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Digital Humanities: An attempt to place itself in a new modernity

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Dibyajyoti Ghosh, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Abstract

Modernity is often reflected through pedagogy, which in turn is frequently shaped by capitalist forces. The nature of academic disciplines continues to change with time and notions of modernity. Inter-disciplinarity, or a shifting/ dissolution/ creation of disciplines reflect prevailing notions of modernity. It is in this background, that I plan to examine the rise of the digital humanities (henceforth referred to as DH), and the manner in which DH tries to place itself in a new form of modernity. Rather than looking at specific literary and cultural texts, I shall look at the nature of texts. The paper aims to show as to how DH has changed the way of thinking about texts and accessing texts. Rather than looking at a text as a linear narrative, DH opens up the possibility of visualising para-textual matter—matter not contained within the text itself but implied by it. In a way, DH also suggests a post-modern dissolution of the text itself—if the linear narrative is not more important than the para-textual matter, is the value of the text being undermined? This paper tries to conclude by connecting these implications of DH with the nature of how such suggestions of radicality justify the inclusion of DH as a marker of the ‘modern moment’ seeking to wilfully set itself against the past.

Modernity is often reflected through pedagogy, which in turn is frequently shaped by capitalist forces. The nature of academic disciplines continues to change with time and notions of modernity. It is in this background that I plan to examine how Digital Humanities (henceforth referred to as DH) tries to place itself in a new modernity. I shall divide my paper into three sections. The first section will be utilised in discussing the nature of academic funding for DH, the second in looking at how DH changes the notion of the text, and the final section in trying to analyse how DH interacts with the idea of modernity.

  1. The nature of academic funding for DH

It is an obvious truism that academics is governed by funding. DH is primarily reliant upon soft funding, that is, temporary, non-long-term, highly competitive funding, as opposed to hard funding which governs permanent teaching positions in Indian colleges and universities. Given that in 2015, the skills needed to practice DH are not usually acquired by students at either the school level or even at the undergraduate level, DH is a post-graduate subject of academic study. In India, the only full-time DH course is the one run by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. That course is a post-post graduate diploma course. The course is funded by a one-time grant from the currently discontinued UGC-Teaching and Research in Interdisciplinary Innovative and Emerging Areas scheme. Under the scheme, the course could only be a one-year post-post graduate diploma course. In other countries, DH is also taught at the Master’s level.

               Given the nature of soft funding for DH, DH projects tend to be short-term (that is, something which can produce demonstrable artefacts after a period of funding ranging from a few months to a maximum period of say 5 years). Also, given that DH projects are not very well-funded but at the same time require full-time professional service, DH practitioners tend to be either permanent teachers or post-postgraduates on an ad-hoc basis. The nature of soft funding for DH also ensures that DH is restricted most often to the nature of projects, something that is seen as a research activity, as opposed to a teaching activity, which as mentioned earlier, there is only one instance of it in India as of March 2015. Such research projects also have short-term goals, as a result of which once the period of funding ends, there is practically no scope to keep updating the project. The humanities research involved in most DH projects is a laborious task and has usually a longer period of validity as opposed to the technological aspects of DH projects. However, whenever the funds run out, the technological aspect of DH projects is no longer updated. Given the short-term validity of technology, most DH projects seem outdated technology-wise within say a period of 5 years since its completion. Thus, unless the data sets that underlie DH projects is made easily accessible to the public at large (such as the Folger Shakespeare XML-TEI texts), the data of most DH projects is not amenable to re-use.

This nature of research attributed to DH is often thought of as the reason why it alienates other humanities practitioners who are not keen of using DH methods. The fact that a large number of computer science graduates are also often leaders of DH projects and programmes makes DH an area where humanities graduates are often wary of treading. DH funding is also most often granted only to permanent teachers who are allowed to take on project staff. Thus, the nature of DH funding makes it a risk-laden career choice for the project staff. On the one hand, in India, such career experience is not considered for valid Academic Performance Indicator (API) scores, where digital output is not yet a valid form of research output. Moreover, collaborative research, involving much more than 5 or so research fellows, is not amenable to the division of API scores. On the other hand, DH ‘seems’ the practical long-shot risk in the face of dwindling academic funding for the humanities in general…Access Full Text of the Article

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Call for Reviewers and Copy-editors

Reviewers We invite applications from established scholars to act as Reviewers for the Rupkatha Journal (www.rupkatha.com). Reviewers  familiar with OJS

Big Data and the Arts

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Miguel Ángel Medina, University of Málaga (Spain)

Abstract

Big Data has come and is here to stay pervading many human activities, including social, humanistic and natural sciences. This article briefly reviews the emergence of Big Data in Humanities and the Arts, as well as the opportunities and issues it opens.

