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Unsettling Landscapes: Landscape and the Entelechies of the Alienating Gaze in Kipling’s The City of Dreadful Night

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Satarupa Sinha Roy, Calcutta University, India

Abstract

This paper examines and analyzes Kipling’s representation of colonial Calcutta in his travel sketch, The City of Dreadful Night. It explores the role of the European gaze at length seeking to uncover the ways in which it became complicit in delineating not only the colonial space but also the (hitherto more secure) notion of Englishness. In order to do so, this paper exploits Freud’s play on the concepts of heimlich and unheimlich, shining a light on how the colonial space, in Kipling’s imperial narrative, functioned as a covert force in the formulation of identities.

[Keywords: Kipling, Landscape, Colonial space, Gaze, Alienation, Desire]

Vision seems to adapt itself to its object like the images that one has of a town when one contemplates it from the height of a tower; hearing is analogous to a view taken from outside and on the same level as the town; touch, finally, relates to (the understanding of) whoever comes in contact with a town from close up by wandering through its streets. (Leibniz 1668)

In Kipling’s rendering of the colonial city of Calcutta in The City of the Dreadful Night, the entelechies of the urban colonial space can be grasped through a careful consideration of the senses—primarily, the visual, the aural, the haptic and the olfactory—and the interplay among them. In the specific context of his travel sketches on colonial Calcutta, this sentience is both the locus of his desire as well as its occasion. But before one can delve any deeper into the vectors of such longing, it is imperative to remind oneself that Kipling’s narrative on Calcutta distils the essence of European alienation and the primordial desire for home. Calcutta, for Kipling, both is and is not home and it is this very contradiction that enables one to see desire as an embodiment of two opposed ideas: first, as an entity that one must resist or escape from in order to preserve one’s integrity and second, as an entity symbolizing the human longing (at the moment of desiring, that is) for an ideal state, object or outcome.

Interestingly, the traveller/narrator of The City presents desire as both promise (albeit, elusive) of fulfillment as well as absence or lack—an idea that replicates the essential dichotomy between longing (for the ‘object’ that one lacks at the moment of desiring) and evasion (of the seductive yet, admittedly sinister world of taboos etc.). However, the desiring Subject is not essentially aware of this basic dissonance characterizing the nature of his desire(s) but is, nonetheless, structured through the object(s) of his longing(s). It is on account of this very inevitability that it is useful to apprehend the traveller/narrator of The City (and concomitantly, the narrative he produces) as the function of his desire(s) for the Orient as well as for all that it (the Orient) lacks. While the European’s desire for the Orient (the promise of adventure, discovery, power etc.) can be easily explained, his longing for what the Orient lacks warrants a more conscientious speculation. In this particular instance, what the Orient lacks and the traveller/narrator desires can be summed up (not too imprecisely, so to speak) as “some portion of [my] heritage” (Kipling 7). It is no doubt an abstract idea but, also one that reasonably embodies the European’s anxiety, his longing for the heimlich in the midst of an alien world and the ultimate unattainability of his desire(s). For although “Calcutta holds out false hopes of some return” (Kipling 6), the materiality of the claustrophobia it invokes automatically cancels the immaterial reprieve afforded by an illusionistic idea of ‘homecoming’. The desire for the heimlich London within the unheimlich domain of colonial Calcutta culminates into the febrile crescendo of the (ironically self-fashioned) “backwoodsman” and “barbarian”: ““Why, this is London! This is the docks. This is Imperial. This is worth coming across India to see!” Then a distinctly wicked idea takes possession of the mind: “What a divine—what a heavenly place to loot!”” (Kipling 8; emphases added). While Calcutta in its being the specular reflection of Dickensian London excites the desiring Subject (the traveller/narrator of The City) into asserting the malleability of forms and models (London, in this instance, is the model not only of Calcutta but also of all metropoleis), it is also the locus of the European’s desire to appropriate the Other for himself (“What a heavenly place to loot!” (Kipling 8)). However, this should not be confused with anti-desire or the desire to annihilate or destroy; on the contrary, it traces the trajectory of colonial desire to a longing that manifests itself as (latent) power of the Occident over the Orient.

