films has received some attention in the rich scholarship
on the culture of empire in twentieth-century Britain, but the majority of
these studies have focused on textual themes, assuming an ‘ideal’ western or
British audience who all understood these films in the same way. Much of this work takes for granted that
“India films” told masculinist stories to primarily male audiences and argues
that their popularity was due to overwhelming popular conservatism and
nineteenth-century nostalgia in interwar Britain.
Writings
from contemporary female filmgoers, however, suggest that many British women
found “India films” incredibly appealing, and their interest lay beyond these
films’ overtly jingoistic plotlines.
Using letters-to-the-editor from three of Britain’s top film fan
magazines, I examine the ways in which female viewers discussed “India films,”
which often mocked and rejected domesticity, as speaking to their own concerns
as wives and mothers. I argue that
British women used “India films” as a means for escaping the confines of
interwar domesticity, for arguing against gender stereotypes, and for
reimagining conceptions of female desire.
27. Philip
Goldstein
Associate
of Arts Program
University
of Delaware
Derrida as Reception Theorist
Unlike Marxist theory, which has declined in
status since the 1970s and 1980s, the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno has
experienced a revival because it justifies a return to the formal, textual
analyses set aside by the literary theory and cultural, black, women’s, gay,
ethnic, and postcolonial studies of the 1970s and 1980s. Adorno’s aesthetics suggests,
however, that, while the culture industry inculcates in readers or viewers a
blind faith in the capitalist system, high art resists the industry’s conventional
discourses and reveals the repressed ideological divisions and social conflicts
of as a whole. In that regard, Adorno’s aesthetics parallels the aesthetics of
Martin Heidegger, who also maintains that great art undermines conventional
discourses and reveals the truth. In Truth
in Painting Derrida’s account of Kant’s and Heidegger’s aesthetics
undermines this notion of aesthetic autonomy and critique. Derrida suggests
that the division between high art and the culture industry is itself a product
of the theoretical framework enabling Adorno to divide high art from the
culture industry or instrumental reason. Although Derrida rejects Foucault’s
historical method, Derrida’s account is, moreover, open to a positive
Foucauldian approach which situates aesthetic norms in diverse cultural
institutions, regimes, or formations. This Derridean/Foucaultian approach
allows both the textual interpretation of texts, films, or the media and the socio-historical
analysis of the practices of readers, viewers, audiences, or fans.
28. Mary Beth Haralovich
School of
Media Arts
University
of Arizona
mbharalo@u.arizona.edu
They Also Serve: TV’s
Military Wives Reach Out to Women
Television’s
military wives are domestic parallels of soldiers on deployment. Civilians are “under fire” at home, expert at
repressing fears, providing unconditional support, and accepting that they live
with stress and anxiety. Television
military dramas participate in a culture of expectations about how families of
soldiers are to behave. Through
discussion threads on websites, it is apparent that women viewers respond to
the emotional register of television as well as to the programs’ efforts at
realist portrayal of military wives.
This paper
examines how two television dramas and the response of viewers on fan
sites. In addition, this paper draws
upon my personal experience waiting with women and families for USMC companies
to return to 29 Palms base after a tour of Iraq (“the boys are back in town”).
The
Unit (CBS, 2006-present) is male-oriented action, black ops
tough. The women at home are expected to
be stoic and blindly loyal. They are
allowed no information about the tactics and strategies in which their men are
engaged. Efforts to gain knowledge are rigorously
suppressed. In Ryan/Mamet-tough
performances, the men’s visceral physicality contrasts with the soft physical
and vocal presence of the women.
Army
Wives (Lifetime, 2007-present) is woman-oriented and
melodrama-inflected, grounded in performances by actresses with substantial
television chops (Kim Delaney, Catherine Bell).
Although there is a black ops unit, their soldiers serve in more
conventional deployments, tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. These wives cross class, race, and gender,
from base commander first lady to barmaid PFC newly-wed. These Army wives are the moral fiber for the
entire base and, by extension, for the USA.
Their speeches explain, to each other and to viewers at home, why we
serve.
A brave
stoicism is common to The Unit, Army Wives, and the women at 29 Palms
Marine Corps base. In television stories
and in real life, senior women mentor younger women, shepherding them without
question into the expectations of courage.
Fan writing indicates that Army
Wives functions as mentor and guide for viewers, giving expression to the
domestic space of war.
29 Joan Hawkins,
Indiana University Bloomington,
“Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est? Watching Horror Downtown”
It might be argued that the Downtown Art Movement (1975-2001) currently occupies the same space that, Jeff Sconce argues, the contemporary Zombie occupies. Throughout the fin-de-siècle period, however, it was a thriving scene which incorporated horror into an avant-garde production obsessed with the body and the everyday. Arising just prior to the identification of AIDS and developing in tandem with the trajectory of the disease and of a deepening recession, the Downtown Art movement embraced horror as one of the best tropes to describe our transition into the Twenty-First Century.
This paper seeks to do a couple of things. For one thing, it seeks to rewrite horror back into the history of the Downtown Avant-garde, as a dominant organizing principle, not just as a thematic sideline. For another, it seeks to draw links between the theory which motivated many of the Downtown Artists—Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, and the other continental theorists published by Semiotext(e)—and the horrors which those same artists embraced and created.
Finally—and perhaps most importantly—it seeks to analyze what it means to “watch horror downtown.” This is not as coy, as it might at first seem. Downtown films were projected in a lot of different spaces; very few of them were legitimate theaters. The films were shown in squat galleries, in clubs (either as a backdrop to punk performances or in a separate back room screening area), on community access cable, and- most disturbingly- on the exteriors of buildings (so that vampiric acts of fellatio-violence literally towered over the neighborhood). To “watch horror” in a street-side venue or a bar sutures and incorporates spectators in a totally different way. In some cases, the bodies of the people next to you—or even your own body—is shadowed on the screen as a key component of the composition. And since the films were made while the actors and directors were not yet well-known, it wasn’t all that unusual to run into that same brutal vampire at some club. To complete the uncanny effect, some horror aficionados of the period actually had their teeth done—the incisors filed to points—and cultivated a certain “taste” for blood as part of sexual encounters. And while the films produced by downtown directors never really crossed over into popular culture, the larger social context of hip-horror and Vlad the Impaler clubs did.
30. Matthew
S. Hedstrom,
University
of Virginia
hedstrom@virginia.edu
The
Religious Book Club: Marketing Liberalism through Print
The
Religious Book Club, founded in 1927, sought to capitalize on the popularity of
middlebrow reading innovations such as Readers’ Digest and the
Book-of-the-Month Club to market liberal Protestantism to the American reading
public. Religious books experienced a
renaissance in sales, and marketing sophistication, in the 1920s, and this
paper examines the Religious Book Club as a critical institution of that
renaissance. An extensive examination of
the Club’s monthly newsletter, including letters to the editor and book return
rates, reveals an increasing acceptance among readers of
psychologically-inflected, mystical, and non-Christian forms of spirituality
from the late 1920s through the 1930s.