1. Introduction

Big Data is a relatively recent term that has emerged as a widely recognized trend pervading many different human activities and attracting the attention from the industrial and commercial sectors, governments and academia (Hashem, Yaqoob, Anuar, Mokhtar, Gani & Khan, 2015). There is not a consensus definition for Big Data yet. Big Data is sometimes defined as “the amount of data just beyond technology’s capability to store, manage, and process efficiently” (Manika et al., 2011). Very recently, Big Data has been similarly defined as “a term utlized to refer to the increase in the volume of data that are difficult to store, process, and analyze thorugh traditional database technologies” (Hashem, Yaqoob, Anuar, Mokhtar, Gani & Khan, 2015). Introducing slight but interesting differntial tinges, Magoulas & Lorica introduce the Big Data concept “when the size and performance requirements for data management become significant design and decision factors for implementing a data management and analysis system” (Magoulas & Lorica, 2011). Others define Big Data as characterized by the size of data volume, variety, and acquisition velocity, altogether usually mentioned as “the three Vs” (Zikopoulos, Parasuraman, Deutsch, Giles & Corrigan, 2012; Berman, 2013). Some authors add a fourth essential and key V to the features defining Big Data, namely, V for value (Gantz & Reinsel, 2011; Chen, Mao & Liu, 2014).

It should be stressed that Big Data is a relative and moveable concept in terms of data “size”, taking into account both the actual historical moment and the human activity in which is going to be applied. It is clear that the amount of data to be considered “big” is not the same for the Information Technologies, Biology or History. And it is also clear that the maximal technological capability to manage data is continuosly increasing. A recent analysis carried out by CISCO revealed that from 1992 to 2012 the amount of data transmitted across the Internet hugely increased from 100 gigabytes per day to 12 terabytes a second (mentioned in the AHRC The Challenge of Big Data brochure published in July 2014). Up to the beginning of the current millenium, most of the available information was maintained stored in analog storage systems (books, photographs, drawings, maps, discs, tapes, and so on). In 2002, digital storage of information amounted for a half of the global information sotrage capacity, thus marking the beginning of the digital age. In only five years, by 2007 almost 94% of the totality of the accumulated information was already digitally stored. Furthermore, the trend to accumulate new data is continuously accelerating so fast that currently more than 90% of total data available in the world has been created in the last two years. Thus, currently the “size” of Big Data initiatives ranges from a few terabytes to many petabytes of data.

Although Big Data indeed refers to very large quantities of available data, now it seems clear that size is not the most relevant feature of Big Data, but rather the value of these data is what matters most. As mentioned in the presentation of the Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information symposium held in 2013 to celebrate the 125 years of Georgetown Universtiy Law Library, this value of Big Data is related “with our ability to discover meaning by connecting points of information electronically, across numerous, vast, and often unrelated stores of data“ (available in http://www.georgetown.edu/library/about/125/symposium/index.cfm). Therefore, the most relevant feature of Big Data is not its size, but its relationality to other data. And this is so because Big Data is essentially networked (Boyd & Crawford, 2011). In particular, Big Data coming from data tracking has introduced two new types of social networks, the so-called articulated and behavioral networks. In fact, networks are currently pervading all scientific, humanistic and social disciplines. For a review on networks and arts, see my essay on the issue recently published in Rupkatha (Medina, 2015)….Access Full Text of the Article

Digital Humanities, Big Data, and Literary Studies: Mapping European Literatures in the 21st Century

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Carolina Ferrer, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada        

Abstract

The purpose of this research is, firstly, to map the 48 national literatures of Europe, through the exploration and the analysis of the bibliographic references contained in the main literary database, the Modern Language Association International Bibliography. Secondly, the series obtained are correlated to economic and development indicators in order to determine whether and how the cultural, economic, and social fields interact with each other. From the theoretical viewpoint, this project stands at the crossroad of several concepts: the literary field defined by Pierre Bourdieu (1972, 1980, 1992), knowledge domain analysis (Hjørland& Albrechtsen 1995; Hjørland 2001; Nascimento & Marteleto 2008), scientometrics (Price 1963; Garfield 1980, 2005; Leydesdorff 1998), and the recently emerged concept of big data (Berman 2013; Boyd & Crawford 2012; Mayer-Schönberger& Cukier 2013). Methodologically, aiming at quantitatively identifying the European national literatures, we base our research on scientometrics. Initially developed by Price (1963), the purpose of scientometrics is to measure and to analyze the scientific and technological activity. In this study, we adapt scientometric indicators to the architecture and features of the Modern Language Association International Bibliography. Thus, the elaboration of bibliometric indicators (Garfield 1980, 2005; Hjorland & Albrechtsen 1995) allowed us to obtain the number of bibliographic references dedicated to the study of each of the 48 European national literatures, making it possible for us tovisualize the importance of each of these literatures and to compare them to economic and social indicators.