As indicated earlier, Kipling’s representation of colonial Calcutta derives, to a great extent, from his sensory experience of colonial space. Like the royal palace in Italo Calvino’s “A King Listens” (Under the Jaguar Sun 2009 [1983]) which is “all whorls, lobes: [it is] a great ear” (Calvino 38), the colonial metropolis of Calcutta for Kipling is a sprawling sensory map—a vast network of sensory signals concretizing emotion, affect and memory. He repeatedly makes reference to the great “Calcutta stink” which he variously describes as the “essence of corruption” (9) and “the clammy odour of blue slime” (9)—notably fusing the haptic, olfactory and the visual. That the experience of the colonial space (and the subsequent representation of the same in writing) is informed by sensory perception in The City need hardly be over-emphasized, given its conspicuousness. Rather, it is the deployment of sensory perception to convey a sense of anxious alienation from the notion of home or the heimlich in and through language that is likely to strike one as particularly intriguing. The speaking Subject of Kipling’s narrative—a stand-in for the European colonial—is alienated in ways more than one, for he not only typifies the Self in exile condemned to dwell “in the outer darkness of the Mofussil” (Kipling 5) but also problematizes the gaze of the European surveying the colony in a more or less unambiguous acknowledgement of the blurring boundary between the familiar and the foreign. At the heart of Kipling’s representation of colonial India lies this central paradox: India is both familiar as well as foreign; both home as well as abroad; both heimlich as well as its terrifying Other. It might be noted that the relation between the (German) words heimlich meaning familiar, homely, tame etc. and unheimlich (the prefix un- indicating inversion) meaning unfamiliar, strange, uncanny etc. is not free from ambiguity; they do and do not—well, at the same time—seem to suggest the same conventional relationship as that shared by two unequivocally antithetical terms. As Freud writes, “Heimlich thus becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges with its antonym unheimlich. The uncanny (das Unheimliche, ‘the unhomely’) is in some way a species of the familiar (das Heimliche, ‘the homely’)” (Freud 134)…Access Full Text of the Article

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Eliade in the Looking Glass

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Monica Spiridon, University of Bucharest, Romania

Abstract

Our paper focuses on the intertwining of modern travel writing with a series of major questions pointing to Western culture. In the realor imaginary texts of Mircea Eliade, Thomas Mann and   J.-M.G. Le Clézio,European identity is at stake. Regardless of their different starting points, the authors end up questioning the status of the equation civilized versus wild, as a basic principle of Western culture. A special emphasis   is placed by the three writers on the stereotypes of the encounter Self / Other, fostered by modern European culture mainly through mythical patterns.

[Key words: travel writing; European identity; marginal; exotic]

  1. Myths of European Identity

It is common knowledge that standard European identity has always been flaked by the image of the other, both as a barbaric figure opposed to the Western man and as an obstacle to a free cross-cultural communication. One of the basic principles of Western culture and a major landmark of European identity has been the equation civilized versus wild. In the process by which Western identity was constituted, the opposition civilized versus barbarian as well as the Figure of the Barbarian played an important part. The myth of the barbarian is tightly bound up with the main mythical components of Western identity (Bartra, 1994:146).

Traveling creates images of the other, analyzes otherness, and makes it easier to accept and to cope with (Moura, 1998). In the real and imaginary travelelogues of Mircea Eliade, Thomas Mann and J.M.G. Le Clézio that I am pointing to in the following pages, one can see the intertwining of modern travel writings with major questions concerning Western culture.

Turning the tables on those who suggest that the primitive peoples, discovered and colonized by European explorers, gave birth to the myth, we have to accept that, in fact, the already existing myth of the wild man shaped the reactions of the Europeans to real people. In this way, the wild man underpins the notion of civilization on which much of Western identity has been based (Bartra 147-48).

The very idea of a contrast between a wild natural state and a civilized cultural configuration is part of an ensemble of myths sustaining the identity of the civilized West and emphasizing the otherness, the difference. Yet, one needs to merely cast an eye on the myth of the wild man to realize that we are dealing with an imaginary form existing only on a mythological level (Duer 1986).

In his book, India, the Library ofthe Maharajah,Mircea Eliade usually sets the epithet “barbarian” between inverted commas when he is referring to India or to Indians. It is his way of showing that he is using it as a quotation from the standard European discourse. (The discourse of the white man who brought “civilization” to India). By using it, the author of the journal is challenging the idea, turning its meaning upside down: “In double ventilated train cars, Americans are praising the blessings and the reforms of continental civilization in a barbarian country” (Eliade a. 54). And further on: “Benares is stretching in all its weary barbarian beauty” (Eliade a. 64).

At a certain point the author maintains that “barbarian is rather the outlook of modern Europeans on the botanical garden: a concept that can only have its roots in a stupid epoch like the nineteenthcentury” (Eliade a. 104).

The current equation is reversed. The barbarian is the civilization-bringing Englishman who seeks to build up a monotonous town like Darjeeling, in order to feel at home: “Englishmen who are forced to spend a longer time in wilderness would make any effort to change their habitat into a small corner of England. It is they who refer to local people as poor savages “ (Eliade a. 106).

