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Authorial Histories: The Historical Film and the Literary Biopic
Get PDFThis essay examines a particular type of historical film, the literary biopic. Literary biopics have become increasingly popular from the 1990s onwards and their popularity highlights a particular type of contemporary engagement with history that is mediated by the creative process of literary productions and personal life-narratives. In this essay, I argue that this specific branch of the historical film displays a contemporary postmodern historical consciousness, in which national and cultural histories are self-consciously presented to audiences through an engagement with individual life stories and fictional literary constructions, highlighting the individual and “fictional” nature of the historical film and history itself. Drawing from theories of heritage cinema, I seek to demonstrate how literary biopics display a complex engagement with and construction of history, in which the past is entered into a dialogue with the present through the figure of the well-known author. The portrayal of these authors’ lives is often an avenue to explore contemporary concerns in the films, such as post-feminism, the place of history in the contemporary, the role of love in a mass-market age, the cultural capital and legacy of the canonical author and the postmodern loss of historical consciousness, memory and authenticity. It is through the mediating figure of the author that larger debates regarding history and the historical film are investigated and ultimately, I argue that these films demonstrate how the genre of the historical film has become increasingly aligned with the authorial persona as both an individual and cultural emblem of contemporary historical consciousness
Heart and clock:Time and history in <em>The Immortal Heart</em> and other films about the Middle Ages
No full text
Heart and clock:Time and history in <em>The Immortal Heart</em> and other films about the Middle Ages
No full textMediating the Crisis: Revisionary Economics in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street Films
Get PDFStates of Crises: representational economies and conjunctural contexts In April 2012 the US Treasury Department estimated the total loss of household wealth resulting from the subprime mortgage crisis to be 19.2 trillion USD (Childress, 2012). This figure does not account for a number of mid- and long-term effects, such as the impact on prior homeowners who became less socially mobile through the 2008 subprime crisis and whose future contribution to the economy would continue to be severely limited as a result. As a local estimate based on domestic losses, it also could not take into account the vastly larger picture of collateral damage across world markets and economies that ensued. Worldwide recession in the wake of the 2008 US subprime mortgage crisis was of such epic proportions, it seemed to herald the end of neoliberalism (Grantham and Miller, 2010). And while the crisis generated a new wave of critical commentary on the hegemony of financialization in neoliberal economics, it also lead individuals, organizations and institutions to question their own habits and worldviews; to consider how they might have contributed to the crisis; and to ask what might be done as a corrective measure (cf. Plehwe, Walpen and Neuenhöffer 2006). In the humanities and social sciences there has been growing consensus on the need to rethink neoliberal economics: not as a field of institutional power moving uniformly forward with intention, but one characterized by internal conflict, decentralization and imbrication in broadly diverse social institutions and cultural practices. My aim is thus an exposition and application of Grossberg’s injunction to conceptually pluralize and conjunctively contextualize notions of the economic, and thus counteract discursive practices that close down potential for critical reevaluation through reductionist or essentialist logics. In practical application, my method entails a comparative analysis of aesthetic economies that represent conceptually plural and historically contextualized notions of the economic in the opening scenes of Stone’s Wall Street films. This comparative reading aims to make each of Grossberg points graspable in novel but pragmatic ways. In a second step, I attempt to make more intelligible potential degrees to which inter-referential discursive meaning production can be plural and complex in symbolic (conceptual) and material (aesthetic) economies of filmic representation; and will do so in a close reading of visual economies in a key scene from Stone’s second Wall Street film, Money Never Sleeps. While the comparative analysis of representational economies each contentiously articulating historically specific conjunctures has a higher level of theoretical correlation in conjunctural analysis, the close reading of plural and complex visual economies finds more explicitly employs media archaeological methods
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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