FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
Not a member yet
346 research outputs found
Sort by
“a void rubbing out its own inscription”: Electronic Technology, Hypertext and the Paradox of Self-Erasure
Get PDFThe advent of electronic technologies like the computer and the internet necessitated new ways of writing and thinking about writing. Where the age of mechanical and industrial technologies led to Blake’s visionary engravings and Swift imagining a random text generator in Gulliver\u27s Travels, “for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations” (171), the electronic age might be said to have given rise to the work of composers like John Cage and Brian Eno, hypertextual writers such as Michael Joyce and Mark Amerika and the work of the Oulipo. Perhaps the predominant linguistic theory associated with, though not limited to, electronic technologies is that of “hypertext”. Hypertext is defined by Ted Nelson, who coined the term, as “non-sequential writing with reader-controlled links” (qtd. in Bolter 105), and George Landow as a technology that matches Barthes\u27s ideal textuality of a “text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path” (Landow 2). Nelson and Landow’s succinct definitions are both accurate, but fail to encompass the extent to which the hypertextual model destabilizes conventional notions of the text. This essay will examine the ways in which hypertexts erase themselves, and the implications this paradox of self-erasure has for the whole field of signification, the material status of the text and hypertextual conceptions of identity
"Unleashing the Underdog": Technology of Place in Virginia Woolf\u27s Flush
Get PDF"Technology," as both technical and common term, is often associated with scientific and industrial tools, techniques, and procedures. This academic paper, however, propounds that the term "technology" in its etymological roots epitomises not only the objectivity of science but also the subjectivity of arts. The concept of technology oscillates between binary poles of the concrete and the abstract and, by so doing, merges and disrupts those seemingly fixed binary oppositions. The dynamism of technology manifests itself most clearly in our understanding of place. "Technology of Place," the means by which an individual comes to understand place, embodies not only the concrete "architectural textures" perceived through sensory reception, but also the abstract ideas or "textual architectures" which form understandings of, and feelings towards, a particular place. Since it is made up of both tangible and intangible layers of texts, place can be "read" and approached as a text. Through the literature of place, one is able to read through the surface of place and interrogate its embedded discourse of power and technology of production. The hypothesis and conclusion of this essay will be attested and illustrated in a close analysis of Virginia Woolf\u27s Flush, her "underdog" text which depicts the life story of the underdogs: the Victorian poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her pet. Published in 1933, this biography of a cocker spaniel investigates how dogs and women perceive the world and how they come to understand their places in it
The War Artists’ Advisory Committee, Aviation and the Nation during the Second World War
Get PDFThis article draws upon broader research that examines the representation of aviation in the collection of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC). On the 23rd November 1939, the WAAC met for the first time. They were charged with creating an artistic record of the war both at home and abroad on behalf of the state. By the time the committee was dissolved in December 1945, it had amassed nearly 6,000 works by over 400 artists, depicting all major aspects of the war. Although library shelves are filled with histories of various aspects of the Second World War, this collection has hardly been touched by academic historians
The Old Woman in the Cave of Lust: Edmund Spenser\u27s Silenced Feminine Voices in The Faerie Queene
Get PDFEdmund Spenser’s epic Arthurian-centric poem The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) is permeated by fairy tales and old wives’ tales, but the very presence of the tales and their tellers is problematic, as these feminine voices are often included only to be silenced (Miller 6). Spenser’s anxiety of female voices, narratives, sources, and genres, becomes manifested in one very complicated and often overlooked character: the Old Woman in the Cave of Lust. This Old Woman is only found in one canto of Spenser’s epic poem (IV.vii) and is denied a voice; she isn’t given one line of dialogue. The very fact that this Old Woman emerges into the text, is ambiguously portrayed, temporarily vilified, and then retreats from the text unscathed demonstrates the power of the female voice in Spenser’s text.