Civilization, its motives, and its models unify but also flatten differences and nuances. “It is not Europe – splendid and immortal reality – that I dislike, he concludes. It is the stupid tendency of the European of molding all the rest of the world after himself” (Eliade a. 84).

In Thomas Mann’s travel journal Travelling with Quixote journal the relationship between civilized and barbarian is explicitly phrased and emphatically reiterated. The epithet “civilized” is frequently used. Mann is, for instance, talking about “being disgusted of the mechanism of civilization” deeply hidden within his own personality. He also expresses his desire to give up civilization for primitivism, and uncertainty, for the irrational and for adventure:

“Does this pleasure betray my own disgust with the mechanism of civilization, a desire to abandon it, to deny it, to reject it, as being destructive for my soul and for my life, a desire to search for a new life style, closer to the primitive and to improvisation? Is there in me a voice that is crying for the irrational, for this cult of danger, of risks and of abuses, this cult against which I have been guarded by my critical rational consciousness, a cult which I have fought against – out of my sympathy for the European, for rationality and for order, or maybe because of an in-built need for balance – as if I didn’t’ t have in myself enough to battle against?”(Mann 293).

The escape of the self-exiled writer from Europe provides an opportunity to take a stimulating distance and to review a highly debatable equation. Civilization and the barbaric – generally speaking – are for Mann the torn halves of a cultural hybrid. The German writer is able to discover a barbarian side of modern European culture – the barbarity of Nazism, for instance, as well as Nietzsche’ s criticism of canonical European values.

Nietzsche himself – who is seen by Mann in close connection with the idea of the barbarian side of European identity – includes in his Birth of Tragedy, a dialogue about the recipe of happiness between the Fridjean king Midas and the barbarian Silenus. Although Silenus himself is meant to be the very embodiment of the non-European, he can also be seen as a symbol of the hidden, repressed dimension of Europeanism…Access Full Text of the Article

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How Do the French have Fun in India: A Study of Representations in Tintin and Asterix

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Anurima Chanda, JNU, New Delhi, India

Abstract

From the times of Ctesias and Megasthenes down through to today, there have been many representations of this exotica in other literatures. Mostly these are serious recounting of travelers aimed at raising the commercial and political interest of their fellow countrymen. In contrast, the writings of Herge or Gosciny and Uderzo are aimed at entertainment. While not discounting the rise of sensibilities of the west with the intervention of postcolonialism, the paper will argue that the othering of India continues in modes of production that are more exclusively western than others. In situations where the west is the producer as well as the consumer of cultural products, these seem to crawl back to stereotypes and projections that demand interference. The paper will try to show how the picaresque interference of the comic heroes serves to turn the nation, that is India, into a mere destination which has little or no sovereignty. In a world of post colonialism, the continued ideological challenges that comics, with their popularity with children poses, cannot be taken for granted. The paper will try to read the comics with the hope of problematising the ideas of comics and fun in relation to depictions of India.

 Keywords: Postcolonial, Stereotype, Tintin, Asterix

The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences (Said 20). This ‘invention’ has played a crucial role in the project of European imperialism. It was not simply ‘the other’ against which the West found its own definition. It, in fact, provided them the fodder around which an entire discourse was built, through which certain images of the Orient are repeatedly sold as a system of knowledge with impressive resilience. With the advent of postcolonial studies, there has been a renewed interest in rereading these images as continuing the project of colonialism through cultural hegemony. A majority of these images were distributed and maintained through texts, a reason why Greenblatt has suggested them to be the ‘invisible bullets’ (Ashcroft, et al. 93) in the arsenal of empire. Today, the way we read Robinson Crusoe or perceive the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, has changed completely. Texts and textuality are no longer seen as an innocent medium through which the Europeans exercised their ‘civilising mission’, but rather as weapons which have played a major role in both conquest and colonization. These texts – be it fiction, histories, anthropologies – have all captured the non-European subject as the ‘other’ of the European man, prominent in his alterity or lack from the latter. Not only did these images provide material to the Europeans, but also polluted the mind of the colonized through formal education or other cultural relations, making them believe in these projections as authoritative pictures of themselves. Evidently, the celebrated norm in all of these images was that of the white European man who had to be followed and emulated, while the image of the ‘other’ became a signifier of what the colonizer’s own past had been like – to quote Marlow from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ”And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Conrad 6).