31. Tom Hertweck, Program for Literature & Environment
University
of Nevada, Reno
thertweck@unr.edu
Commodity
Narratives and the Sublime Object of Consumption
Commodity
narratives (also called commodity histories) have become a dominant mode of disseminating
information about the banal stuff of everyday existence and, as popular
non-fiction, take up increasing amounts of shelf space in bookstores. Works like Bananas, Coffee: A Dark
History, and Robbing the Bees present
the long and complex stories of the things we take for granted, producing the
tale of how item get from out there in the world and into our homes.
Though these works produce excited reader
responses, little work has been done to understand how audiences relate to this
emergent popular genre. What has been
said, however, is disturbing. In his
essay “Commodity Histories,” Bruce Robbins has argued that the sole function of
these works—even those produced by seemingly objective academics—is to
re-fetishize the commodity for the reader, that these works are, at base,
“effective capitalist propaganda” because of their inability to engage
critically with the capital system (456).
With Robbins I disagree. It seems reasonable that even as these works
have the potential to sensationalize their subject, they still produce factual
narratives from which readers might—and do—drawn information with which they
make more deliberate choice in the marketplace.
Taken this way, I argue that we can read commodity narratives as the
sublime object of consumption in that these stories produce both the amazement
(awe) that Robbins asserts in the ability of capital to make our lives more
enjoyable, and the horror (shock) of the social and environmental costs of
bringing goods to our homes.
In this
paper I will explore these issues in relation to Dan Koeppel’s recent Bananas, a book that reader-after-reader
has lauded as one that “makes one want to know more” while at the same time
revealing that “something will have to be done.” I explore how readers bear out this sublimity
of narrative between the “I had no idea!” and “How terrible!” responses. More than a position of ambivalence, I
reassert that having this information is better than not, and produces a more
conscious consumerism. In this way, we
can see that commodity narratives are produced precisely as receptive texts par excellence meant to entreat a reader
to action.
32. Ashley
Hetrick
Department
of English
UI at
Urbana-Champlain
“Accessories / To his
bold riot”: Audience and Empire in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Early Modern Travel Narrative
John
Milton’s Pandaemonium is quiet, hushed between stages of becoming. The demons that Satan has left behind to care
for hell while he conquers foreign lands, are hunkered down in their inchoate
empire, waiting for his return. For it
is only when he tells the story of conquest that the empire takes shape. This shape, however, is one of horror. Satan places his audience at the center of
his narrative, claiming that he performed certain acts only to tell of them
later. After he narrates deceiving Eve
as a serpent, he calls his audience to claim their new home. Instead of cries of victory, however, he
hears hissing. Satan’s audience has
indeed taken up residence at the center of Satan’s imperial journey and tale:
through what Milton terms “horrid
sympathy” (X.539), the demons assume the shape in which Satan sinned. Book X of Paradise Lost, I argue,
offers an image of imperial reception, wherein to convey travel is to bridge
the gaps between self and other, and doing and receiving.
Book X must be situated within Milton’s reception of Richard Hakluyt’s travel narratives (1589, 1598). My paper thus locates it within the relationship that Hakluyt established between British imperial narratives and readers. I argue that Paradise Lost partakes of the tradition of empire-building through colonial discourse set forth in the Principall Navigations. I trace the imperial speech act, intent upon making readers vessels for the continuation of empire, from Hakluyt to its full and horrific realization in Satan’s transformative speech.
33. Barbara Hochman,
Ben Gurion University,
bhochman@bgu.ac.il
"Nella Larsen's Passing: Racializing Edith Wharton in the 1920s"
The young Edith Wharton was accused of slavishly imitating Henry James. Yet in recasting James she critiqued his approach to gender norms. The young Nella Larsen was attacked as a pale imitator of Wharton. The charge of imitation had particular force when levied against a black writer "copying" a white one. I suggest that Passing (1929) reflects Larsen's rereading of House of Mirth and Age of Innocence via two issues that Wharton only flirts with: race and violence. Examining Larsen's use of Wharton I will explore the meanings attached to imitation, intertextuality, and plagiarism in the literary culture and racial context of the Harlem Renaissance.
34. A.
Robin Hoffman
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
ALH73@pitt.edu
The BFG and the
Spaghetti Book Club: A Case Study of Children as Critics
“No matter what size you are, you can still
be a good person (or giant).” In
concluding his book review by recounting the lesson learned, Ryan S. also
demonstrates how interactions between text and child reader can be subject to
idiosyncratic twists.
This
study attempts to redress the common error of essentializing child readers, or
speaking for them without considering either real child readers or their
experiences of reading. In this, I
follow scholars like Holly Blackford, Shelby Anne Wolf, and Shirley Brice
Heath, who have explored the intersections of ethnography, childhood studies,
literary studies, and education research with case studies of particular child
readers or child readers’ responses to particular texts. I avoid my
predecessors’ reliance on interviews and surveys by taking advantage of an
online resource: an archive of children’s book reviews posted on the website of
the Spaghetti Book Club, a for-profit educational organization that provides
web hosting services for school classes and their students’ reviews.
This study surveys 30 different reviews of The BFG by Roald Dahl and their
accompanying illustrations, produced by fourth-grade students (aged 8 years old
to 11) representing a broad diversity of American demographic groups and
geographic areas. Far from revealing an
“essential” or “passive” child reader, this sample set bears witness to
children’s capacity to derive highly personal meaning from the text while constantly
negotiating the boundary between self and story. It also reveals children’s
propensity, much less their ability, to distinguish between form and content
while describing aesthetic experience.
35. Charles Johanningsmeier
University of Nebraska at Omaha
jmeier@mail.unomaha.edu
“The Potential – and Limitations – of Using Fan Mail to Assess Historical Reader Behavior: The Case of Willa Cather”
In the paper I would like to present at the Reception Studies Society conference, I would first assess the relatively little previous scholarship that has used fan mail in order to assess audience response to various fictions. Most of my paper, however, would detail what I have learned first-hand on this topic, in the course of my work on the fan mail written to Willa Cather between 1900 and her death in 1947.
The drawbacks of using these letters are, on the surface, rather significant. First, there are only 222 of them. This might seem like a large number, but of course they represent only a statistically insignificant percentage of Cather’s actual contemporary readers, who numbered in the millions. In addition, they naturally tend to reflect the opinions of Cather’s more educated, literate, and confident readers. Furthermore, very few express negative opinions of her works; not only were letters likely pre-screened before Cather actually read them, but understandably Cather, even if she did receive critical letters, would not have been likely to save any of them. The extant letters do not, then, necessarily constitute a representative sample of all letters sent to Cather but instead represent what Cather herself deemed most significant.
Despite such limitations, however, I believe these letters can still prove very useful to us today. For one thing they can help us understand Cather’s own artistic anxieties, because they are a good indicator of what she most wanted and needed to hear about her work. Quite possibly, too, they encouraged her to “hold the course” and continue writing in certain veins even when professional critics disapproved of such work. Possibly most important, in addition to offering revealing insights about reader behavior in the first half of the twentieth century, they give us at least a glimpse of what characteristics of her works made them popular among “regular” readers during her lifetime. Most certainly, the aspects of Cather’s works that most struck these readers are quite different from what modern academic scholars have focused on. Finally, they can also help us answer the question: how did Cather’s texts affect her readers’ thinking and behaviors?
