viz.

Image Credit: Brandeis.edu

"Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas" portrays the book as a concrete opposition against the Nazi campaign to suppress free expression. This poster represents the base of a literary monument hardening into brick, creating a wall against the forces of anti-intellectualism and hatred. On one level, the text and image disagree as to whether books constitute a weapon or a barrier. On another, the vulcanized page promotes the binary of "us" versus "them," which is required to motivate citizens to armed resistance. The essentialism of this binary, unfortunately, needs to be called into question. Courses in modernist poetry prove that not all fascists were anti-literary, just as twentieth-century American history (or even the recent nightly news) shows that "we" also take our turn at book-burning. Far from denying the clear differences between Axis and Allies during World War II, we might consider how the poster's instrumental definition of books gestures toward a paradoxical complicity subtending the opposed acts of creation and destruction. Such an inquiry inverts the more conventional topic of how certain forms of preservation might actually threaten the existence of art and literature. Speculation into the creative capacity of book-burning has surprisingly rich antecedents in Alexander Pope's eighteenth-century poem, The Dunciad, and in Jorge Luis Borges's reflections on that poem in his mid-twentieth century essay, entitled "The Wall and the Books."

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2011/banned/

Video Credit: Youtube.com

John Lloyd, producer of Spitting Image (1984–1996), tells a story of how he was asked to validate the "humor" of the title ('If the unemployed are hungry, why don't they eat themselves') to television executives who missed his allusion to Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (8:08 min). He had given these lines to the puppet of conservative MP Norman Tebbit (with bat above). Lloyd’s story gestures to two limitations to satire on the boob tube:

1. The public's general lack of familiarity with the satirical tradition

2. A pervasive demand for our ‘satirists’ to operate as ‘comedians’

A brief explanation through the lens of satires during Jonathan Swift's era (17th–18th c.) might clearly show that the english language/english-speaking population once possessed:

1. a refined and self-conscious conception of satire

2. a definite distinction between comedy and satire

To begin, if we consider Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary—published in the golden age of British satire—we find a striking differentiation between:

Comedy: [comedia, Lat.] A dramatick representation of the lighter faults of mankind

Comical: [comicus, Lat.] (1.) Raising mirth; merry; diverting

Comedian: A player or actor of comic parts

Satire: [satira, anciently satura, Lat. Not from satyrus, as satyr] A poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.

Satirick: (1.) Belonging to satire; employed in writing of invective; (2.) Censorious; severe in language

Satirist: One who writes satires

Video Credit: Youtube.com

I recently encountered Annenberg Media’s program series, entitled “Invitation to World Literature,” and was pleased to find a television show dealing with literary texts. This presentation of the Odyssey (one episode within a series ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the 1,001 Nights) is surprisingly rare on television—a medium relatively resistant to literature (if we discount the tested format for 19^th c. novels and the "mini-series"). While much of the literature studied in colleges never ends up on television, Salman Rushdie has recently explained to the UK Telegraph that the writing in contemporary television far exceeds that in film (where literary themes are currently in vogue). As an instructor and consumer of English literature, I wondered— how might television possibly adapt or introduce a literary 'canon'?

Video Credit: Youtube.com

When pop mogul Simon Cowell dubbed “Mack the Knife” the best song ever written, he more than likely based his judgment on the ballad’s phenomenal billboard success during the later half of the twentieth century. As this song was received as a popular standard in England and America, not all of the audiences and performers were aware of its literary origins. Kurt Weill composed the original music and Bertolt Brecht wrote the words for this song, which was featured in his 1928 musical drama, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). Brecht and Weill’s artistic and political investments are well known, and no summary is needed here. It is less well known that Brecht borrowed major portions of his plot from the eighteenth-century British playwright, John Gay, whose Beggar’s Opera (1728) features a rogue hero named “Macheath.” In this audio-visual post will position Gay's complexly ironic hero alongside a range of musicians, from Lotte Lenya to Clay Aitken, Louis Armstrong to Liberace, Marianne Faithful to the Muppets.     

Video Credit: Youtube.com

Media pundits rarely take on the pervasive Orientalist discourse that makes up Marshall McLuhan’s legacy as “prophet of the media.” Orientalist discourses are central to McLuhan’s theory of media, but these are difficult to read for two reasons. First, McLuhan’s Orientalism brazenly adopts metaphors and analogies that most well-educated people today either critique or avoid. In addition to this discomfort, McLuhan’s discourse reinforces his personal ties with radically primitivist (/racist) moderns such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Second, his Orientalism is difficult because it emerges out of self-consciously esoteric literary contexts (he was hired as an English professor and not a media theorist). In the video above (1968), McLuhan and Mailer describe two versions of cultural contact (see above 15.30–22.00 min) between “East” and “West.” One cannot rule out satire in McLuhan’s “Orientalism,” given that his account of electric “Western” man inhabiting “all points” (19.38–19.50 min.) is also his exact definition of the “auditory” and “tactile” realm of what he calls “oriental field theory.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), he writes: “The modern physicist is at home with oriental field theory.” His famous book Understanding Media (1964) equates this existential field with the “tribal drum” of an electric “West” in an age of the “global village.”