Bhabha takes this argument one step further when he looks at these images as stereotypes which reiterate the position of the colonized as a fixed reality “at once the ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (Bhabha 41) that needs no proof. The stereotype becomes the primary mode of identification, penetrating human consciousness as a reality, through which one claims knowledge over the other race and culture. Having been consumed unquestioningly over time, stereotypes that have been fed repeatedly create an illusion of reality. One fails to realize that it is merely a false representation of a given reality that has become a fixity without giving space to its evolving differences. The stereotype assumes the role of a fetish, which according to Bhabha has an ambivalent relation with the source that generated it. It is at once an object of desire in its alterity, as it is an object of terror. The image of the subject becomes more important than the problematisation of the way the subject was formed. The colonial power continues to exert its power through the knowledge of the stereotype that it has created instead of questioning the “function of the stereotype as phobia and fetish that, according to Fanon, threatens the closure of the racial/epidermal schema for the colonial subject and opens the royal road to colonial fantasy” (Bhabha 43). Reading against this grain, one can specifically take up the case of comic books which generally exploit stereotypes within their storylines. For the sake of this paper, I will be looking at two of the most popular comic characters of all time, Tintin and Asterix and their adventures in India.

Assouline, who has traced the timeline of Herge: The Man who Created Tintin, mentions an episode from the writer’s life:

George and his parents rarely spoke; they communicated with drawings. Herge remembered it was by this means that he understood what he had common with, and how he was different from, his father. One day both were drawing airplanes; his father gave his the lightness of dragonflies, while George’s versions carried the whole weight of the aeronautics industry. From that Georges deduced the fact that his father was an idealist and that he was a realist… (Assouline 6)

The George here is Georges Remi, who wrote under the nom de plume of Herge, and the creator of The Adventures of Tintin, one of the most influential comic-strip art of the 20th century that changed the face of European comic scene forever. With the usage of high quality illustration where special attention was given to minute details and the introduction of speech bubbles inspired from American novels, Herge (the word which comes from reversing Georges’ name and pronouncing them in French) received almost instantaneous popularity. However, how much of a realist was he, is a question one has much to debate about…Access Full Text of the Article

Book Review: Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre

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Review Article

Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre: Essays on the Theatres of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka

Edited by Ashis Sengupta

image Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Pp. I-xviii, 250.

 

 

 

Reviewed by

Himadri Lahiri

University of Burdwan, West Bengal.

Theatre as a performing art is potentially an effective medium for bringing together sections of people across cultures and nations, particularly if it has the proper message to convey. It is more applicable to a geo-political area like South Asia with a history of shared moments and experiences. South Asian countries, which are politically volatile, have experienced turbulent periods of intra-national identity politics and violent inter-national hostilities. The ‘shadow lines’ that exist between warring communities and nations are the result of intensely felt, and violently executed, politics of ‘difference’ although the fact remains that many of them share the same origin and similar history. Artificially created national, political and religious prejudices which stem from hegemonic forces operating within nations block efforts of people-to-people cultural contact. It is in this context that the publication of Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre: Essays on the Theatres of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka edited by Ashis Sengupta may be considered to be a welcome gesture towards understanding the region from cultural points of view. The book provides a well-researched picture of the contemporary South Asian theatre in the five countries of the region mentioned in its subtitle. It is, as Aparna Dharwadker points out in her Foreword to the book, “is the first study to confront the problem of fragmentary approaches, and to think ambitiously and systematically ‘beyond the nation’” (x). South Asia, recognised as “a key geopolitical area,” provides the contributors of the book this “beyond the nation” space for an intensive study of its theatre movements. The approach in this volume is, as Dharwadker points out, “an inclusively ‘regional’ [i.e. South Asian] rather than exclusively ‘national’ approach” (ix). Keep Reading

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Book Review: One Year for Mourning

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A Compelling Saga, Poignant yet not Maudlin

A Novel by Ketaki Datta

Download PDF Version

Ketaki_Datta Hardcover: 188 pages

Publisher: Partridge Publishing

ISBN-10: 148283345X

ISBN-13: 978-1482833454

Reviewed by

Arnab Bhattacharya

Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata

The mother-daughter relationship is certainly one of the most intriguing of human relationships. Carl Gustav Jung has written extensively on the mother archetype, and also on the mother-complex in the daughter. According to Jung, the ways in which this mother-complex can operate in a daughter can be classified into four major categories namely, i) hypertrophy of the maternal element, ii) overdevelopment of Eros, iii) identity with the mother, and iv) resistance to the mother. But, as life always overleaps the theoretician’s best endeavour and the scientist’s sharpest acumen, the categories mentioned above are neither exhaustive nor definitive. To a woman, her mother is very often more than an individual; very often she stands for her home, her lost childhood, a part of her life all of which become part of a memory that she can no longer live. Keep Reading