36. Kelly Kessler,
DePaul University,
“Remember our Heroes: Network and Audience Negotiation of a Series in Crisis”
In 2007 Tim Kring’s Heroes stormed into the NBC primetime lineup garnering both popular and critical praise. The comic book styled sci-fi drama had the highest rating of any new NBC drama over the past five years. Time magazine dubbed its cast one of the “people who mattered” and the show landed award nominations and accolades from the prestigious (AFI, WGA, Golden Globe Awards, Emmy) to the folksy (People’s Choice Awards). The apparent powerhouse of televised superpowers seemed a force to be reckoned with by the close of season one. In the wake of narrative shifts and a crushing writers’ strike that truncated season two and dashed hopes of a publicized six episode spinoff Heroes: Origins, the show has spent the last season and a half attempting to regain the critical praise and ratings success it had found in its freshman year.
This presentation will examine the various ways in which fans, writers, and NBC have attempted to use extra-textual means to regain the momentum lost in the sophomore season. Highly visible online fan presence and NBC’s embracing of webisode spinoffs/character background clarifications, fan interaction, and online graphic novel depictions of the series and its further imaginings mark the show as a 21st Century case study in narrative preservation and resuscitation. No longer simply at the mercy of the one-hour time slot—or lack thereof in the case of the shortened strike season—Heroes exemplifies the emotionally and economically invested parties’ new-fangled outlets for series protection.
37. Olga
Kuminova
Abrahams-Curiel
Department of
Foreign
Literatures and Linguistics
Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev
Committed to Public Care: Reader, Author, and the Community in the
Reception History of The Sound and the Fury
Despite the
common view of the novel as a genre for a solitary reader, the reception
history of The Sound and the Fury suggests that modernist novel is best
appreciated by a community of readers. The first American reviewers of
Faulkner's novel, in spite of being experienced novel-readers, stood baffled and
alone in front of the enigmatic text, and expressed frustration at its
obscurity, its manifest "refusal" to communicate. The modernist novel
was as yet an unfamiliar genre, and its first readers had no recourse to a
familiar set of reading conventions to help them tackle works of this type. The
Sound and the Fury, in particular, is a very challenging, introverted
communicative gesture, where especially the first two sections seem addressed
to no external consciousness, and deliberately unhelpful to a first-time
reader. This extreme "individualism," even autism, of the text leaves
the reader no choice but to reach out for support of an interpretive community
-- which soon began to form around The Sound and the Fury.
Today the
first-time reader is in a much better position to do justice to this novel, if
s/he belongs to the readerly, critical and scholarly community that shares a
tradition of reading modernist novels in general and this one in particular.
Yet even with such a reader, Faulkner's text is not guaranteed the warm,
selfless, empathic reception that Faulkner had worked to achieve, by
publicizing and popularizing his novel in various ways.
38. Lesley
Larkin
Northern
Michigan University
Learning to Read: Jamaica
Kincaid’s A Small Place
A Small Place (1988),
Jamaica Kincaid’s scathing critique of tourism, neoimperialism, and
postcolonial corruption, operates through the relentless interpellation of its
“reader” as a white, male, Western “boob.”
The formal devices that effect this interpellation, including
antagonistic use of the second person, initially aim to distance readers, many
of whom may feel unfairly “stereotyped” by the work. These devices ultimately function, however,
to invite disidentification with the figure of the tourist (and rejection of
“tourist-reading”) and partial identification with Kincaid—who appears as a
reading subject within the pages of her book.
This paper argues that A Small Place is a pedagogical work that
teaches readers how to read it, and that the anti-tourist, anti-imperialist
reading practices it promotes are transferable to other works and other scenes
of reading race, including contemporary classroom settings.
39. Elana Levine,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
ehlevine@uwm.edu
“’What the Hell does TIIC Mean?’: Soap Viewing in a Transmedia World”
As overall ratings have declined, as the average age of viewers has risen, and as commercial slots have generated fewer dollars, the US broadcast networks have sought out new ways to attract viewers to daytime soaps. Since 2005, one such strategy has been to use web-based platforms as a way to retain existing viewers and appeal to new ones. Soap producers and networks have pursued cross-platform distribution as well as engaging in transmedia storytelling as a way of promoting the broadcast episodes and, potentially, of generating new revenue. In these efforts, new content featuring existing soap characters, actors, or backstage personnel extends the soaps’ narrative worlds beyond the daily broadcast episodes into podcasts, blogs, webisodes and other sites. Yet the audience reception of these convergent media efforts has not been as welcoming as the soap industry might like. Indeed, online content has become one of the many sites within which soap viewers and the soap industry battle over the present and future of the genre. In this paper, I analyze this conflict, which centers around fans’ belief that writers, producers, and networks are not serving the true nature of soaps in these transmedia efforts, with “true” soap storytelling suffering most. My analysis focuses on the character blogs of ABC Daytime, in particular the ways in which the blog of General Hospital character Robin Scorpio serves as a site of struggle between ABC Daytime executives, General Hospital creative staff, and General Hospital audiences.
40. Katherine Mack, Ph.D.
English DepartmentUniversity of Colorado, Colorado Springskmack@uccs.edu Title: Public Memory as Contested Receptions of the Past
All memories exist on a spectrum between memory-as-object and memory-as-process. At times memories are fixed and stable; at other times, they are vigorously contested. This paper suggests that what distinguishes public memory from social, collective, and cultural memory is this active and processual dimension. Building on the work of memory theorists such as James Young and Edward S. Casey, and drawing on publics theorist Michael Warner, I define public memory as on-going interpretive engagement with the past—a definition that considers the uptake and circulation of different interpretations of the past to be its defining characteristics. If public memory is more a process than an object—an ongoing engagement with and argument about the past rather than a particular memory—the analysis must track its movements, not merely describe its contents. Rhetorical hermeneutics, which tracks paths of thought in the form of arguments and tropes in a particular historical and cultural context, offers a method with which to study public memory. To exemplify this definition and method of studying public memory, my paper will conclude with a rhetorical hermeneutic reading of the ways that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) generated public memory by introducing topoi about the apartheid past to which different social actors then responded in a variety of media.
41. Steve
Mailloux
Loyola
Marymount University
sjmaillo@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu
My current project is still rhetoric and
receptions of St. Paul. I could do a
paper on "Receptions of St. Paul's TheoRhetoric," which begins with a
reading of Paul as a "theorhetor" by the seventeenth-century French
Jesuit Nicolas Caussin and moves to a political reception study of Paul in the
U.S. Senate debates over the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s.
42. Thomas
McLaughlin
Department
of English
Appalachian
State University
“Hexis and
Hermeneutics: Reading as a Bodily Practice”
In Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of practices,
embodiment plays a central role. A
practice is an activity repeated so frequently that it becomes second nature,
proceeding without conscious awareness. A practice is learned through a social
process and eventually becomes an
unconscious motor program – Bourdieu calls it a hexis -- an operation trained into the body so deeply that it feels
instinctive. This process of embodiment
can also be understood in Foucaultian terms, as a discipline that creates a
docile body, an acceptance of social power.
