FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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To Speak or Not to Speak: An Encounter with J. M. Coetzee\u27s Foe
Get PDFFor critics and authors, there has always been a tension between silence and voicing experience. My concern, as both author and critic is: What does it mean to speak or to be, not remain, silent; what are the consequences of voicing experience or choosing, rather than being forced, to be quiet? Through J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1988), I hope to interrogate the tension between silence and voice and discover why, sometimes, silence is appealing
Ge-stell and the Specters of the Spectrum
Get PDFNo more than a few hundred meters separate the site where Gugliemo Marconi first witnessed the extraordinary effects of Hertzian waves in 1895, and the site where armored vehicles crashed through barricades in order to put down a riot allegedly incited by local radio station, Radio Alice, in 1977. When considering that the former represents the point of departure for one of the most important inventions of the 20th century and the latter represents one of its most paradigmatic instantiations, we might question whether their proximity is something other than coincidental. Affirming that this is more than a coincidence, however, carries with it the necessity and responsibility to demonstrate some causal relationship between Marconi\u27s invention and its appropriation, circa 80 years later, by a group of students and activists in search of means to communicate, organize, experiment and play
Dickens’s Haunted Christmas: The Ethics of the Spectral Text
Get PDFThe question of haunting itself has its own interest, but one might also wonder why Dicken\u27s Christmas Carol - a Christmas story - should be at all haunted. While some connection between Christmas, winter and the supernatural can be traced back through Shakespeare and no doubt beyond, Dickens seems especially interested in the manifestation of ghosts and phantoms at Christmas-time. Indeed, by publishing his own and many others’ seasonal ghost stories in his magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, he can be attributed with making the ghost story a sort of Victorian Christmas tradition (Cox xiii). Moreover, in his Christmas tales, Dickens saw no contradiction in combining the Gothic effects of ghost stories with sentimental scenes to present his religio-social message of charity, compassion and communal affection
Mod Murder: Death and Desire in Swinging London Film
Get PDFThis paper explores the themes of gender identity, self-reflexivity, and the concept of the cinematic gaze in British modernist film. Specifically, it focuses on how the social milieu of 1960s Swinging London informed the films Peeping Tom, Repulsion, and Blow-up regarding the construction of the sexualized female image and how it is replicated within the process of filmmaking itself. These self-conscious portrayals of the commodification of sexuality to violent ends thrived in the “mod” era. More than anywhere else at that time, London in the early- to mid-60s offered a crystallized view into the emerging sexual revolution while exploiting the very currency that cinema has furtively traded in since its inception: the appropriation of the female image for the pleasure of the male voyeur. This brief cycle of films self-consciously pointed to the perils of the mod love affair with image over content. By examining them within the confines of mise-en-scène and the psychoanalytical discourse of Laura Mulvey (voyeurism as sadism) and Gaylyn Studlar (voyeurism as masochism) as well as other cinematic texts on scopophilic desire (the works of Hitchcock), it becomes clear that British modernism offered a timely and unique discourse on the process of looking, and being looked at, in the cinema
In Arcadia: Landscape filming in a toxic wasteland Game engine affordances and post-game narratives
Get PDFVideogames, whether immersive simulations or abstract puzzlers, impose their own set of internal logics upon the player. If the player decides to transgress or subvert the rules or normal behaviour without directly affecting the software system itself through modification or hacking, these same internal logics still affect the player or ‘subvertors’ behaviour; the videogame has its own set of affordances, the properties that an artefact or system has that influence interaction
Clipping
Get PDFWe are living in a new era of haunting, one in which (as the essays published here suggest) we find ourselves engaging with the \u27ethics of the spectral text\u27, \u27spectral and textual haunting\u27, and \u27ghostly narrative\u27 (as distinct from narrative about the ghostly). Such phrases themselves tell a story or at least evoke a disorder that is in keeping with this new era. They are new kinds of phrases: they seek a place, a haunt, in which spectrality cohabits with writing, text and narrative, as well as with the question of ethics.You have to move very fast. Everything is just clipping by. That\u27s what is at issue in this new era in which hauntology replaces ontology and increasing spectralization is the disorder of the day
Palimpsest, Pasolini, Poe and Poetics, or the phantoms haunting Dario Argento’s Opera (1987)
Get PDFArgento’s gialli – i.e. Italian-style thrillers – from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) onwards present a succession of protagonists who find themselves haunted by some vital fragment of sound or image that they cannot quite recall, going up against antagonists whose inability to overcome the haunting legacy of some incident in their past compels them to kill again and again. Unsurprisingly this has encouraged many commentators to take a psychoanalytic approach to Argento’s gialli and those of his imitators. However, there is the haunting trace of something else here in that the Argento giallo is distinguished by its excessiveness, as Maitland McDonagh argues. In this paper, I wish to undertake such a reading of one specific but in certain respects exemplary Argento giallo, Opera (1987). Beginning with an outline of the film’s narrative for those unfamiliar with it, I will proceed by interrogating some of its most striking images, seeking to bring out an alternative ‘hauntology’ of their possible meanings based on the notion of the palimpsest and the aesthetic ideas of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1965) and Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
Female Effigies and Performances of Desire: A Consideration of Identity Performance in Lars and the Real Girl.
