Engl507

Class Notes: Meeting 2

1) Through the choice of media we study: for a given topic, what media (e.g., text, audio, images, or video) are relevant? How are media also objects of inquiry in literary and cultural criticism? To what effects on our methods (including methods that rely on computation)?

2) Through how we perceive and attend to media (as objects of inquiry): in many ways, criticism is embedded in questions of perception and attention (e.g., close reading, scanning, pattern analysis, re-reading, deep listening/watching).

3) By rendering mediation our object of inquiry: rather than assuming that perception and attention are constants (or givens) across time and space, we can historicize or contextualize how they are structured and organized, even if we cannot perceive media like they did back then.

Clearly, these are only a few options. What are some others?

Ways of understanding criticism through mediation:

• Exegesis as a "clear communication" (or that which is naturalized, largely agreed upon, or not questioned by critics or audiences)
• Hermeneutics as "deep communication" (or that which is privileged esptimelogically, denaturalizes, resists the superficial, often relies on an external rubric, highlights ambivalence, understands texts as problems, digs into the unconscious and history, and constructs a narrative)
• Symptomatics as "stresspoint communication" (or that which complicates exegesis and hermeneutics, resists the depth model of communication, questions expedience, underscores absence, highlights what is not said, renders normative models obsolete, and yet is also already hermeneutic)
• Immanence as "iridescent communication" (or that which is privileged metaphysically, invested in aesthetics, close at hand, illuminating, and ostensibly unmotivated, immediate, and immersive)
• The network as "furious communication" (or that which bypasses deep reading and aesthetic appreciation and instead enumerates, scans, diagrams, and transforms/deforms, often with and through computation/machines)

Key questions for now: Are current technologies too easily mapped onto contemporary criticism, as if technological research neatly corresponds with cultural research? To what degree is criticism a product of its time (e.g., an age of networks, programmable matter, computer vision, and cloud computing)? How do (or should) new technologies and emerging technocultures influence (if at all) research on historical periods (e.g., Victorian or Early Modern Studies)? Are computational approaches to literature and culture a new form of revisionism? And finally, to what degree (if at all) are we in a post-hermeneutic moment?

"People and Things": people and the things that they buy (consumer goods, publishing); the differences between people and things; the material world of Northanger Abbey

"Belonging": in the context of Victorian poetry, specifically children's poetry; how are death and mourning mediated for an audience of children

"Self-Representation": Illustrated London newspaper and how they represented themselves in text; how are images and text used to market a paper

"Place": as a constellation of stories thus far (Massey); looking at changing landscapes through the lens of literature/poetry; how are we at home; how we relate to landscape

"Backpackers": the ontology of traveling; backpacking as a cultural phenomenon, including narratives, stuff, and guides; how are traveling experiences expressed and networked online (e.g., couchsurfing networks)

"Jewishness": social, cultural, and historical representation of Jewish people in texts; how is Jewishness defined in literature and how does it operate as a mode of demarcation; understanding identity as transitional

"Writing": to trace the form of characters; expression through letters; relevance of writing across fields and disciplines; how does writing change across media and platforms; how does it manifest differently

"Diane Di Prima": used the act of writing to perform / enact critique (rather than relying largely on her characters) in the context of the Beat Generation; sparked transition into feminist literary modes during the second half of the 20th c.

"Enlightenment": the ability to say, with a straight face, the knowability of truth; historical faith in the utility of empiricism; looking at Pope in particular ("An Essay on Man"); also transitioning into the Gothic period

"Classification": how and why do people classify, with an emphasis on historical studies of the encyclopedia; also, how do we articulate differences between things, including objects and subjects

"Modernists and Universities": what were the influences of modernism on the writers who attended university; how did curricula change after the modernists; what constitutes the university across practice and infrastructure; possibility of looking at journals and letters from the period; how did modernists perform in university courses

"Sound Particle": instead of the wave, the use of particles, swarms, and other such particles to represent sound; Varese's relation to physics, for instance; also, the study of micro-sound; ultimately, what is the connection between, say, glitch culture and sound particles; how do sound particles tell a different narrative than most narratives in digital culture