Editorial

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The issue on Digital Humanities was planned in order to approach an interdisciplinary field that has emerged with the intervention of digital technology in appreciation and dissemination of literature and arts. Every new medium brings with itself new array of possibilities, which sometimes prove to be quite ‘revolutionary’ after its infancy is over. Digital Humanities or whatever it will be named in future, seems to be still in its infancy and we are not fully aware of the possibilities and potentialities. The world of information technology—though manipulated largely by the big corporate hands, is changing at an unprecedented rate and it is too early to say what direction it will take. But the impact on the individuals and the academic institutions has already been felt in a big way—so big that the questions of modernity and modernization are taken up seriously. The impact of ICT on literature and arts is greater because of the ways production, appreciation and dissemination of literature and arts undergoing massive changes. Added to this, is the new concern with the preservation and retrieval of ‘born-digital’ data. The articles in the collection try to explore the new horizons from various positions.

Digital Art: technoMetamorphosis by Rob Harle

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About the Artist

Rob Harle is an artist, writer and researcher. His academic work involves research into the philosophy of Transhumanism, Artificial Intelligence and the nature of Embodiment. Artwork, Biography and selected writings are available from his web sites:www.robharle.com

Artist’s Statement Concerning These Artworks:

I see my artwork as a kind of documentation of the technoMetamorphosis, this word describes the terrifying and exhilarating process of the irrevocable changes technology is bringing about for all humans.

My artwork now consists solely of digital images – some are created entirely with the computer, others a manipulation of my original photographs and sculptures using various computer programs and techniques. These explore my concerns about our cyborg, transhuman and posthuman future. Human beings are balancing on the edge of a truly new abyss. Through genetic, chemical and computer engineering we have to

decide what we will become. The old myths perpetuated by bureaucratic-authoritarian religious organizations, Newtonian style reductionist, non-holistic scientific investigation, and messianic, capitalist economic policy represent unsustainable practices and ideologies, which if continued, will bring about the extinction of humanity. I try to create a dynamic tension in my images between being human and the technology we create. The essence of my work is perfectly described by Dollens, “his images have a narrative quality that interlocks the technical and metaphysical creating a space of oscillating dialogue giving them depth and mystery”. I hope my new work will evoke in others an increased awareness of the ramifications of our fledgling technoMetamorphosis.”

The following brief descriptions are not complete just to help access the meaning of the works:

After_The_Singularity

1 – After The Singularity: The Singularity is that proposed point when technology, especially computers, take over from humans and manage themselves. Actual image inspired by the film Powaqqatsi.

 

Cyborg_Dreaming

2 – Cyborg Dreaming: The cyborg, a part machine, part android creature is shown thinking about science, digital matrices and the solar system.

 

Silicone_Messiah

3 – Silicone Messiah: The Messiah has come again, based on the Christian myth, only this time from within the digital environment or all-integrating quantum field. The skull is evidence of the impending demise of humanity as we know it.

 

Game_Over_#2

4 – Game Over #2: This android/alien/cyborg figure is indicating that the old authoritarian bureaucratic religions are finished, the centuries old game of lies is over.

 

U_Run_and_U_Run

5 – U Run and U Run: These android/robotic figures are running in a centrifuge like machine getting nowhere, like the Pink Floyd song which partly inspired it.

 

We_Are_Worried_About_Your_Future

6 –We Are Worried About Your future:These two androids, sitting like concerned old mums, are warning of the impending destruction of humanity through unsustainable industrial and energy practices.

 

 

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Book Review: Digital Literary Studies: Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose, and Drama, Eds. David L. Hoover, Jonathan Culpeper, and Kieran O’Halloran

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New York: Routledge, 2014.

ISBN: 978-0-415-35230-7

202 pgs. 6,228.00 INR

Review by P. Prayer Elmo Raj, Pachaiappa’s College, Chennai

index

Digital Literary Studies brings to focus the issues, methods and approaches to the recent advent of an area of studies, ‘digital literary studies.’ The book focuses on an in-depth analysis of non-digital literary texts with an objective to be studied from a digitized perspective. It attempts a study on the literariness and style of work employing natural language compilations fabricating particular tasks, including the three major literary genres, poetry, prose and drama, to bring in compelling present issues. The methods used in the book such as “multivariate analysis,” “text-markup/ annotation,” and application of “huge corpora” brings in fresh focus to the texts with innovative schemes. Textual analysis makes use of the digital nature of the texts to examine them from the point of view of media. Various computational methods significantly influence the avenues of digital literary study to mark the worth of corpus linguistics. The book has a glossary of corpus linguistics terms employed in digital humanities to make aware the complex theoretical propositions. Corpus, here, is explained as “structured collection of digital texts.” For analytical purposes the essays create a corpus within their spectrum of research. For instance, Culpeper on his studies on Romeo and Juliet collects the speeches of the characters in relation and comparison to each other to form a corpus. Central to the study of corpus linguistics is the role played by linguistics, the manner of interpreting style and aesthetics of a text. The intermingling of corpus linguistics and stylistics is a call for the stylisticians to note the broader vision of stylistics and its importance in digital literary studies. This also meant to underline the encompassing nature of corpus linguistics that deploys varied methods bringing in qualitative, quantitative and computational methods.