[Keywords: European literary field, bibliographic databases, data mining, big data, digital humanities, quantitative methods, economic indicators, social indicators]

Digital humanities and big data

In «A genealogy of digital humanities», MarijaDalbello (2011) proposesa definition of digital humanities:

the ability to read the archive of core texts, together with their residual materiality from previous media contexts in order to produce intensive modes of engagement with particular documents, groups of texts, and the archive is brought to broader audiences. (Dalbello, 2011, p. 497)

The following year, Boyd and Crawford (2012), define Big Data «as a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology […], analysis […], mythology» (Boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 663). The technological aspect corresponds to the capacity of extracting, storing, and putting in relation immense sets of information. Analytically, these massive amounts of information make it possible to identify patterns that allow us to obtain economic, social, and technical conclusions about the behaviour of the series. The authors consider that the belief that big datasets represent superior knowledge capable of yielding truthful, objective, and exact results is only a mythology.

In 2013, Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger (2013) establish that the phenomenon of massive information implies a change in the way we consider data. Firstly, we can no longer consider a sample of data, since huge amounts of data are available. However, this considerable amount of information implies a certain uncleanness of information. Thus, this change means, secondly, that we have to accept the existence of some inexact data, an amount that is meaningless given the quantity of information available. Finally, frequently, this data does not allow us to know the causes of the phenomena considered, allowing us only to correlate the series. Thus, there is a displacement from the determination of the causes of the events observed to their descriptions: instead of explaining the past, the correlations are used to predict the future. Moreover, as Berman (2013) points out: «Big Data provides quantitative methods to describe relationships, but these descriptions must be transformed into experimentally verified explanations» (p. 226). In this analysis, we will base our explanation on Bourdieu’s study of the behaviour of the literary field (1992).

Once the definitions of digital humanities and big data established, we should examine if there is a relation between these concepts. Thus, we have extracted from the ISI Web of Knowledge the references that correspond to these concepts…Access Full Text of the Article

Editorial, Volume VI, Number 3

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The Rupkatha journal appears more eclectic with passage of time, even as it registers the most contemporary research in the emerging humanities. The problem of an empiricist-scientific approach to humane themes is therefore addressed with curiosity and intellectual commitment. If Rupkatha has been able to successfully defend this trend in the humanist academy and in areas which contravene all its given certitudes, then this is the kind of achievement any journal seeks at present. The brief history of networking discussed in an article illustrates this fact. The fundamental questions on the nature of art are being revised; there is an increasing faith in the material conditions governing our artistic ambitions and judgement. This is in no way counterintuitive since empiricism – in its appraisal of our mortality and finitude – also renders the question of everything that is mysterious and beautiful in life more complex and analytical. With this spirit we dedicate the current issue of our journal.

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Editor-in-Chief

Aesthetic Experience as Temporary Relief from Suffering: Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and Mu Qui’s Six Persimmons

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Tony Lack, Jefferson College, Roanoke, Virginia, USA

Abstract

Assesses the relationship between Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of art and aesthetic principles derived from Buddhism. Begins with an overview of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and its relationship to his aesthetic theory.Develops closer analysis of Schopenhauer’s theory of art, placing emphasis on the relationship between aesthetic experience and relief from suffering.Continues with analysis of the convergence between Schopenhauerian and Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics. Concludes with an interpretation of Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons, ink on paper,13th century China.

Introduction

This article assesses the relationship between Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of art, as adumbrated in The World as Will and Representation (1818) and related aesthetic principles derived from Buddhism. It begins with an overview of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and its relationship to his aesthetic theory. This is followed by a closer analysis of Schopenhauer’s theory of art, with special emphasis on the relationship between art and redemption. The convergence of central aesthetic principles in Schopenhauer’s and Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics is then discussed before turning to an interpretation of Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons, Ink on Paper, from13th century China.

Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic Theory

The World as Pure Idea: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy and Aesthetics: The World as Will and Representation is divided into four sections.Each section has a distinctive focus. The best way to begin an overview of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art is to explain the content of these sections.