Video Credit: Youtube.com

“Anamorphosis thrives on mystery, and its masters rarely give away their secrets.” The Brothers Quay thus introduce the technique of perspectival distortion, which they document in their short film De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis (1991). This film provides viewers with an introduction to a little known post-Renaissance technique, whose etymological origin derives from the Greek ana (again/against), morphe (shape/form). Re-form against form. Anamorphosis submits a classical paradigm of geometrical perspective to systematic spatial manipulations that thwart a conventional “centric” viewer’s apprehension of representational form on a canvas. In order to satisfactorily envision an anamorphic puzzle, the viewer must adopt an off-axis, lateral, or “eccentric” angle of sight. The mechanics of such sight further requires that the viewer assume a monocular, cyclopean, or “keyhole” gaze, which flattens visual depth and paradoxically conjures up an embedded three-dimensional image. The mechanics of this “eccentric” vision offers an apt analogy for the uncanny aesthetic of anamorphosis.

Image Credit: wikipedia.org

I was surprised to discover that Daniel Defoe’s famous eighteenth-century castaway narrative has been filmed several times in the twentieth century, and that at least four of these films can be watched in their entirety on the web. This visual archive will appeal to instructors who want to introduce students to the text, and to viewers already familiar with Robinson Crusoe. The four films are interesting for their modernizations of Defoe’s tale, and their interpretation of particular passages. The most striking discrepancy between the four films pertains to scenes featuring Robinson Crusoe and “Friday”: the native he instructs in English and Christianity. The four twentieth century films adapt these lessons very differently, and reflect an ambivalent tribute to Defoe’s conception of pedagogy and cultural exchange.

 Video Credit: youtube.com

Percy Smith’s The Acrobatic Fly (1910) offers a time capsule into a genre of nature documentary that may seem unfamiliar to many of us today. In contemporary media, bugs are often mobilized for their visceral shock value. In the early-twentieth century, Smith’s singular flies compelled sentimental and conceptual interest. Upon the initial release of his film, The Strength and Agility of Insects (1911), audiences were repelled by its seeming cruelty toward the blue bottle fly. Thankfully, Smith only secured his protagonist with a thread of silk, and no animals were harmed in the making of his film. Audiences were also struck by the uncanny anthropomorphism of Smith’s portrayal of insects’ performances with wood-chips, lint-balls, and dumbbells. His anthropomorphic irony is even more striking in his Romance in a Pond (1932), a nature film tracing the aristocratic courtships and unhappy marriages of “gentlemen newts.” What is so interesting about Smith’s creatures is that they conform to an older natural history in which curious and exemplary specimens played a role in social thought.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The following post concerns my recent visits to the Hazel H. Ransom Reading Room at the Harry Ransom Center. The images, such as the one above, were derived from unpublished scholarly notes that I never would have found if I didn't use a card catalogue. Since I have been in the process of writing my dissertation in the Department of English Literature, the resources at the Harry Ransom Center have guided me toward avenues of research I did not initially expect to pursue. I would like to relate a personal narrative and a few thoughts about why I’ve enjoyed accessing the Center’s extensive and rich archive by means of the card catalogues. The views expressed below do not reflect those of the Center, but are entirely my own. I do not write from the point of view of a library scientist, although I might gesture toward their expertise in my personal reflections on old-fashioned metadata. Instead, I hope to reassert what many students at the University of Texas already know, concerning the advantage of our proximity to the Harry Ransom Center. Specifically, I would like to suggest the need to actually visit the Reading Room to realize the full extent of the possibilities for research there.

Image Credit: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections

Over the past summer, I spent a month as a Gest Fellow at Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections, where I was researching an eighteenth-century female preacher. The most entertaining and unexpected find over that month pertained to an image archive classified as “Anti-Quakeriana.” One of the more interesting aspects of Quaker history (in my opinion) is their retention of documents released by rivals and detractors. Hence the origin of the classification, “Anti-Quakeriana.” As a result of such practices, scholars and historians now have an archive rich in cultural contexts and historical negotiations that mark the transitions from a seventeenth-century “schism” to an eighteenth-century “sect.” Below, I briefly discuss a series of paintings and engravings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female ministers.