Jonathan Culpeper’s “Keywords and Characterisation: An Analysis of Six Characters in Romeo and Juliet” aims to study how a key area in stylistics, characterisation becomes beneficent of keyword analysis, an empirical method and an elucidation of what keywords and how keyword analysis could help in corpus linguistics. Culpeper examines the dialogue, the voice of the characters for keywords facilitating the individual subject positions by using tagging system. Lexical and grammatical patterns surface as the analysis of speeches of various characters in Romeo and Juliet progress. For instance, Romeo’s keywords beauty and love and Juliet’s key words if and yet offers deeper insights on the mechanics of word functions and stylistics. However, the study does not deal with the interconnection between keywords across corpus and the limitations of keywords within multiword units from a semantic point of view. Proceeding on this chapter is Culpeper’s “Developing Keyness and Characterization: Annotation” that appropriates the grammatical and semantic annotation to the words of the data and investigates the annotation for keyness to seek the habitation of meaning in texts. In order the computer to recognize the grammatical and semantic traits annotation is fundamental. The chapter also deals with the question which aspect of the text is important or should we attribute fundamental significance to text. The grammatical and semantic analysis of the speeches of Romeo brings in closed words to highlight patterns that are annotated to achieve desired results. Culpeper concludes by stating “we can trust the text” (61) because the analysis both grammatical and semantic brings in possibilities that move beyond the generalizations of style and characterization.

David L. Hoover’s “The Moonstone and The Coquette: Narrative and Epistolary style,” deals with the deviations in style within a single fiction. John F. Burros reveals how Jane Austen’s characters can be differentiated distinctly one from the other in the manner which they use words in a particular dialogue. The author investigates two novels written with compound style with the help of multivariate authorship attribution method to establish how an author alters between styles. While Wilkie Collins through his narrative style exemplifies the distinct voices, Hanna Webster with her epistolary style was not successful in granting distinct voices her characters. The failure and success in creating distinct voices of their characters belongs to the cultural and social arguments put forth by the novelists rather than their literary technical quality. The next chapter, “A Conversation Among Himselves: Change and the Styles of Henry James,” employs authorship attribution technique to locate the uniqueness of Henry James’ style from that of the others but internally exhibits three distinctly different styles in his earlier and later writings. In order to drive home his thesis Hoover compiles 19th century novels into a corpus employing multivariate authorship attribution and statistical methods. Rather than delving into any methods of form critical methods he employs word frequencing techniques to enhance the style variants in James’s work which is uniformly progressive.

“Corpus-Assisted Literary Evaluation” by Kieran O’ Halloran advocates subjective literary evaluations can be substantiated through evidences. Roger Fowler’s evaluation of Fleur Adcock’s poem “Street Song” is forceful and brings in disconcerting effects on a reader into the work even before any in depth study of the poem begins with. The author maintains that through empirical corpus evidence literary evaluation can be substantiated through schema theory and corpus analysis from the reader’s perspective. His essay “Performance Styllistics: Deleuze and Guattari, Poetry, and (Corpus) Linguistics,” O’ Halloran utilizes propositions from Deleuze and Guattari to engage in alternative interpretations like performance sytlistics where a poem is viewed as an invitation for the audience to be creative and partake in the interpretive journey allowing the poem to be inclined and evocative spurring knowledge to employ the resources available in World Wide Web to form fresh subjective perspectives on the poem to innovatively “fill in” personas and settings of the poem. Web based stylistic analysis forms the basis of such interpretative performance to activate a creative interpretation of the poem calling for a computational participation of the reader.