            In section one, Schopenhauer develops an analysis of what his predecessor, Immanuel Kant, had called the world of phenomena. The phenomenal world is the world as we know it, constituted in terms of space, time, cause, substance, and so forth. This is the world of representation in Schopenhauer’s idiom.

            In the second section, Schopenhauer discusses Kant’s noumenal world or the world of things-in-themselves. Kant had claimed that this world was unknowable, a question mark. Schopenhauer argued that the Kantian thing-in-itself was pure will. He suggested that we do have access to this world of will, the deeper reality. When I exercise my individual will, I catch a glimpse of the primordial will as it operates through me. When, for example, I raise my arm, I gain crude access to the primordial will through my bodily action. However, this access is not something to be celebrated, because, as we shall see, the will that manifests itself in our actions is desire, a relentless striving for satisfaction that can never be sated. For this reason, everyday access to the will is a type of suffering, experienced as endless dissatisfaction which can be alleviated by aesthetic experiences.

            In the third section of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer discusses art. For Schopenhauer, art has a redemptive quality. Art can provide an escape from the suffering caused by the relentless drive of the will. The contemplation of art provides us with a pure experience, devoid of desire and hence devoid of the dissatisfaction created by the will.

            Schopenhauer concludes on a pessimistic note. Although it may be true that art can rescue us from the clutches of will, this is only a temporary fix. Aesthetic contemplation must eventually end, and when it does, the restless will reasserts itself with a vengeance. The only solution to human suffering is asceticism, the mastery of desire. With this brief summary in mind, I will trace out the argument in The World as Will and Representation more carefully.

When Schopenhauer claims, “The world is my idea”,[1] he means to suggest that the world that we know, the Kantian world of phenomena, is no more and no less than representation. The world that I come to know is a world that I have created. I have created it through the constitutive action of my mind. I can only know the world as it appears to my mind, and therefore as it appears under the mental conditions of time, space, number, cause, substance, and so forth. I do not have immediate access to the world as it really is; I only know my mental representations. The world that I have created operates according to several principles. First, Schopenhauer claims that the world of representations is a world defined according to the principium individuationis, the division of the will into particulars of time and space that create the illusion of discrete individual entities and persons.[2] The world as representation is also a world that operates according to the principle of sufficient reason.

“The will as a thing in itself is quite different from its phenomenal appearance, and entirely free from all the forms of the phenomenal, into which it first passes when it manifests itself, and which therefore only concern its objectivity, and are foreign to the will itself. Even the most universal form of all idea, that of being object for a subject, does not concern it; still less the forms which are subordinate to this and which collectively have their common expression in the principle of sufficient reason, to which we know that time and space belong, and consequently multiplicity also, which exists and is possible only through these . . . According to what has been said, the will as a thing-in-itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms, and is consequently completely groundless, although all its manifestations are entirely subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason. Further, it is free from all multiplicity, although its manifestations in time and space are innumerable. It is itself one, though not in the sense in which an object is one, for the unity of an object can only be known in opposition to a possible multiplicity; nor yet in the sense in which a concept is one, for the unity of a concept originates only in abstraction from a multiplicity; but it is one as that which lies outside time and space, the principium individuationis, i.e., the possibility of multiplicity.”[3]

            As the individual comes into being and passes away it exists only as a series of phenomena, existing only for knowledge generated by the principle of sufficient reason, in the principium individuationis. In terms of this knowledge and the experiential awareness generated by it, the individual receives his life as a gift, rises out of nothing, suffers the loss of the gift through death, and returns to nothing.

            From a different frame of reference, that of science, there is a reason behind every individual thing that exists in the world of representations. There is no freedom in nature. There is no freedom in human behavior either. Our behavior is caused by our biology, our past, our social situation, and our character. We have the illusion of freedom, but pure freedom does not exist in the world of representation. The world of representation is a law-like world, a mechanistic world. It is Kant’s world of phenomena and natural laws.

            On the other hand, the world of will is similar to an all-encompassing fountain from which all of reality flows. This is Schopenhauer’s way of modifying Kant’s noumenal realm via a retrieval of the ancient idea of emanation. The will is a life-giving, form-producing, eternal source, conceived of in somewhat sexual terms. The phenomenal world is then seen as the formal manifestation of this life-giving force.

“We have therefore called the phenomenal world the mirror, the objectivity, of the will; and as what the will wills is always life, just because this is nothing but the presentation of that willing for the representation, it is immaterial and a mere pleonasm if, instead of simply saying “the will,” we say “the will-to-live.”[4]

            The will is an indivisible whole, best understood as a process, not a collection of things. As will endlessly actualizes itself; it pours itself into the differentiated forms that we, on the other side of the veil created by the limitations of our mind, grasp as reality. What we grasp and perceive is all illusion. We see our desires as individual, indeed we see ourselves as individuated, but we are nothing more than manifestations of one outpouring of will, a continual, restless, life-giving, process that shapes the reality that we know.