This paper proposes to examine the act of reading as an embodied
cultural practice. Over time, readers
develop distinctive physical postures and gestures. They hold the book, support its weight, turn
the pages, underline and write in its margins, performing these practical tasks
in a variety of somatic styles. I argue
that these postures and gestures make visible the reader’s distinctive
hermeneutic process, and more radically, that they contribute to the
interpretive process by operating as an element in the cognitive
unconscious. Hexis determines, at least
in part, hermeneutics. This argument proceeds by an analysis of images of
reading bodies – photographs, paintings, clip art, sculpture. We can see in these images the socialized
body’s unconscious adaptations to the conditions of reading and its power to
determine the cognitive and emotional work of reading.
43. Susan McLeland,
University of Texas at Austin,
mcleland@austin.rr.com
“DeadWife’s in the Pimp Spot: Reading American Idol through Extratextual Discourses”
For the fifth year in a row, American Idol was the top-rated show on U.S. television in 2009. Even after its season ended it continued to dominate entertainment news. Throughout May and June, print and web-based journalists reported on allegations of voting irregularities, the runner-up publicly acknowledging that he was gay, and judges’ speculation on returning for additional seasons. What makes this reality show something worth not only watching, but talking about so much? Henry Jenkins discussed the appeal of American Idol’s “affective economics” early in its run in Convergence Cultures, but the bulk of his work dealt with the show’s significance as a brand among brands. For this paper, I will examine American Idol as both a narrative and the seed material for a variety of fan- and media-produced narratives.
The show purports to be merely “a singing competition” with the simplest of narrative arcs: performers sing, judges critique, viewers vote, losers leave. But in the gaps between these televised beats, viewers construct alternative narratives about the contestants and their relationships, judges and their careers, and the legitimacy of the competition itself. These narratives include a variety of stock formulas, including sports narratives of winning, losing, and going the distance, catfights, unlikely heroes and heartless villains, conspiracy theories, and even slash fiction. These stories and more will help us to investigate the ways that even the simplest television narrative can be complicated by invested viewers.
44. Walter Metz
Department of Cinema and Photography
Southern Illinois University
“You’ve gotta be frakkin’ kiddin’ me!”: Science-Fiction Fandom, Academic Television Studies, and Historical Trauma in Battlestar Galactica
Produced in 1978, Glen Larson’s television series Battlestar Galactica attempted to continue the success of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) in hybridizing conventional Hollywood action cinema (Westerns, 1930s serials, and the like) to science-fiction. Both texts responded to a post-Vietnam War crisis in American confidence. However, Star Wars tactically chose to elide the historical trauma in his story (he would wait 25 years to tell the story of the fall of Anakin Skywalker), instead cutting to the chase and beginning his narrative with the triumph of his hero, Luke Skywalker in destroying the Evil Empire’s Death Star. In a matter of two hours of screen time in the summer of 1977, Lucas redefined Hollywood cinema as the most successful device for repairing a wounded national ego, offering jubilant Americans “a new hope.” In a financially unwise inversion, Larson chose in Battlestar Galactica to emphasize the malaise of the late 1970s: his show concerned a distinctly hippie, late 1960s civilization whose embrace of peace and love left them open to the devastation of a sneak attack by robotic Cylons. The bleakness of the show’s theme, about the few survivors of a galactic holocaust, stood in stark contrast to its comic, late 1970s televisual execution, resulting in quick cancellation within one season. However, precisely because of this odd combination, the show developed a rabid cult following among science-fiction fans.
After many aborted attempts to revive the franchise, inspired by the phenomenal success of Star Trek, Ronald Moore and David Eick successfully sold a “re-imagining” of the series to Universal Television in 2003. Whereas the late 1970s show responded to a vague national malaise, the new version clearly engaged a more precise historical trauma, that of 9/11. The new show consequently discarded all of the original’s camp values and comic tone. With rape sequences and graphic battles between seemingly indestructible Cylons (as opposed to the original show’s cheesy tin can, bulky costumes), the new Battlestar Galactica announced itself as a serious science fiction show about the likely end of humanity. When Moore and Eick took their show to science fiction conventions, they were besieged by angry cult fans offended by their tampering with the original text. They received death threats, and repeated interventions to restore the peace by original cast member Richard Hatch were unsuccessful.
The rabid, irrational defense of original texts by fans when confronted by remakes is neither new nor interesting. However, in the case of Battlestar Galactica, the historical framework in which the re-imagining was accomplished opens up interesting avenues for inquiry. The original Battlestar Galactica’s facile critique of the culture of the 1960s as having produced an American collapse by the late 1970s was little commented upon during the initial run of the show. There was little infrastructure, either in academic television studies (in its infancy with the publication of Horace Newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art shortly before in 1974) or in fan culture (well before the networking power of the Internet), for sophisticated analyses of the show. When the new Battlestar Galactica appeared in 2003, both of these mechanisms were well developed.
It is within these new academic and technological contexts that the reception conflict over the re-imagined show needs to be considered. Moore and Eick took the original framework of the show and tactically redesigned its basic metaphoric spine. Most commented upon has been the show’s deliberate gender inversions. The original Starbuck (Dirk Benedict) was a stereotypical, cigar-smoking womanizer; in the new version, Starbuck was played by a woman (Katee Sackhoff), offering both a thematic engagement with women in combat, but also featuring one of the most beautiful women on television
45.
Daniel Morris.
Professor
of English and Jewish Studies
Purdue
University,
morrispur@aol.com
Paper
Title: “Embarrassing Exposures: Textualizing Images to Influence Viewer
Reception in Weegee’s Naked City”
I
am currently working on a book on Weegee (1899-1968), the Jewish-American
photographer and author of ground-breaking books such as Naked City
(1945) that combined image and text.
For my Reception Theory conference paper I will focus on Weegee’s use of
humor in his captions and commentaries as an expression of his ambivalent
relation to his intended audience of middle-class viewers, to his Jewishness,
and to his role as a photographer whose fame rested on exposing the hardship of
other poor urban immigrants in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Weegee’s concern about how his images will be
received by his intended audience can be detected in his commentary, especially
in how he frames the visually mediated “real” through language. The satirical tone evident in the captions
expresses Weegee’s embarrassment at his exposure of the ethnically encoded
urban body. Concerned he has revealed
too much about his hardscrabble world to middle class viewers, one senses his
determination to distance himself – through verbal satire -- from his authorial
persona as disheveled Bowery bum, and from the compromising images of other
night crawlers he puts forward. The satirical captions also express Weegee’s
embarrassment at his display of blood, disfigurement, and violence in ways that
mark bodies as available for representation and that also signify his claim to
fame. Weegee’s concern with reception is
evident in how he translated the silent image into a means of personal
expression through words that signify his persona in cadence, tone, and
colorful street idiom. This is so even
as his words, which express scorn for the violence and degradation he
witnessed, signify his wish to distinguish between his experience as an exiled
immigrant with an uneasy relation to mainstream culture and his authorial
sensibility.