The book, though takes its cue from stylistics, does not succumb to the traditional stylistic methods like using select instances or textual excerpts to interpret the whole corpus of an author. It opens up spectrum of possibilities for digital literary studies and research with its lineage to corpus linguistics and stylistics. The subject matter discussed in the essays are analysed with theoretical academic rigour coherently and innovatively. The essays encompass three major literary genres highlighting the significance of corpus linguistic analysis from a computational point of view taking it beyond the traditional methods. These essays lay foundation for the upcoming researchers in digital literary studies offering a platform to build on and propose fresh avenues. The book attempts for particularity in its approach by relating the study to poetry, fiction and drama. However the esoteric nature of the digital literary approach is kept intact to analyse the work of art chosen by the authors in detail. The authors bring together extensive amount of creativity in putting together disciplines with their ability to catalogue and define the new area of literary studies. The book, however, fails to draw the challenges and issues pertaining to digital literary studies in particular and corpus linguistics as a whole. The conciliation and renegotiation of corpus linguistics with traditional texts traverses only through a nascent vision weakening to reconfigure and recreate a fresh perspective to literary studies. Though not a compendious study on corpus linguistics, these essays are groundbreaking in the manner in which they tread through the developing digitized literary research. These essays are not for beginners of digital literary studies but for those who aspire to undertake fresh researches in a rapidly transforming and developing field.

Prayer Elmo Raj is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Pachaiyappa’s College, Chennai.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935), Vol. VII, No. 1, 2015.
Ed. Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay &Tarun Tapas Mukherjee
URL of the Issue: http://rupkatha.com/v7n1.php
URL of the review: http://rupkatha.com/V7/n1/16_Digital_Literary_Studies.pdf
Kolkata, India. Copyrighted material. www.rupkatha.com

Book Review: The Digital Media Handbook (2nd Edition) by Andrew Dewdney and Peter Ride

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Abingdon: Routledge, 2014

Reviewed by Rohit K Dasgupta. University of Southampton

9780415699914

 

The second edition of Dewdney and Ride’s Handbook is a very welcome read. Digital Media covers a broad range of topics relating to the convergence of everyday life practices within a networked environment. As the authors have rightly noted over the time as this discipline has evolved so has perceptions about new media systems- the internet as a dawn of creative freedom now replaced by seeing it as a system of exploitation of control (p.2).

This book is a useful guide that charts the complicated nature of the subject taking the reader across several points of interests and relationships between media and the wider public sphere. Ride and Dewdney start with an impressive introduction where they identify the various ways in which professionals and scholars have been debating digital media and chart these debates.

The book is made up of five parts- Networks, convergent media, Creative industries, Digital Media and finally rounding it up with a section on Media histories and theories. The first two sections open up the discussion on networked computing and the concept of a networked society. The authors following the footstep of Henry Jenkins argues that convergence of previously separate cultural media forms and practices are now coming together and creating a new working environment. It is no longer possible to think about the cultural industries separately from the audience but need to be read through the same prism. This section also introduces some useful terms such as hybridity, medium specificity before moving on to the case studies.

Pedagogically speaking the strength of this book is the way in which the authors deftly bring together their case studies and the theories. It is indeed very useful having the case studies come right after the theoretical grounding that is provided at the start of each section. I was slightly surprised to have the fifth section on Digital media theories where the authors introduce concepts such as postmodernity, Marxism and so on. Whilst this is an important section and provides a strong theoretical scaffolding it felt quite different from the rest of the book both in terms of its tone as well as its structure (unlike the other sections it does not have any case studies). It would have been much more worthwhile if this section preceded the rest of the book instead of ending with it.

To conclude, this is a timely book and scholars and practitioners will welcome its new edition. The authors have written the book in a very approachable language and aimed at a range of readers from undergraduate students to artists and graduate students. As a handbook it is a comprehensive review of the field and offers some interesting ideas for further research.

Rohit K Dasgupta teaches in the University of Southampton.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935), Vol. VII, No. 1, 2015. Ed. Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay &Tarun Tapas Mukherjee. URL of the Issue: http://rupkatha.com/v7n1.php. URL of the review: http://rupkatha.com/V7/n1/15_Review_Digital_Media_Handbook.pdf

Calculation in Art: The Inconspicuous Heuristics of Computation

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Judson Wright, Pump Orgin, New York, USA

Abstract

How might computers, as tools for automatic execution of formal boolean logic, as opposed to their popular use as rote presentation appliances for presenting various pre-packaged media, be integrated into art? Though the latter use may only yield discussion relevant to a subset of media theory, and we have no argument in or with that forum, the former represents a fundamental inquiry regarding cognition, perception, biology, mathematics, and anthropology, which applies to a far broader issue that bleeds across to far more disciplines of study. The direct approach, algorithmically generating modal events, is hardly sufficient. It is the well-known, but hardly ever analyzed basis of the Turing test. As an example, computers taking input from distinct biosensors tend to create what can be called “cat-walking-on-the-piano” music. This is not to say that an individual cannot come to develop an appreciation for such an aesthetic, but merely that our species seem to be equipped with a general organic art-ness detecting sense.

keywords: cognition, Constructivism, development, modeling, perception

This depicts our triadic relationship with computers. The computer has no sense of its own holism, its mechanical parts, or its own behavior. As a middle, fairly optional, part of a three-step process, the computer can only aspire to indirectly encourage the rudiments of meaning within cooperating human minds.
This depicts our triadic relationship with computers. The computer has no sense of its own holism, its mechanical parts, or its own behavior. As a middle, fairly optional, part of a three-step process, the computer can only aspire to indirectly encourage the rudiments of meaning within cooperating human minds.