            Art has a privileged place in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The contemplation of a work of art allows us to escape temporarily from the relentless process of willing that inevitably draws us back down. When we contemplate a work of art, we set aside our practical concerns and assume a disinterested posture. We get lost in contemplation. Beautiful objects or experiences in nature can jolt us out of our endless dissatisfaction.

[1] Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Colorado: Indian Hill, 1958, p. 1.

[2] Ibid: 23

[3] Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Colorado: Indian Hill, 1958, p. 146.

[4] Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Colorado: Indian Hill, 1958, p. 45

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Network Theory and Its Applications in Arts Practice and History of Arts

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Miguel Ángel Medina, University of Málaga (Spain)

Abstract

Networks pervade our world. Network theory is currently applied to different social, humanistic and natural sciences. The concept of network and the theory behind it have enormous potential of useful application in both art research and art practice. This article provides historical backgrounds of network sciences and reviews some relevant applications in arts.

  1. Introduction

These first years of the XXIst Century have known the development and explosion of the science of networks. The birth and expansion of technological tools has contributed to popularize the term “social network”, as shown by the successful paradigms of facebook and twitter. But the concept of social network is not new at all. In fact, what else is a group of friends, or a family, or a neighborhood? Furthermore, evidence clearly shows that in our world there are networks everywhere, not only man-made technological networks (as those of internet), but also natural networks. At all the scales, from the molecular to the cosmic level, natural systems organized as networks can be identified. This is the case of interacting protein networks (interactomes), metabolic and biosignaling networks, ecological networks (including food webs), and even the diffuse network connecting matter in the universe. Thus, in few years we have become aware that there are networks pervading everywhere and that these networks bring everything surprisingly very close to each other. In this point, a number of questions arise: What is a network? What have all the networks in common (if anything)? What are the main rules and general principles of organization and evolution of networks? And what have network to do with arts? To provide answers to these questions, it could be advisable to go backwards to the historical backgrounds of modern science of networks.

  1. Historical background and some key concepts

It is widely accepted that the earliest precedent of modern network science goes back to the XVIIIth Century, and in concrete to the most productive mathematician in the history of mathematics, namely, Leonard Euler, who laid the conceptual bases of the scientific study of networks with the formulation of graph theory. Euler founded this new branch of mathematics when he solved for the first time the famous problem of Königsberg’s bridges in 1735, at the age of 28. The city of Königsberg (currently, Kaliningrad in Russia) is set on both side of the Pregel river and included two islands connected to each other and to the mainland by seven bridges. The problem was to find a walk through the city that would cross each bridge once and only once. Euler managed to solve this problem by making an abstraction of the concrete situation (Biggs, Lloyd & Wilson, 1999; Euler, 1913), identifying each position as a point or node and each direct way connecting two positions as a line or edge. Modern network science also represents networks as graphs consisting of nodes and edges. A second essential background is related to the second most prolific mathematician in the whole history of mathematics, namely, Paul Erdös, who in cooperation with Alfred Renyi introduced the new mathematical theory of random networks in 1959 along eight specialized articles mentioned in (Graha, & Nesetril, 1996).

A network is any system that can be abstracted and depicted in the form of a graph in the terms introduced by Euler. Hence, any network is composed of two subsets of elements: n nodes and m edges connecting nodes. For a primer on concepts, principles and rules of network science see (Newman, 2010). Irrespectively of their nature, networks can be described by their topological features; among them their degree and length. The degree of a node in a graph is the number of edges connected to it. In random networks, the connections among nodes are established randomly, giving rise to an average degree of the network with little standard deviation. In a graph, two nodes can be connected with a number of paths and the length of a path is the number of intermediate nodes in this path. A geodesic path (or shortest path) is a path between two nodes such that no shorter path exists between them. The diameter of a graph is the length of the longest geodesic path between any pair of nodes in the network for which a path actually exists. In random networks, the diameter varies with the number n of nodes as ln n. The number of independent paths between a pair of nodes is called their connectivity. This can be thought of as a measure of how strongly connected those nodes are.