Not Just Ensemble Films: Six Degrees, Webs, Multiplexity and the Rise of Network Narratives
Get PDFIn a scene from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu\u27s 2006 film Babel, one afternoon a deaf-mute Japanese girl, Chieko, gossips in sign language with a school friend via her mobile phone\u27s web cam. The scene\u27s linguistically estranged nature encapsulates how language in itself is a technology, a system which reaches across borders of silence to allow understanding. We are only able to interpret language through shared knowledge of its systems and, in many cases, through the aid of devices which collapse the barriers of proximity in time, space, and in this case, vision. It is indicative of the contemporary paradigm of network society that this scene occurs within a film which explores worldwide repercussions of (mis)communication, and that Babel belongs within a genre which in recent years has frequently thematised systems of interconnection, exploiting digital narrative technologies and in effect practicing Fredric Jameson\u27s concept "cognitive mapping" (Jameson 54). However, while they may appear to value difference and diversity, in many cases these films use cognitive mapping as a tool for totalisation, divulging narratives of smoothed-out differences and equalised circumstances. Within this emergent paradigm of interconnectedness continues the problem of how to relay the postmodern promise of endless complexity, without subordinating difference to a simplified reduction of totality
Computer Error: Voices and Translations in Edwin Morgan’s Science Fiction Poetry
Get PDFMy favourite scene in the movie Independence Day (1996) is when Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) knocks out an alien with a single clout, whips out a smart “welcome to Earth”-esque punch line and then lights up a cigar. Sheer. Smith. Action. But what if aliens aren’t all doomsayers, what if all they want is a nice chat? This article will examine the variety of voices in Edwin Morgan’s Science Fiction Poetry (hereby referred to as SFP) and consider their continuities and differences with Morgan’s non-SFP. It will discuss the importance of Morgan as a translator and experimenter of language, highlighting the freedom which SFP allows Morgan as a poet.
Technology and Perception in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire: A Reflection on Time, Space and Memory in the Postmodern Metropolis
Get PDFWim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is a work that cinematically explores discourses of history and memory in postwar Germany and, since its 1987 inception, most examinations of the film have centered on these aspects. However, little attention has been given to the significant role of technology in Wenders’ film. Emphasized not only in the opening scenes but also throughout the rest of the film, transportation technologies such as airplanes, cars, and trains link the spaces of the city and therefore lie at the heart of Wenders’ Berlin portrait. Furthermore, the self-reflexive nature of Wenders’ work posits film as the quintessential technological medium of storytelling and history, and my paper will thus link theories of technology and perception with those of memory and history. I will begin my paper by elucidating Paul Virilio’s and Jean Baudrillard’s theories of speed and spatiality in postmodern society and will link these theories with the portrayal of transportation technologies in Wings of Desire. The next part turns to Walter Benjamin’s model of space and memory as a more optimistic approach to spatiality in Wenders’ Berlin portrait, and this latter model will prove to be highly significant in my final analysis of Wenders’ film. In particular, I will explore the film’s emphasis on spaces of absence and the way in which this emphasis reveals a model for a new kind of perception and a model for narrating the past. The last section of my paper will stress the way in which Wenders mediates between the communication technologies of transportation and film, and further, between modernity and postmodernity. Ultimately, the technological perception created by transportation technologies (and theorized extensively by postmodernist theorists Baudrillard and Virilio) is redeemed by the medium of film because of its ability to overcome what film theorist Siegfried Kracauer calls the “blind spots of the mind” (53)
The inevitable need to speak in order to be: On the loss of voice in two plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker
Get PDFThe contemporary playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker has shown a long-standing engagement with the themes of language and identity formation. Wertenbaker uses a range of mediumsto explore these subjects and, as one would expect, such concerns have also made frequent appearances in her playwriting. This article will explore and compare two such plays: the unpublished Case to Answer, first produced by the Soho Poly in 1980, and the more widely known, The Love of the Nightingale, first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford, in 1988
‘Whatever people say I am…’: Multiple voices on screen and page in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Get PDFThe British New Wave in cinema, which ran from 1958 to 1962, was built around the adaptation of a number of literary texts that derived their ‘newness’ by vocalising working-class protagonists, hitherto largely suppressed in popular visions of British society. As a knock-on-effect, British screen culture refreshed, suffering as it did from the same level of under-representation that blighted literature. In a wider context, the films’ freshness and vigour can also be seen to be identified in a new approach to film style and aesthetics which had more in common with the European art cinema than the staid traditions of British filmmaking.
MY PROSTHETIC AND I: Identity Representation in Bodily Extension
Get PDFMy prosthetic is a secret of my self. It hides, tucked beneath clothing, allowing me to pass as something that I am not, that I can never be. It is precious to me, it enables me, gives me mobility and an aesthetic that would cease if it was removed from me. Within my body schema, my prosthetic is as much a part of my body as my skin, blood, and organs. It is also an object of technology, a topological replacement of a missing body part. However, a large, un-chartered misunderstanding of experience separates both of these experiences. For many years, academics, artists, and theorists have tried to merge the two, in the process bringing forth ideas on the prosthetic that have seemingly removed it from the realm of disabled experience and into the fantastical world of the uncanny. Therefore, the question for myself, as an artist, is how to explore this large chasm of differing experience and draw out the uncanny into a world of subtle, lived understanding and visual acceptance