viz. - literature

Literature on Television?

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

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

Annenberg media’s “Invitation to World Literature” summarizes famous texts from the perspective of several commentators, who each represent a different way of approaching the printed book. In the initial clip above, we hear the Odyssey likened to a comic book (“Superman”), a movie (“Wizard of Oz”), and even a script for comedic interpolation (this one is interesting). This “remediation” of literature seems to employ a tactic media theorists refer to as “hypermediation,” in which “the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer) strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgment. . . . the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation” (Bolter & Grusin 41–42). By employing several different windows for consuming the Odyssey, “Invitation to World Literature” compels a conscious engagement with medium in hopes of rendering content “transparent” to a range of potential “readers.” We are most familiar with hypermediated environments via internet “windows” or television formats of windowed audience/pundit participation. To what extent might hypermediacy enable more complex presentations of literary texts, authors, or contexts in the future? The National Library of Ireland’s interactive online W.B. Yeats exhibit offers such a “hypermediated” format that balances general overview with narrower frames of interest. As television and internet increasingly cross over and share more in common, how might we adapt interactive, finely-tuned presentations of the "literary tradition"?

Video Credit: Youtube.com

The video above is one of my favorite examples of literary history on the small screen. The original run of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder aired on the BBC between 1983 and 1989. This sitcom differs from the “didactic” shows I have been considering. It expects viewers to have some basic literary and cultural familiarity, but one can understand the jokes even without thorough research. Through comedy and pastiche, Blackadder includes content otherwise unpalatable to television.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

The video above represents an example of the possible limitations to remaking literature on the television. The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) adapts a story popularized in old English ballads and eighteenth-century stage performances. This 1993 stop-motion animation first aired on BBC as a ten-minute short, before being banned for its dark content. After this controversial prohibition from television, The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb enjoyed acclaim and cult status as a film. Intriguingly, only one year after Secret Adventures was banned from television, Warner Brothers released Thumbelina as a blockbuster animated film cartoon. While this is the context in which most people know of “Tom Thumb,” the Secret Adventures has a good deal more in common with the baroque literary original. Perhaps there are many cases in which literature doesn’t translate well to television because it is actually too controversial—not because it is boring or outdated. Since "respectable" writers are no longer averse to admitting television as a space for literary engagement, we might start thinking about how this changing media environment might bring audiences into contact with the diverse array of texts in the literary tradition.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

Re-Covering the Classics

Cate Blouke — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 20:09:40 +0000

Contest winning re-designed book cover by Philipp Dornbierer for The Fox Is Black

Elizabeth's post this week (about the Great Gatsby game) reminded me of a design contest I stumbled upon recently. TheFoxIsBlack.com, a blog about web and graphic design, has begun a series of monthly competitions inviting participants to redesign the covers of classic literature. Last month was The Great Gatsby (winner pictured above), and this month it's The Lord of the Flies. (The deadline is February 25th, so there's still time for you designers out there to get a shot at the $100 Amazon gift card).

Re-designed book cover by Matthew Gore for The Fox Is Black

It's interesting to think about the interaction of text and cover art, how the cover can shape our perception of and approach to a book. Aside from just being pretty cool to look at, the entries are fascinating to compare and could be used as a conversation starter in classrooms. For example, comparing the image above (Matthew Gore's entry) to the one below (Ian O. Phelan's entry). Though both feature the color green, what can we infer from the choice in hue? Also, the image above is more masculine and violent (with the broken glass), positioning Gatsby is the central figure, whereas the image below depicts a female figure and focuses our attention on Daisy.

Re-designed book cover by Ian O. Phelan for The Fox Is Black

Mapping the Eighteenth Century: A Report from CSECS

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:03:19 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

While I wrote in my last blog here that I would use this week’s blog to discuss my upcoming conference paper for MMLA, I was led astray this weekend by an excellent panel I attended at CSECS that I thought the viz. audience might enjoy. (Sorry, Gossip Girl fans. Tune in next week!)

After deciding to attend the panel entitled “Mapping Culture: Topographies of London,” I was delighted to discover it featured not only a paper on Boswell’s enchanting London Journal, but also an excellent discussion about using mapping strategies to teach and research eighteenth-century texts. What united the various papers on the panel, which discussed such disparate texts as John Gay’s “Trivia,” the Mohock Club, Boswell’s aforementioned Journal, and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was that each paper was based on material provided by The Grub Street Project, a website that unites topographical data with literary texts like Pope’s Dunciad.

As explained by Allison Muri, both the panel’s chair and the website's designer, The Grub Street Project’s goal “is to visualize the literary and cultural history of London.” The About the Project page also notes that

High-resolution “zoomable” maps from 18th-century prints associated with a database of bibliographical and topographical data, trades indexes, and literary texts afford new possibilities for not only seeing the relationships between trades, book production, and dissemination of ideas, but also for seeing the topographies of literary imagination.