In spite of the interest of random networks, many (and the most interesting) real networks are not random. This fact postponed the scientific exploration and analysis of real networks for years. In fact, technological and natural networks only began to be studied within the framework of network science from the nineties on. In this point, it is noteworthy that the first influential scientific studies of real networks were not carried out in any of the natural sciences but in the social sciences. The first one was the experiment and study on the so-called “small-world problem” carried out by the psychosociologist Stanley Milgram (Milgram, 1967). This study, inspired by the popular expression “it’s a small world”, followed the path started by Ithiel de Sola Pool’s group at MIT, who empirically studied the structure of social networks in the early sixties. The graduate student Michael Gurevich conducted this study under the supervision of de Sola. This work yielded the PhD dissertation “The Social Structure of Acquaintanceship Networks”, which was later further formalized in mathematical terms by Manfred Kochen in a study that only was published in 1978, many years after the actual moment in which it was carried out (de Sola Pool & Kochen, 1978). In his popular 1967 paper, Milgram describes two parallel experiments designed and carried out to give an answer to the question: “How many intermediaries are there connecting two distant, randomly selected persons in the USA in an acquaintance chain?” In Milgram’s study, chain varied from 2 to 10 intermediate acquaintances with the median value at five. Surprisingly, this median value had been envisioned by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in 1929. Karinthy was convinced that technological advances in communications and travel was contributing to make friendship networks grow larger and span greater distances, thus giving rise to an ever-increasing connectedness of human beings in an shrinking world. This idea is exposed in his brief history “Chain-Links” (Karinthy, 1929), contained in the short stories’ volume “Everything is Different” (1929). The quotation from this short story (translated into English) is as follows…Access Full Text of the Article

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Breaking Post-modernism: The Effects of Technology and Writing Programmes on Contemporary Literature

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Amanda M. Bigler, Loughborough University

Abstract

The paper explores the relationship between post-modern literature and contemporary literature after the expansion of the technological age. Through the effects of technology, such as the internet, the subject matter and the overall tone of literary fiction has made a departure from post-modern literature. Post-modernism is seen as a reaction to the end of World War II and the persistence of the Cold War, which creates a different socio-political atmosphere than in the contemporary era. The technological influences on contemporary literature encompass the growing inclusion of a globalised voice and an understanding and curiosity of other cultures that can be expressed through works of fiction. The writing programmes within the academic setting have also influenced the contemporary writer’s relationship with the post-modern texts often consulted in the programmes. Because students react to the post-modern tone and writing style, they have created a post-post-modern attitude towards writing fiction.

[Keywords: Post-modern, contemporary literature, contemporary fiction, creative writing programmes, technology and literature]

Introduction

The differentiation between post-modernism and contemporary literature is vital to the literary community. By looking at contemporary works, academic journals, and the influence of technology and writing programmes on writers’ perspectives, one perceives a significant difference between the post-modern literature movement and the contemporary literature writing forms today. As well as the technological influence on contemporary literature, the way in which budding authors are taught in an academic setting has also impacted the voice of the contemporary author. As many contemporary writers today have taken either coursework in creative writing or have pursued degrees in literature and creative writing, the academic setting of the classroom must be taken into account when studying contemporary works. The rise of creative writing programmes both in the United States and within the United Kingdom have impacted writers both by exposure to post-modern works and by working on self-reflection as well as taking in the opinions of peers.

Works of, for example, Vladimir Nabokov versus the works of David Foster Wallace show some of the gaps between post-modern literature and contemporary literature. The influences of post-modern writers vary greatly from those of contemporary writers. Nabokov’s Lolita focuses on the inward struggle of the protagonist and the narcissistic nature of obsession; David Foster Wallace’s lengthy novel, Infinite Jest, includes numerous main characters (Hal Incandenza, Remy Marathe, John Wayne, Michael Pemulis, Don Gately, etc.), three separate locations and backgrounds of the characters, and an interweaving plot between the characters that allow the reader to experience multiple points-of-view by refusing to alienate the audience. Researchers and critics have commented on the narrow viewpoint that Lolita encompasses, and, as Kasia Boddy points out, “since Lolita was published in 1955, many have agonized over the fact that his eponymous heroine had neither much of a life nor, in Humbert Humbert’s hands, much of a literary memorial,” (Boddy 2008: 165). This single-minded need of Nabokov to indulge the reader in only Humbert’s thoughts and emotions, and by depicting Lolita as literally incompetent, is testament to the post-modern tendency to absorb the work in the self. This self, often loosely attached to the musings and struggles of the author, outshines the other characters and often renders the other players as one-dimensional. This is due to the emphasis on the protagonist’s opinions and conflicts, and deters the work from delving into other viewpoints that would divorce the work from an often egocentric frame of reference.

