Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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Arche-speech and Sound Poetry
Get PDFSteve McCaffery describes sound poetry as a “new way to blow out candles” and “what sound poets do.” In his brief survey of sound poetry, McCaffery describes the genealogy of sound poetry from its earliest formalized birth during Russian futurism (found in the experiments of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh) and builds his survey until North America, 1978. This essay will consider the history of sound poetry, a history that has no history, but retains the avant-garde experimentalism of modernist poetics. By looking at sound poems by Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters; the sound-experiments of Diamanda Galás; performance in sound poetry; the influence of “primal therapy” (which emphasizes the therapeutic potential of the scream); and the theological tradition of glossolalia, I will demonstrate how the noisiness and non-sense of sound poetry offers a variety of forms of political engagement against hegemonic uses of sound and silence. Sound poetry is notable in that it is loud – originally being called Lautgedichte or literally “loud poems” – and this brash noise opens up a heterotopic space of acoustic potential: of potential sonic engagement outside of normative chirps, whistles, vocalizations, glottal stops, fricatives, and speech. This “sonic engagement” will be grounded in the new theoretical concept of what I call "arche-speech" or "arche-sound.
Modern Times, the ‘Pre-Digital Hum‘, and the Impossibility of Silence
No full textThe article considers Charlie Chaplin's 1936 feature _Modern Times_ as highly influenced by the sound transition. Even though the film appeared when film sound had undergone narrative integration and synchronized sound had ceased to attract the spectator's attention in its own right, _Modern Times_ frames cinematic sound as unnatural. Thereby it employs techniques and experiences from the sound transition and uses them for comic purposes. At the same time, the relations beween the film's depiction of machines, its use of sound and music, and the flow of time is constantly under negotiation. What results is a pre-digital era Hum that is constituted by an impossibility of silence in film after the sound transition, an overall mechanical hiss of the cinematic apparatus that inscribes itself into the film, and the aestheticization of rhythm and noise in the modern era
"Aggravatin' Papa": Race, Omission, and Discursive Liminality in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
Get PDFMy essay constructs a postcolonial theoretical framework to investigate a scene in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. The scene suggests that an African-American character--a musician performing the popular jazz song "Aggravatin' Papa"--may share a sexual history with the novel's white female protagonist. The text strategically silences the black character's voice at several moments in the dialogue. By exhuming the musician's lyrics and showcasing the silenced voice in this intertextual relationship, I argue that the marginalized minority voice is, in fact, central to Hemingway’s modernist experimentation. In the very process of its appropriation and silencing in the novel, the black presence bursts forth from its liminal discursive space and intervenes in the narrative’s construction of difference
The Antisocial Fantasies of Jude the Obscure
Get PDFThis article discusses two prevalent tensions in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: Jude’s failed attempts to become a Christminster scholar, and his vexed sexual relationships. At different points in the novel’s publication history, Hardy figures each of these tensions as the novel’s primary conflict. By so doing, he seems to invite the reader to decide whether the novel is really about “the tragedy of unfulfilled aims” or “a deadly war waged between the flesh and spirit.” Reading the novel through a psychoanalytic framework, I argue that Hardy offers this as a false choice. Rather, I suggest that Jude’s academic and sexual ambitions are simply two manifestations of a single antisocial fantasy
“Can We Get a Clean Up On Aisle 2?”: How Film Critics Mopped Up the Transgressions of Jenny McCarthy’s Dirty Love
Get PDFPurposefully tasteless, the 'gross-out' comedy is notorious for its lowbrow predilections for toilet humor, salacious sight gags and sexually explicit jokes. Considered by critics to be the lowest form of entertainment, films of this sort are at best affectionately tolerated while at worst they are coolly dismissed. But no gross-out comedy in recent years has been maligned as mordantly as DIRTY LOVE (John Asher, 2005). This ribald, Rabelaisian romp was penned and produced by its star, Playboy model-turned-comedian Jenny McCarthy. This low budget lightweight was not only a monumental box office blunder, but it also consistently garnered poor ratings across the board. It even won a whopping four Golden Raspberries (“Razzies”) the year of its release. Yet for a film that so few people saw (and enjoyed), it let loose a startling deluge of hostility. The reviews, though scant, all harbored a perceptible, unrivaled rancor. Roger Ebert harangues in The Chicago Sun for example, “DIRTY LOVE wasn’t written or directed, it was committed.” But the film’s merit is beside the point—Ebert betrays the crux of his contention when he adds, “it's painful to see a pretty girl, who seems nice enough, humiliating herself on the screen. I feel sorry for her.” Ebert is just one of many critics to insinuate that the film’s failure is ultimately a failure to keep a safe distance between Jenny McCarthy’s erotically charged centerfold body and her comically charged grotesque body. This paper will examine the popular reviews of DIRTY LOVE and identify the rhetorical strategies, from disgust to pity, condescension, and belittlement that critics have used to contain and disinfect McCarthy’s disruption. In probing the film’s reception then, this paper will lay bare the underlying anxieties that persist about women in comedy, and the mutability of female corporeality more generally’s power to unsettle does not rescue it from the gutter, but in re-positing it as a unique and spirited attempt to illuminate underlying taboos, this paper hopes to acknowledge, reconsider and reassess the film’s radical underpinnings
Extrapolating Terminology: The Carnivalesque Practice of Language Writing In the Grotesque Body of I Don’t Have Any Paper
No full textThere is a similarity between the rhetorical strategies of Language Writing and the rhetorical strategies attributed to carnivalesque texts by Mikhail Bakhtin. However, the aesthetic differences between standard uses of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism may, at first, obfuscate these similarities in rhetorical strategy. While the aesthetic of these two forms of writing is certainly not identical, there are enough allegorically and rhetorically parallel elements to state that a form of the carnivalesque and grotesque is at work in Language Writing. To prove as much I will summarize Mikhail Bakhtin’s articulation of carnival and grotesque realism and then draw lines of similarity between that articulation and the strategies of Language Writing expressed by Bruce Andrews and Steve McCaffery. In the process I will bolster my argument with reference to textual examples, taken from Bruce Andrews I Don’t Have Any Paper, which exemplify these parallels in operation