Get PDFThe female sex doll allows for the projection of uninhibited sexual fantasy and is animated through that fantasy in the mind of her partner. In this way, she can be seen to function as a performative effigy of desire, maintaining heteronormative male sexuality by reflecting a patriarchal ideal of female physicality and objectification while simultaneously demanding a responsive performance of heterosexual masculinity. In the film Lars and the Real Girl, the relationship between the female sex doll and her male partner is shifted into the public sphere, and Lars projects a social, rather than sexual, identity onto Bianca, the sex doll object of his desire. The social identity constructed by Lars reflects his desire for a non-sexual, community-oriented, and ultimately subservient female partner, and the widespread acceptance of this model of femininity by the community is evidenced through the performative interactions that occur between Bianca and those around her. Because the sex doll exists in a potentially deviant category of sexual interaction, the community’s refusal to treat her as an object, but rather as a living subject, reflects the power of performance in the construction and maintenance of social identity. The very fact of Bianca’s object status allows her to take on complex sexual and social fantasy-roles, all of which prove to be problematic, but which ultimately allow for the maintenance of male sexual and social authority
The Mad Man in the Attic: Playing with Gendered Literary Identity as Object and Muse in Iris Murdoch\u27s The Good Apprentice and The Message to the Planet.
Get PDFWithin The Good Apprentice and The Message to the Planet, Iris Murdoch appears to be consciously manipulating both Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s feminist response to Bloom, The Madwoman in the Attic, in order to challenge both her readership’s presuppositions on madness in general, and more specifically how the depiction of madness in literature can be seen to relate to sexuality, religion and gender. Bloom writes that modern authors (specifically male authors) are concerned about their ability to resist the influences of their literary forefathers in order to achieve an original work of their own, with no mention of how a female author might be challenged to create in response to such a male dominated literary past. Bloom relates his theory to Freud’s Oedipus complex and the male child’s desire to overthrow his father in order to establish his own supremacy. The Madwoman in the Attic looks at Bloom’s argument from a female viewpoint, with readings of a number of female authors in the nineteenth century examining how it was impossible for them to follow Bloom’s theory and identify with the authors who have superseded them in order to respond with their own creations
“But who is to say what is fake and what is real?” – Spectral and Textual Haunting in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton
Get PDFThis essay looks at how the phenomenon of haunting is discussed in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton (1989). It analyses in which forms the idea of haunting appears and which function it fulfils in the text. Of particular interest here is the multi-layered narrative which presents haunting in several different modes, both on the story and the meta-level, not only giving it the shape of regular ‘visitations’, but also pointing it out through intertextuality and metafictional comments. This essay also shows that the element of haunting in Chatterton works as a tool to disrupt the novel’s different storylines. This disruption underlines the relation between imagination and reality by highlighting and foregrounding the novel’s fictitiousness and at the same time “points to the constructedness of any representation of the ‘real world’” (Delgado 349), may it be fiction or the visual arts