David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, has broken away from the post-modern notion of self-reflection in support of using multiple character points-of-view to create an all-encompassing narrative that veers from the ego of the protagonist into a patchwork of differing voices. He swiftly and abruptly moves from one character to another in often jarring segues. As Timothy Aubry notes, “when [Wallace] interrupts the progression of the narrative, rendering it all the more compelling, Wallace highlights the fact that plots are often propelled, or at least enhanced, by efforts to suspend them, and he exposes a similar pattern in addiction… Addiction and metafiction (sic), then, turn out to be peculiarly resonant,” (Aubry 2008: 209). This literary device of diverting the reader from one plot to another is prevalent in contemporary literature in response to the often linear progression of post-modern works. By challenging the reader to abandon one character for another, Wallace is able to create an environment in which multiple viewpoints can be explored and understood. This understanding and study of differing characters allows the work to foster an open foray into empathising with varying scenarios and developments that is not easily created in single-protagonist centred works of post-modern fiction.

Many contemporary writers utilise multiple viewpoints in order to create a broader and more encompassing experience for the reader. As stated above, creating multiple protagonists allows the reader to empathise with different persons and world views. Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, John Barth, and Zadie Smith, amongst others, have worked with incorporating this style in order to challenge, involve, and intrigue the reader. McLaughlin states that “in the movement into the twenty-first century [literature] has learned to adapt post-modern techniques of subversion for its own purposes [by] constructing ‘realities’ from multiple narratives,” (McLaughlin 2013: 289). The multiple narrative literary device is only one example of the contemporary movement to connect with the reader and forego the often cynical and alienating tone of post-modern fiction. Robert McLaughlin reminds the literary community, “David Foster Wallace, for one, argued that the post-modernists of the 1960s made good use of irony for tipping various sacred cows, but at the end of the century, when all sacred cows have been tipped, irony leaves us caught inside a self-referring trap, unable to assert any belief, unable to connect with others, unable to make a new world,” (McLaughlin 2013: 285). This “tipping of cows,” as it were, is necessary to bring cultural issues to light, but (somewhat ironically) by relying solely on irony, an alienation of those within said culture is evident. An example of this depressing and empty irony can be found in Don DeLillo’s White Noise when Jack states, “No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die,” (DeLillo 1985: 20). This quote encapsulates both the self-absorption in the protagonist in regards to the “animals” around him, and the unrelenting use of irony to push others away…Access Full Text of the Article

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Rupturing the ‘political’: Socialist-Utopian Performatives in Satyajit Ray’s Seemabadhha (Company Limited)

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Dwaipayan Chowdhury, University of Amsterdam

Abstract

The article delves into Satyajit Ray’s film Seemabadhha (1971), as a pamphlet for social critique in the politically turbulent decade of 1970s Calcutta, with the aim to decipher the possibilities of the socialist-utopia it carries.[1] The focus will be on the politics of Ray’s film aesthetics that project the vision of socialist-utopia on the audience community and predicate an emancipatory potential for the future. In doing so, the focus will be on the film’s aesthetics that rupture the fortified notion of the ‘political’ and catalyse a process of mobilisation through the redistribution of the sensory experiences.[2] By socialist-utopian performatives, I mean – those performative nuances contained in the sensory registers of the medium of film, which crystallises hope for a more just future. The ethical-intellectual drive in Seemabadhha does not let the audience (the social agent) remain shrouded in pure contemplation. Instead, the audience becomes the active community, who see the representations of “configurations”[3] in the cinematic space with an immanent quality of approaching a fulfilment, which forms the basis of what should come, which is, the emancipatory promise generated by the socialist-utopia.

Seemabadhha stands out in the entire Ray repertoire for it spells out the paradox, in vivid detail, of the post-independence Indian civil society by portraying the dialectics inherent in its construction, from the perspective of the urban white-collared middle class, which is completely absorbed by the State, so much so that it snatches from this class its identity.[4]It is through this dialectics that Ray challenges the “aggregation” of the history of post-independence India.[5] Ray’s aesthetics in Seemabadhhastands out in its disagreement with the homogenous linear model of development of the Nehruvian socialist dream and are manifested in the film through various devices such as- acting strategies, camera positioning and sharp cuts.

Ray’s Seemabadha and the other two films of the Calcutta trilogy, were representative of the conception of a decade marked by exponentially growing rates of economic investments from the Western countries in India, increasing expenditures on the processes of militarisation, public announcements of growing antagonisms across international boundaries, unemployment, inflation, failure or exceptional delay in implementation of government policies. The decade of the 1970s were part of the process of a massive democratic impulse in West Bengal, which had seen a recent large-scale peasant uprising in Naxalbari in 1967.[6] The collapse of the movement resulted in further fractures within the Indian left. Such disjunctures within the left democratic movement on the one hand, and on the other hand, the anticipations of massive political upheavals provided the backdrop to Ray’s Seemabadhha, which has to be seen within the larger process of the democratic cultural mobilisation of the decade. However, my study here is concerned withthe subversive impulses that the film generates,contextualising it within the ambit of socialist-utopia, pertaining to specific moments in the film.