46. Jennifer
Nolan-Stinson
Department of English
North Carolina State University
Towards a
Life History of Reading
One of the
most frequent criticisms leveled against the literary critical community is
that the readers discussed are often little more than theoretical
representations of the ways that literary academics read. As Janice Radway has
argued, acknowledging that “professional, academic reading is only one kind of
reading and a relatively specialized one at that” provides impetus for the work
of scholars who contextualize our studies in non-academic social and/or
historical contexts. An overview of the methods currently used to
understand reading makes clear that the complete range of possible meanings of
reading has been glossed over because our focus on the text, academic modes of
reading, and even on particular groups of readers cannot explain the ways that individual
readers use reading and make it meaningful within the context of their everyday
lives. In his introduction to The Ethnography of Reading, Jonathan
Boyarin notes that “we still need an ethnography of that ‘solitary reader’
whose stereotype we decry, but who we spend much of our waking time
being.” Despite the important contributions of scholars like Radway, I
argue that Boyarin’s pronouncement still holds true sixteen years later—we still
need an ethnography of individual readers. I propose that a life history
approach that considers social, cultural, spatial, and temporal influences on
reading, readers, and the researcher holds the key to understanding reading as
a social and cultural practice. In this paper, I will use examples from my life
history work with actual readers to demonstrate how such techniques work and
what they have to offer studies of reading and reception.
47. Ildiko Olasz, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Northwest Missouri State
University
olaszild@msu.edu
“Pick Up a Book or Go to the Movies? Film Adaptations and Student Audience”
When it comes to film adaptation rankings, novels written before 1900 rarely fare well. The Guardian's 2006 readers, for instance, included only Heart of Darkness and Oliver Twist among the top 20 adaptations of all times, and mentioned Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as thirty-first on the list. Among our student population that ranking tendency changes: the classical adaptations of the 1960s and 1990s lose foothold, and films based on sentimental novels gain popularity. My presentation will commence with a comparison of my students' reception of Jane Austen adaptations, All that Heaven Allows, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The analysis will highlight that this specific audience group approaches each of these film genres--romance, melodrama and anime--with different expectations. These expectations, interestingly, represent a unique mixture of what the genre foretells, what the historical context suggests, and what they have learned about gender representations. As a result, students resist utopias and limit the interpretation of films about the American 1950s, but find their voices during the discussion of Austen adaptations. Beyond the analysis of class discussions and student paper passages, this presentation will reflect on the ways in which this audience group relates to novels they have seen on screen. Based on statistics of recent film sales and book reprints, the presentation will end with a look into the future of these novels that will act as text versions to be read after film screenings.
48. James Paasche
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University.
“Recovering Lost Audiences: The Curious Case of Business Screen”
Historical reception studies have drawn attention to the discourses surrounding films within large cultural contexts. However, too often this mode of film history has focused its attention on the products of Hollywood or narrative filmmaking. We must apply the methods of historical reception studies and its discursive focus to other types of films, films that were seen by audiences outside of the movie palaces and dime theaters.
Business Screen was a trade magazine that began in the late 1930s. Its focus was on drumming up interest and investment in the nascent business film industry, which included industrial, training, and corporate films. Throughout the magazine there is an overt attempt to make the case that film is a tool that can draw attention to a business, aid in the training of employees, and serve as a public calling card for said businesses. Important to this call for the use of films was the construction of many different audiences: business owners, management, employees, and the general public/customers. The wide variety of viewing contexts for these films, whether in corporate offices or on the floors of factories during World War II, opens up considerations of how people watched films and what they did with them. This paper will read the various discourses in this magazine surrounding the construction of audiences and viewing contexts that can widen our understanding of the work that historical reception studies can accomplish.
49. Allen H Redmon
English Department
Texas A&M Central
Texas
How Many Lebowskis are There? Introducing the Constructivist Use of Genre
M. Keith Booker (2007) identifies the willingness to mix multiple genres in a single work as one of the key ingredients of postmodern film. As his own study admits, the Coen Brothers’ films exemplify the practice. Even their most straightforward productions demonstrate a willingness to blend the narrative and stylistic practices of several well-established genres in American cinema. While conceding Booker’s point, the proposed paper suggests that to construe the Coen Brothers use of genre in this way alone would be to miss more novel uses of genre in their films. The Coens move beyond generic allusions able to create the self-conscious pastiche customary in postmodern films by including not only generic references, but by adopting the logic and concerns of the genres from which they borrow. In so doing, their films invite the savviest viewers to use knowledge of otherwise separately demarcated genres to construct multiple films from each text. By way of example, the proposed paper describes the way in which The Big Lebowski (1998) works almost equally well as, among others, a detective film, a war film, or, more generally, a reflexive film. The exact nature of the film depends almost entirely on the discretion and generic knowledge of the viewer. The proposed paper refers to this use of genre as constructivist and ends with a description of that use.
50. Sharon Ross,
Columbia College (Chicago),
“’OMFG!’: The Incorporation of Fan Reception Practices Into the Marketing and Narrative of Gossip Girl”
Teen
television shows are at the vanguard of utilizing new media to invite their
viewers to become immersed in the worlds of their programs. The O.C. was an early example of a teen
soap that blended the use of new communications technologies into the marketing
of the series and also the narrative. The producers of that program are behind
the current hit teen soap Gossip Girl, successful
in part due to the incorporation of fan reception practices into the marketing
and narrative of the program. In this paper I will examine how the complex
world of Gossip Girl has been built
outwards to encompass viewers through the use of fan-oriented marketing
campaigns. I will also examine how the complex narrative of this series lends
itself to fans comfortable with new media technologies; the entire premise of
the series rests on the trope of a never-seen character who sends text messages
about the comings and goings of the main characters in such a way that drives
the plots of the show. Further, the CW has worked to create online and mobile
narratives for fans that become active in the main text, and moments within the
main narrative also indicate an attention to what fans are saying online. What
might such stratagies indicate about how teen viewers are being understood in
today’s TV industry, and even where the industry might be heading as it
prepares itself for adult viewers raised within this current world of
convergent media practices?
51. Barbara Ryan,
University of Singapore,
usprbt@nus.edu.sg
“Re-reading the Bible, Revising Ben-Hur: The Man Nobody Knows”
Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody
Knows (1924ff.) was a long-term steady seller that meant a great deal to
readers ‘round the globe. Many, but not all, were Christians attracted to
Barton’s revisionist portrait of Jesus of Nazareth. Barton’s revision was
controversial. But an underappreciated aspect of it was how directly it
contradicted the last
52.
Benjamin G. Sammons
Department
of English
Chesnutt’s
Technology for a Warm Reception
Chesnutt’s Technology for a Warm Reception
In the May 1900 Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells favorably reviewed two
volumes of Charles Chesnutt’s short stories, affording the young author his
highest literary honor to date.