As the incredibly topical (and topographical) texts of the early eighteenth-century require some previous processing for undergraduate students to understand the references, I was delighted to see how well The Grub Street Project works to help visualize these texts in intriguing ways. (I most enjoyed Kurt Kruger’s paper on “Gentleman and Topography in Boswell’s London Journal: 1762-1763,” and thought that his map of Boswell’s first month in London well represented how Boswell topographically conceives of gentlemanliness.)

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

I also enjoyed how this panel raised interesting questions about the pedagogical purposes of visual material not only in explaining the eighteenth-century, but also in making arguments about the eighteenth-century to students and scholars alike. While I know that our own distinguished Sean McCarthy has led the way in showing how Google Maps can work in the writing classroom, visual data can often be difficult for certain kinds of students to interpret, and its conclusions can sometimes seem “obvious,” for better or worse. As I’ve been thinking this week about Chaim Perelman’s New Rhetoric for a class I’m taking with Trish Roberts-Miller, I wonder if there’s something about visual arguments that may appeal to the universal audience, but that are similarly difficult to understand as constructed, just as rhetors can forget that the universal audience itself is a rhetorical product. Our language encodes the value of visuals in such maxims as “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but how are we supposed to interpret that picture? And what safeguards are there to prevent misinterpretation? As we move into explicitly teaching digital literacies to students, however, these questions will help students to consider more carefully how they evaluate and analyze visuals as rhetorical objects.

At any rate, The Grub Street Project has great functionality and is very intuitive to use. In addition to things like UT’s eComma, I am beginning to visualize a literature classroom that integrates web materials fully.

Exhibiting Poetry and Rhetoric

EmilyBloom — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:39:48 +0000

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

While conducting research on W.B. Yeats I encountered this fascinating online exhibition from the National Library of Ireland that raised interesting questions for me about the relationship between visual rhetoric and literary archives. Like many other graduate students teaching rhetoric while writing a dissertation on literature, I often wonder about the interconnections between the two fields and what ideas crossover and what do not. Yeats, in many ways, seems like the perfect place to start to blur lines between the rhetorical, the literary, the visual and the auditory. Navigating this website, I was struck by the extent to which the virtual museum brings together these fields and makes visible Yeats’s complicatedly interdisciplinary and multi-sensory career.

This exhibition includes virtual rooms recreating spaces that Yeats inhabited, display cases with clickable first editions and manuscripts, videos with scholarly commentators discussing Yeats’s biography and works and images of various artifacts displayed in the collection. One of the advantages of the online exhibition is that the viewer can virtually turn pages of documents that would otherwise be static in the display cases. In this manner, I was able to leaf through a few pages of a first edition without having to visit the archive.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

The exhibit also displays a few instances of visual literary criticism, such as a compelling chart that tracks the composition of Yeats’s The Tower. By clicking on the icon of a single poem, the display highlights a line tracking the publication history. Three poems—“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan” and “Sailing to Byzantium”— are linked to auditory commentary on Yeats’s extensive revision process.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

In many respects, the strategies of this exhibition are similar to those in Yeats’s broadsides. In these broadsides, published by the Cuala Press, Yeats included visual prints, poetic text and sheet music to combine different sensory experiences in works that were, on several levels, blurring the tenuous lines between rhetoric and art.

Irish comics wiki

John Jones — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:18:47 +0000

Those of you interested in comics and/or graphic novels and Irish literature should find the The Irish Comics Wiki to be a useful resource. From the wiki:

There are lots of Irish comics creators out there, from people starting out to wizened veterans. I’m hoping that people can share information, for the betterment of Irish comics. Also, I‘m sure there are people with some knowledge about the history of Irish comics and underground press. It would be great to bring that to light.

I’m not very familiar with the Irish comics scene, but the site links to some great-looking comics. The panel to the right comes from The Ulster Cycle, a web comic based on Irish mythology by Patrick Brown (who also appears to be the creator of the wiki).

via Caricatures Ireland

Text or Image, why must we favor one over the other?

LaurenMitchell — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:00:32 +0000

I just saw a talk given by Katherine Hayles here at UT. Hayles is arguing that literary criticism is missing something when it ignores the material aspects of a text. She calls for a new form of literary criticism that she terms media-specific analysis. This form of criticism views the material aspects of a text as contributing as much to the meaning of a text as the text itself. She showed two examples of electronic texts that make visual arguments at the same time that they make textual arguments.

One was Lexia to Perplexia by Talan Memmott. This text takes control away from the reader by using text that disappears suddenly, text that becomes unreadable when you roll the mouse over it. Essentially, the movement of the mouse can unexpectedly change what is on the screen. The words and images are fused in this text. The create significance together because the words are part of the images.
The other text that Hayles showed during her talk was Nippon by Young-Hae Chang. Nippon uses moving text and music at the same time. Half the screen is red with white English words and half white with red Japanese characters. The words and characters move at a readable pace and then too fast to be read. It alternates between the two. The size of the letters also changes as well as the method by which they appear on the page. The text is also synchronized with the music. So this text has audio, visual, and textual characteristics which contribute to its meaning.
These two texts are examples of a fusion of visual and textual rhetoric. One is not subordinate to the other in the way that captions are to images, or images serve merely as examples of what is being discussed in a text.