Introduction

Both practices, the use of computers and the experience of art, are generally exploitations of perceptual gestalt rules. Yet gestalt can be applied much more deeply, through metaphor, to conceptualization. These gestalt rules, which allow our species to both perceive and enjoy the use of our bloated pre-frontal cortices, are products of Evolution. But can we say that the current results are optimizations of our design? With evolutionary competition as a model, beginning with number theory and the Turing machine (Ash, 1965; Shannon & Weaver, 1940; Turing, 1936), and culminating in the weighting of options that is fundamental to neural networking schemes (Adbi, Valentin, & Edelman, 1999; Sporns, 2011), the computer is implemented as a means of optimization. Optimization is somewhat synonymous with a common approach to computation. However, deep in the background of this underlying theoretical approach, remains the implication that Evolution itself is a means of optimizing individual species. It is not (Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2001). It is a means of optimizing systems (relative to the current state of other systems)—not instances.

To this end, we will be discussing computer programs which tease apart aesthetic sensory experiences, of what is described as an objet d’art (i.e. embodied by recognizable media)—from cognitive effects, of which art-ness (in a much wider variety of forms) is a byproduct. As this certainly bears further explanation. Suffice it to say, these works are not intended to be conclusive of a hypotheses, but initial indicators answering what exactly is to be investigated. The former paradigm might be likened to aiming at an elusive target, while the later is more akin to turning on the lights before entering an unfamiliar room. However, there is a more fundamental obstacle.

This division of labor [between scientific fields] is … popular: Natural scientists deal with the nonhuman world and the “physical” side of human life, while social scientists are the custodians of human minds, human behavior, and, indeed, the entire human mental, moral, political, social, and cultural world. Thus, both social scientists and natural scientists have been enlisted in what has become a common enterprise: the resurrection of a barely disguised and archaic physical/mental, matter/spirit, nature/human dualism, in place of integrated scientific monism. (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, p. 49)

Sarah Shettleworth (1998) makes an important point about cognition in nonhuman animals, that whatever their available behavioral and motor features, these mental abilities only tend to be idiosyncratic strategies the organism uses given its own embodied resources, rather than any reflection of the degree of that organism’s comprehension of the environment. There is no ideal vantage point from which to observe the universe. It must be taken as a premise on faith, that a world beyond the mind exists, roughly in the way humans describe it to themselves as conceptual metaphor (Feldman, 2008; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). So too we humans must appreciate the effects of being human on our interpretations of our art and our computers.

This is no simple matter. We highlight a subtle distinction between physical properties (and the possible organization thereof), and the inconsistent detection of such physical dynamics by human sensory systems, as rendered within the Cartesian theater of the detector’s mind (as it is discussed in Dennett, 1991). That humans so easily confuse these two entities, that they are so often only considered as a single phenomenon, is ultimately essential to the utility of the computer, and coincidentally as well as art (this subtle distinction for art was recognized in Dewey, 1935).

Actually, this coincidence may be rather trivial. We are designed to overlook this slight discrepancy, and, in turn, design artifacts to accommodate this idiosyncrasy (as discussed in Deacon, 1997; see also Greve 2013). We do not experience the word objectively, rather the protocol/medium between mind and body is affect (to site various domains Clancey, 2005; Cobb, 2005; Grafton & Cross, 2008; Hohenberger, 2011; Lakoff & Núñez, 2000; LeDoux, 2002), subject to—or perhaps shared in the common adherence with—gestalt and grouping (regarding nonhuman animal linguistics, see Cheney, 1984; Seyfarth, 1984). Our species developed its complex processes of perception and conceptualization in response to evolutionary pressures (Herrero, 2005). One conspicuous byproduct of these features is art. Moreover, inventions of mechanical prosthetic devices, from the wheel to the computer, are ultimately embodied artifacts of those very same cognitive processes. We invent machines to satisfy our species-specific needs in this respect, and not to answer to an unknowable, ultimate objective perspective. It would be perhaps more accurate to say that the construction and employment of any technology (including paint brushes and the piano) is art, an expression of this creative impulse.

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