Chesnutt’s letter of thanks to Howells indicates that he deemed the
review a sort of initiation: “I am very grateful for your kindly notice and
encouragement, after which I feel that I can safely subscribe myself a man of
letters and hope for a worthy career in that field of effort.” Chesnutt’s optimism about his relationship
with American readers would not outlast the lukewarm reviews of his later Marrow of Tradition, but in his
posthumously published novel from this period, A Business Career (2005), his eagerness to find a welcoming
audience can scarcely be contained. I
argue that this novel dramatizes Chesnutt’s fantasy of reception into the
predominantly white ranks of
For
Chesnutt, concerns with reception—for himself as an author and for African
Americans as full citizens—lay at the heart of his desire to write. His journals show him wrestling to overcome
white readers’ prejudice against African Americans—“to lead them on
imperceptibly,” as he would have it, “to the desired state of feeling.”[1] A
Business Career displaces this strategic pursuit of acceptance to a
business office where the protagonist’s work of stenography figures the vexed
relation between oral and print cultures, two worlds that Chesnutt sought
throughout his career to reconcile. If
stenography is a technology amenable to Chesnutt’s search for an audience in
literate white
53. Edgard Sankara,
University of Delaware
esankara@UDel.Edu
Transnational Reception of paradox in Confiant’s autobiography
In 1989 Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant (along with
Jean Bernabé) in their manifesto In
Praise of Creoleness set out to advocate a “literature by us and for us,”
thereby positing the primacy of a Francophone Caribbean audience. Confiant’s first autobiography, Ravines du devant-jour (1993), which could be read as “defense and
illustration of Créolité,” focuses on his childhood and the loss of the Creole
language. It is also a return to the
roots of the trauma and an attempt in Confiant’s adult years to revive what he
lost and make it a creative tool. It is
significant that the autobiography was published just a few years after the
publication of the literary manifesto Eloge
de la Créolité, where the co-signers, including Confiant, vowed to create a
new type of literature for
54. Emily Satterwhite,
Department of Interdisciplinary Studies,
Virginia Tech
“Resell Rural America to Americans”: Fan Mail, Migrants, and Pastoral Nationalism
In
1954, author Harriette Simpson Arnow received a fan letter regarding her
bestselling novel, The Dollmaker
(1954), which follows Gertie Nevels and her family from their farm in Kentucky
to WWII-era Detroit. Mrs. Martha Henes chided Arnow, “please…write a sequel -
do get ‘Gertie’ back home….It is the American Way – for every family to have a
farm home someplace” so “please…resell rural America to Americans.” Using
evidence from Arnow’s fan mail, I show that dozens of fans, like Henes,
conflated living in the industrial midwestern
55. Andy Scahill,
University of Texas at Austin,
“Perverse Pollyannas: The Bad Seed, Revolting Children, and the Possibilities of Queer Adoption”
This piece examines the 1956 domestic thriller The Bad Seed, in which a young girl names Rhoda Penmark commits a series of murders and covers her crimes with a cunning performance of childhood innocence. Critical treatments of the film thus far have viewed Rhoda as a site of parental horror and abjection, but none have accounted for the film’s curious afterlife in camp and queer communities—including iterations in camp television, drag performances, and the films of Sadie Benning. This piece intervenes by examining the pleasure of disidentification with “revolting children”—bodies which are revolting in their liminality, and who are bodies in revolt against the family and its patriarchal corollaries—for the queer spectator.
I argue that the film contains its own utility as queer camp through its central ruminations on masking, performance, and its deconstruction of the “naturalness” of normative white childhood innocence. Following Elizabeth Cowie, I suggest that these films, their preoccupations, and their anxieties constitute a mise-en-scène of desire that comfortably accommodates queer subjectivity. In The Bad Seed, and other films that centralize the perfectly performing child, masking and masquerade animate a perverse pleasure in allowing concealment and “closeted-ness” to function as a site of power. In a world that consistently positions queers as incompatible and antithetical to childhood and futurity, what does it mean that queers have “adopted” this monstrous, revolting child?
56. Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture, Film & Media Studies
Shadowing Noir: Generic Inflections in
the Critical Discourse
Conceiving
of film genre not as a fixed aesthetic or formal category, or even as an
industrial creation, but as a discursive construct, this essay is inspired by
one of Rick Altman’s claims in Film/Genre (BFI Publishing,
1999). Altman contends, “[o]nly when a film is subjected to critical
reception is its generic potential concretized and stabilized by its
reviewers. In short, critics and not studios lie at the origin of most
generic language” (127). This essay picks up where Altman leaves off,
taking film noir as a case study for the way genres are identified and defined
by the circulation of critical discourse
James Naremore and others point to 1946 as the year when “film noir”
became a critical term in France, with the premier of five Hollywood movies in
Paris that summer: The Maltese Falcon (1941); Double Indemnity(1944);
Laura (1944); Murder, My Sweet (1944); and The Lost Weekend
(1945). Mainstream American critics, however, did not begin using the
term until Paul Schrader published “Notes on Film Noir” in Film Comment
in 1972. I plan to track the critical reception of the “original” five
films noir in a trade journal such as Variety, an independent exhibitor’s
guide such as Harrison’s Reports,
and major newspapers across the country such as The New York
Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times,
analyzing how the films were classified and understood before the term “film
noir” rose to prominence in the U.S. Moreover, I am interested in looking
at how contemporary critics write about noir in the wake of box-office hits
that have been described as “postmodern noir,” “revisionist noir,” and “neo-noir.”
This topic
alludes to larger cultural questions about who is representing cinema to us and
what power they have in teaching us about genre. Whereas most scholarship
on noir has been akin to textual or auteurist analysis, high theory (especially
with regards to identity politics), and American film history, I feel a project
on the discursive
problem of noir reception will make a valuable contribution to the
conversation.
57. Martin B.
Shichtman,
Department of
English Language and Literature
Eastern Michigan
University,
‘Medieval
Hauntings: Rituals of the Ku Klux Klan’
The Arthuriad
was (and is) always a project in medievalism, always glancing backward
nostalgically to lost dreams--of insular unity, of hypermasculine brotherhood,
of genealogical purity, of imperial ambition. For
58. Jeff Sconce,
Northwestern University
“In the Shadow of the Silent Zombie Majorities”
For nearly a century, critics have looked to Freud’s gothic theater of the mind to explain what scares us and why, and in particular his influential essay of 1919, The Uncanny. But there remains something decidedly ungothic, unFreudian, un-uncanny about the zombie--he, she or it staggering about as an irreducible core wholly resistant to traditional terms of analysis. Perhaps this explains, in part, why Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their own ambitious attempt to slay Freud and Oedipus, nominated the zombie as the only salient mythology remaining within the capitalist era. “The only modern myth is the myth of zombies,” they note in Anti-Oedipus, “mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.” Zombies take the stage when the theater of the mind, so central to psychoanalysis and modern subject, at last goes dark. When there is nothing left to repress, one might say, the dead will walk the earth, not as phantasmic projections of some occult psychic force, but as an obscene parody of positivist sociology—blank bodies on an empty march toward absolute massification. Building on Baudrillard’s reimagining of the social mass as a black hole of inert resistance, this paper considers the zombie as the most obvious of creatures, one that does not demand recourse to the interpretative gymnastics of encrypted metaphor, latent allegory, or political symptomology. The modern zombie, I would argue, is a creature of the post-uncanny social--an era when earlier models of horror born of modernity and repression become improbable, if not completely impossible.
