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Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977
No full textEMBARGO NOTE: This item is embargoed until 2030-08-01In Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977, I devise the biopolitical and critical regionalist framework of “the bad road” to read for moments of textual ferality in early-to-mid century American literature and film. This framework is based around an understanding of transport media—technologies of mobility, infrastructures, adjacent landscapes—as constructs that mediate and include through exclusion. In what follows, I read for the presence and function of transport media in a diverse array of narratives drawn from the pre and post-interstate eras of twentieth century America. Conducting these analyses demonstrates how both transport media, and the narratives that incorporate them, are uniquely prone to rupture and immunitary failure: moments when a protected inside becomes an outside, or an excised other makes an unheralded return. I refer to this dynamic of containment and rupture as the “bad road.” By applying the “bad road” framework to authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and N. Scott Momaday, I unpack how the work of narrating mobility in an American colonial context is particularly fraught as the project of modernization is marked by an irrepressible plurality: cultural, geographic, interpersonal, temporal. By setting my project against the backdrop of a crystallizing culture of the “good road” as mobile privatization, I determine that how an author employs, avoids, or is subjected to, the permutations of the bad road, is intimately linked to their cultural positioning. Reading for these differences is crucial to considering the perils and possibilities of mobility in the United States—past, present, and future
Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977
No full textIn Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977, I devise the biopolitical and critical regionalist framework of “the bad road” to read for moments of textual ferality in early-to-mid century American literature and film. This framework is based around an understanding of transport media—technologies of mobility, infrastructures, adjacent landscapes—as constructs that mediate and include through exclusion. In what follows, I read for the presence and function of transport media in a diverse array of narratives drawn from the pre and post-interstate eras of twentieth century America. Conducting these analyses demonstrates how both transport media, and the narratives that incorporate them, are uniquely prone to rupture and immunitary failure: moments when a protected inside becomes an outside, or an excised other makes an unheralded return. I refer to this dynamic of containment and rupture as the “bad road.” By applying the “bad road” framework to authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and N. Scott Momaday, I unpack how the work of narrating mobility in an American colonial context is particularly fraught as the project of modernization is marked by an irrepressible plurality: cultural, geographic, interpersonal, temporal. By setting my project against the backdrop of a crystallizing culture of the “good road” as mobile privatization, I determine that how an author employs, avoids, or is subjected to, the permutations of the bad road, is intimately linked to their cultural positioning. Reading for these differences is crucial to considering the perils and possibilities of mobility in the United States—past, present, and future
Reclaiming Authorship: The Modernist Aesthetics of Self-Production in Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, and Djuna Barnes
No full textModernism and its twentieth-century wake witnessed the gradual decline of the very power its incipience granted to the author: the authorial self in the space of writing. For modernist women authors, this facet of the period proved particularly limiting. The early twentieth century opened spaces for female authorship while closing spaces for female critics, including for women’s own comprehension of their work; while female talent was acknowledged more than ever before, critics were reticent to grant hermeneutic agency to women’s authorship. Celebrations of the work of female artists are frequently qualified by skeptical sexism—that the woman writing might “stumble upon” something poignant whose craft she didn’t quite intend. This kind of rhetoric is coterminous with the rise of literary studies as a university discipline—a movement that transferred the task of criticism from the pen of the poet-scholar to that of the university professor, moving critical agency from increasingly democratic aesthetic spaces to those populated exclusively by upper-class, formally-educated white men. Female modernist writers responded to this loss of hermeneutic agency through a system of strategies that reclaim authorship—the state of being the literary origin of a piece or body of work, of asserting authority over that work’s publishing, revision, and/or interpretation. Their strategies employ a variety of tactics to work through and against the institutions of modernism—publishing and the literary marketplace, criticism, and sex-based expectations of literary output.
Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, and Djuna Barnes employed methodologies of restoring autonomy to their voices within their corpuses, fostering a bifurcated schema of playing into and playing along with institutional structures while producing bodies of work that challenge these very establishments—the critical modernist community, the necessary reliance on male literary imprimaturs, and the paradox between the growing tendency of literary scholarship to both pathologize women’s writing and dismiss the voice of the author within her work. Revision, criticism of one’s own work, and the refusal to publish are each moments of authoritative intervention in a text, and reassert the power of the female author over the structures that seek to remove it. Each chapter investigates a female modernist author’s aesthetic and biographical responses to the modernist climate and its scholastic reverberations in the regulation and divestment of the voice of women’s critical authorship
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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Apocalyptic Poetics: Reading Ecologically Across Media After 1945
No full textApocalyptic Poetics: Reading Ecologically Across Media After 1945 argues that global literary techniques of imagination respond to the end of World War II as a time when it became imaginable for humans to cause the extinction of our own species. Tracing the development and production of new methods for imagining impossible futures, Apocalyptic Poetics makes the case that a robust attention to the formal and aesthetic limits of media gives the best insights into what it means for a world to end. To that end, I examine three media forms—novels, film, and poetry—to investigate the workings of apocalyptic poetics in their shifting sites and modalities. This dissertation connects the threads of environmental studies, nuclear criticism, and media theory to study the poetics—the artistic techniques of making—that are specific to certain media, such as the cinematics of risk, the interface of novelistic realism, and the spectrality of the lyric voice. By reading widely, with less regard for national borders than for the sociopolitical contexts that produce them, Apocalyptic Poetics highlights four sites where apocalyptic logics are at work, and in so doing offers four case studies on what we stand to gain when we take the end of the world as a starting point. Each chapter intervenes in its own micro-debate about temporality, locality, and apocalypse, demonstrating the richness of possibilities afforded by my method and sketching a loose portrait of the post-1945 literary imaginative landscape as attuned to concerns of “the end.” Among the texts in the project’s varied, multi-national archive are poems from the height of the AIDS crisis, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and a spy novel by Salman Rushdie. By refocusing the lens of apocalypse from “what” to “how,” I argue that accurate representation of crisis or the end of the world is less interesting than the methods of expression themselves
High Weirdness: Visionary Experience in the Seventies Counterculture
No full textThis project interweaves two critical investigations into the history of religions in America, one theoretical and one historical. The theoretical investigation concerns the question of religious experience, and particularly how scholars of religion understand this category once we recognize that to label any experience “religious” already prejudices the phenomenon in question. Developing the work of Ann Taves, I call for a more fine-grained account of how forms of extraordinary experience come to be constructed as religious (or mystical, occult, etc.) through the creative assemblage of existing scripts and templates. However, using the ontological theories of Bruno Latour and Felix Guattari, this project argues that the constructionist account of religious experience does not necessarily negate the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of such experiences. In this sense, the project brings an ontologically rich understanding of constructionism into productive dialogue with the current of American religious experience initiated by William James.
The scripts and templates associated with well-bounded religious traditions are relatively easy to identify. However, within the countercultural period, a wide variety of discourses—religious, psychological, occult, fictional, aesthetic, technological—compete and commingle as ways of shaping and understanding the myriad of intense, sublime, and profoundly weird experiences that, through psychedelics and the pursuit of a wide variety of “altered states of consciousness,” characterize so much countercultural life. Though most studies of the counterculture focus on the sixties proper, I am interested in tracking the construction of extraordinary experience into the seventies, when disappointed revolutionaries turned in droves towards gurus, self-help regimens, and proto-New Age spirituality. While analyzing some of the
sociological dimensions of this influential cultural shift, the project principally investigates three symptomatic but singular intellectuals: the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the underground author Robert Anton Wilson, and the future psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna. Employing their own unique mix of esotericism, social science, irony and fiction, all three men wrestle with their own extreme bouts of “high weirdness” in ways that reflect critical mutations in American religious experience
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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