59. Matt Seybold,
Department of English
University of California – Irvine
Free Agency & The Fire Next Time (Abstract)
In April of 1947, seven years prior to Brown v. Board of Education, Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby integrated Major League Baseball, in what Robinson called “a sociological experiment which revealed certain truths about human relations, a research laboratory and proving ground for democracy in action.” The synecdochic relationship between baseball and America persists to this day. Many of the African-American ballplayers who Robinson inspired, understood that they played a social role beyond mere entertainment. Like most black celebrities of the 1960s, players like Curt Flood, Willie Horton, and Richie Allen acknowledged, whether by choice or by necessity, the reception of their careers could not be extracted from their concurrence with the Civil Rights Movement. One of the ways which these ballplayers sought to understand this association was through the observation and analysis of African-American public intellectuals. This paper is an account of how the reading of James Baldwin’s autobiographical essays, particularly The Fire Next Time, assisted them in appreciating the nuances of the various perspectives on civil rights from the era and perhaps inspired their opposition to oppressive practices within their own sport. Most famously, Curt Flood cut short his own lucrative career in order to protest professional baseball’s reserve clause which prevented players from negotiating with more than one team. He called himself a “well-paid slave” and argued that the lack of free market competition was a disadvantage to everybody. His case, Flood v. Kuhn, went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1972 and although he lost, his persistence spurred his fellow players to increased unionization and eventually led to the institution of “free agency” in 1976. “Free agency” becomes a symbol of the power of Civil Rights-era ideology on subjects beyond race.
60. Janet Staiger,
University of Texas at Austin,
“Lost in Lost: Reading Demands in a Convergent Media Era”
The hit television program Lost (2004-present) has already generated significant academic analysis because of its complex narrative and the large and active fan base. Moreover, it is an excellent example of the media convergence era in which the experience of the narrative occurs across media platforms, here including the original broadcast, internet episodes and extra mini-scenes, print ads, alternative reality games, and a novel. Scholars have speculated about what makes the show so compelling. At one point, Jason Mittell argues that it is more than (1) its game strategy (solving the puzzle of the island and the chronology of and causes for events); it is (2) an “operational aesthetic” in which viewers engage with “how” the creators of Lost are authoring such a complex text. Sharon Ross demurs somewhat, suggesting that primary pleasures include (3) the characters and their relationships, a point backed up by Jonathan Gray and Mittell in a survey of fans who are engaged in searching for advance information about plot developments (“spoilers”) or sorting through such information to determine what are false spoilers: “foilers.” One could also add to this list the pleasures of (4) the science fiction genre, now that the narrative has revealed that our characters are (probably) not in purgatory but in a time-bending experience due to properties associated with the space in which the island exists. Obviously each of these four reading strategies is operative for viewers. My task will be to sort through what this means in terms of reading demands.
61.
Olivier Tchouaffe,
Southwestern
University Georgetown.
"Rue Case-Negres: Exilic Memory, Public Sphere and Politics? This paper, first, discusses the cinematic adaptation of Joseph Zobel's La Rue Cases-Negres by Euzhan Palcy to address the "myth of Return" in exilic autobiographies. Second, taking the case of France, this paper will tackle how Rue cases-Negres is received in term of memories between the state and the Black public sphere in order to address the politics of memory and citizenship in France."
62. Charlotte
Templin
University
of Indianapolis
Americans Read Canadian Novels: Cultural Difference and National Agendas
Margaret Atwood is a literary star
in Canada, the US, Great Britain, and many other countries, but she is read differently in the various
countries. My study of literary
reception focuses on the cultures that provide the context for the reputations
and helps us understand cultural attitudes as well as the novels
themselves.
Cynthia
Sugars points out in an article in The
American Review of Canadian Studies that British readers bring an agenda to
their readings, one that has much to do with their emotional response to loss
of empire and which identifies in Canada the “good place” in North American and
finds in Canadian literature a cudgel to beat the USA.
Americans
find their own myths and preoccupations
in Atwood. They interpret themes of nature
vs. civilization or culture in an "American"
way and appropriate various novels for the feminism that was
fashionable in the US. In their lack of awareness of Atwood's attention to Canadian concerns and their dismissal of criticism of the U.S., there is in some American
reviews a distinct note of co-optation. As Edward Said points out in Culture and Imperialism, writers
in the "metropolitan center" undergird the
ideology of imperialism through their seemingly uncritical acceptance of that
ideology.
My
paper presents a framework of American responses to Canadian novelists, and
focuses specifically on the reception of Atwood’s Surfacing and The Handmaid’s
Tale. I deal with a body of reviews
in which the reviewers speak as “Americans,”
foregrounding their American identity in the reviews.
63.
Kette Thomas
Michigan
Technological University
Traditions
of Deception: How Slave Narratives Helped to Create Haiti’s Restavecs
The
French word, Restavec, means “to stay with.”
It refers to a child who is temporarily situated at the home of a
guardian. Normally, the biological
parents cannot afford to keep the child so a wealthy patron agrees to feed,
clothe, shelter, and educate him/her in exchange for household labor. Though the
informal system implies that the child benefits from the exchange, in reality,
the stories of most Restavecs bear similar patterns of extreme cases of
child abuse. Media attention,
sociologists, politicians and human rights activists have tried to evoke a
sense of urgency regarding the situation.
Though the problem appears clear enough, narratives, like those conveyed
when speaking of Restavecs, have done more to impede progress towards a
resolution than assist. Restavecs
translate as an informal institution of slavery. The perception is that slave constructs
stemming from Imperialism or interaction with French colonists is often named
as the primary source of the problem. In
this paper, I hope to offer an updated reading of slave narratives, such as The Autobiography of Mary Prince, to
illustrate the multiple uses of a singular term. Restavec
children are victims of tricks of language like what we find in our use of
slave narratives or such documents. Addressing such constructs is equally
indispensable to a solution as the legal and political measures correlated with
ethnic and racial profiles.
64. Molly Abel Travis
Department of English
Tulane University
The NEA’s “Big Read” and International Relations:
The Cultural Service of To Kill
a Mockingbird
As part of the
National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” project, three international
exchanges have occurred in the last few years.
In the first, the cultural exchange between the U.S. and Russia involved
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird,
which was showcased in Russia and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich in the U.S. The second transaction, between the U.S. and
Egypt, combined Lee’s novel with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in
exchange for one Egyptian novel,
Naguib Mafouz’s The Thief and the
Dogs. In the third and most recent
international program, “Big Read Mexico,” the NEA has employed only one text,
an anthology of Mexican short stories created especially for U.S. readers; this
unidirectional cultural exchange, notwithstanding the realities of NAFTA,
returns the “Big Read” international efforts to the fundamental objective of the
NEA’s larger campaign to encourage reading among Americans.
In this paper, I focus on the work that Lee’s novel has performed for the NEA and the U.S State Department by analyzing its reception—influenced by a flurry of media events—in Russia and Egypt. The analysis considers how a 1960 novel about racism and other forms of injustice in the American South of the 1930’s enabled, for example, Russian teenagers to discover in Lee’s narrative an analogue for the recent oppression of Chechens. The paper will also compare the choreography of reception of Lee’s novel in Russia and Egypt with that of Tolstoy’s and Maguib’s in the U.S.
65. Tisha
Turk
Department of English
University of Minnesota, Morris
Decoding the Decoders: Vidwatching as Participatory Interpretation
My presentation focuses on vidding, a thirty-year tradition of video creation, practiced almost exclusively by women, in which fans edit footage from television shows or films and set it to music in order to interpret, celebrate, or critique the original source. Like other fan creators, vidders complicate traditional distinctions between creators and audiences: they are not only consumers but producers of culture (see Jenkins, Textual Poachers). A vid is the artifact of a vidder’s decoding of a text—an artifact that is itself decoded by the vidwatcher. When watching a vid based on a source text she knows, a fan processes not only the juxtaposition of clips within the vid and the meaning assigned to those clips by the music, but also the relationship between the vid and the original text. Vids therefore both encode and demand interpretation; it is precisely the demanding nature of this work that makes vids so opaque to audiences unfamiliar with the genre. I argue that treating this participatory interpretation as itself a form of production allows us to understand why increasing numbers of fans identify themselves as fans of vids and vidding as well as, or even instead of, specific television shows and films: vidders and vidwatchers are fans not merely of texts themselves but of particular ways of seeing. By examining the reception of individual vids within a fandom, we can track the community’s negotiation of the source text’s meaning.
66.
Tatiana Venediktova,
Professor
of West European and American Literature
Moscow
University
“Reading Differently as a Cultural
Challenge: Russian readers and reading since 1990s”
Venediktova
draws on insights from reception aesthetics, the theory and history of reading,
and cultural studies to examine the ways Russian literature teachers react to
their society’s burgeoning diversity in reading materials and modes of
interpretation.
67. Angela
Weisl,
Department of
English
Seton Hall University,
‘Contrition,
Confession, and The Rhetoric of Tears: Medievalism in Reality Television’
Following work I
did in Persistence of Medievalism (2003) and an article on conversion
and makeover shows, I have been fascinated by the seemingly medieval return of
confession and penance as the necessary path to salvation in what is so
ostensibly a ‘modern’ phenomenon, the TV reality programme. The rhetoric
of tears, especially male tears, is a profoundly medieval phenomenon, replacing
a very different definition of masculinity that has held sway on television for
a long time. The authenticity topos of reality TV to which this is all tied
also claims a kind of truth of meaning for what is essentially fantastic, but
it is these touchstones (contrition, confession, tears) that are designed to
provide and mark that ‘reality’ within the larger fictional framework. The degree to which reality TV references or
hides its relation to medieval penance and contrition rituals suggests
different modes of the reception of medievalism in mass media. This rhetoric of
tears in reality TV seems to have moved beyond the enclosed narratives of
television shows, certainly into sports, where they become a kind of marker of
authenticity within an unscriptable narrative, which audiences nonetheless want
to be comprehensible in familiar, generic, and medieval terms.
68. John
Howard Wilson
Department
of English
Lock Haven
University of Pennsylvania
Gandhi vs. Mishima: The Politics of Critical
Reception
Abstract:
In Necessary Illusions: Thought Control
in a Democratic Society (1989), Noam Chomsky refers to the “propaganda
model,” which indicates that “the media serve the interests of state and
corporate power.” The propaganda model
can be tested through comparisons, and predictions are often surpassed. This essay applies the model to two movies, Gandhi (1982) and Mishima (1985), closely matched in subject, genre, and
history. Both are biopics of Asian
subjects, and both have been criticized in ways that reflect American attitudes
toward Asians. Mishima focuses on a nationalist who could have upset the
relationship between Japan and the United States, and the film was dismissed as
the glorification of a lunatic, in accordance with the propaganda model. Gandhi
concentrates on the nonviolent revolutionary who compelled the British to quit
India. Nonviolence does not threaten the
establishment, and it can be connected with civil rights. One would expect Gandhi to be praised, and it was.
Gandhi’s opponents were the British, and one might also expect the film
to be lauded for depicting the end of the Raj, since American and British
imperialism are often at odds. Instead,
American reviewers defended British imperialists and objected to Gandhi’s emphasis on their
venality. Criticism of Gandhi surpasses the propaganda model:
any Western empire is preferable to Asian self-determination.
69. Yung-Hsing Wu
Assistant Professor of English
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
(email: yhwu@mac.com).
“The Magical Matter of Books: Amazon.com and The Tales of Beedle the Bard.”
Harry Potter has long been a media phenomenon
— a multimedia darling whose face has graced film, audiobooks, blogs, fanzines,
fanclubs and fan forums, toys, board and video games, even YouTube
testimonials. This diversity is perhaps all the more visible on Amazon.com, where
reader-consumers can make purchases and take part in the Pottermania the site
enables in its trivia quizzes, updates on media events, and special
competitions devoted to ascertaining, for instance, the “Harry-est Town in
America.” At Amazon.com, Harry leads a centralized and ever-circulating life.
I argue that Harry Potter on Amazon.com offers a glimpse into the material investments of on-line readerly culture. Following the case of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, I track “the seventh copy” of The Tales across its manifestations: from the handwritten, hand-illustrated book Rowling donated for charity auction in late 2007, to the virtual object Amazon established after purchasing the copy in secret, and finally, to the editions published with Rowling’s blessing at the end of 2008. This narrative demonstrates how a sense of readerly connection, the engine of Amazon’s literary culture, turns on a preoccupation with the materiality uniquely ascribed to books. For if Rowling’s restrictions against the sale and reproduction of the coveted “seventh copy” ensured its rarity, Amazon’s permanent link does just as much, deploying digital technology to represent the text’s bookish materiality to the readers who make up Amazon’s Harry Potter base. And if the link reproduces The Tales’ bookish aura, then Amazon’s stewardship of it positions the company, at least rhetorically, as the rightful vendor when that time emerges. This Amazonian construction of The Tales makes clear, in other words, that book matter matters — especially before the reader can put her hands on it.
70.
Ronald and Mary Zboray
Department of
Communication
University of Pittsburgh
zboray+@pitt.edu
“Tombstones of Time”: Readers’ Reception of Newspapers on New
Year’s Day during the U.S. Civil War Era
“Anniversaries are the tombstones of time,” Margaret McLean
wrote in her diary on January 1, 1861. “Where shall we be next year?” Her
subsequent recap of news events—President Elect
Lincoln’s departure for the capital, and Mississippi’s threat of
secession—virtually predicted the outbreak of war in April. Throughout the
Civil War, New Year’s day diary entries and letters often alluded to dire
newspaper reports, a practice that starkly contrasted antebellum rituals of making
reading resolutions, commenting on gift books, framing a poet’s words around
one’s future outlook, and taking stock of books received, tackled and digested.
This comes as no surprise given, that by 1861, newspaper reading had virtually
supplanted leisure-time
engagements with fiction, biography, and travelogues.
Newspapers, like anniversaries, had become “tombstones of time,” symbolizing a
buried past, or forecasting an uncertain future, but always marking the passing
of places, people, and institutions. That the Emancipation Proclamation ending
slavery hit the papers on January 1, 1863, was not lost on rejoicing (and disgruntled)
readers. This investigation into “real readers’” reception of newspapers is
based upon 300 diary volumes and letters written between 1861 and 1865 by
civilians, combatants, and battlefield non-combatants from the Union and
Confederacy. Our approach that addresses reception through a
history-of-the-book lens, augments the work of Robert Darnton, James Smith Allen,
and Barbara Sicherman, and extends our own research into the antebellum era as
seen in our _Everyday Ideas_ (2006).