            Here one must deal with the concept of utopia as a paradox. Firstly, it negates its own possibility. Secondly, and most importantly, out of its self-negation it becomes discontent with the ‘here-and-now,’[7]thus initiating a promise of material change. It is in the constant reiteration of utopia that the emancipatory potential of humankind is strengthened. It needs to be mentioned that, this article does not deal with the concept of socialist-utopia within the purview of “The utopian socialists” of the early nineteenth century Europe. Nor, is utopia here associated with the narcissistic view of the private individual.[8] My enquiry is to look at socialist-utopia through the notion of emancipation in the Marxist-Leninist trajectory.[9]

Rolling, Camera, Action

Seemabadhha opens with the shot of the employment exchange in Calcutta. We see the long shots of the youths stranded on the roadside sitting idly on the stairs of the pavements, or with applications forms they are filling up to get their names registered in the exchange in front of the closed doors of the colossal buildings. All the while, we hear the honks of the roadside vehicles, which whizzes past the screen on the horizontal axis thereby hindering the sight of the stranded youths momentarily. From the beginning, Ray harps on the invisibility of a large section of the populace. This is contrasted with the close-up shot of a high-rise in the city, from where the camera is zoomed out at a massive diagonal towards the audience. The spatiality of the audience here coincides with the street view of tall high-rises as is seen by the pedestrians. We then go inside the building and observe the name of the company limited. A close up of a hand is seen, cleaning the nameplate with the words written on it which reads as follows.

[1]The English title to film was given as Company Limited. It was the film rendition of the novel by Bengali writer Mani Shankar Mukherjee of the same name, who adopted the pen name Shankar. However, this article only deals with the film version.

[2]   By “fortified notion of the ‘political’ I connote to the concept of police through which the transformative potential of the political society is thwarted by imposition of stringent structures by the State. The politics of the private individual are negated in favour of a ‘political’ determined by public visibility that places the concept itself in the public sphere regulated in and by a civil society absorbed by the State.

[3]   Jill Dolan in “Utopia in Performance” (2005).

[4]   This dialectics is the confrontation of the politics of the police which I refer to as the ‘political’ which is ruptured by Seemabadhha, and the politics of the “autonomous domain”. (Guha 2005).

[5]RanajitGuha in “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” (2005).

[6] The Naxalbari movement was a massive peasant insurgency in the northern part of West Bengal.

[7] Madhava Prasad in “Satyajit Ray: A revaluation” Economic & Political Weekly (January 19, 2008).

[8] Ruth Levitas in “The Concept of Utopia” (2010). By the nineteenth century “utopian socialists” in Europe I mean here Levitas’s reference of Saint-Simon in France, who envisioned a more just society by the “harmony” of “three human types”, namely the “scientists, artists, and producers”, Charles Fourier, also in France who schematised a just social structure in terms of “harmonious community” by deriving “810 different temperaments” of humans, and Robert Owen of England who tried to solve unemployment by planning the “model factory at New Lanark”.

[9] V.I. Lenin in “State and Revolution: Marxist teaching about the theory of the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution” in 1978. Lenin forwarded the concept of Marx’s dialectics by conducting revolutionary class struggles in the domain of emancipation which firstly implies the proletarian takeover of the bourgeoisie state followed by the abolition of the concept of state resulting in the formation of socialist communities.

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Political Propaganda in the Feature Film Industries of Nazi Germany and Maoist China

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James D. Decker, Middle Georgia State College & Patrick S. Brennan, Middle Georgia State College

Abstract

This interdisciplinary paper examines important similarities and differences in the way that Maoist China and Nazi Germany used political propaganda in their national feature-film industries. The first of part of this paper examines the film industry in the People’s Republic of China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. The Chinese communist regime used the power of film to perpetuate communist themes and to educate the masses about the heroic nature of the Chinese revolutionaries and Marxism. Mao believed through popular film the Chinese Communist Party could educate, entertain, and indoctrinate the Chinese population and could ferret out capitalist and bourgeois elements which he believed were infiltrating Chinese society. The second case study examines how Kolberg (1945), the very last feature film released in Nazi Germany, communicates key elements of Nazi ideology: the Leadership Principle, the celebration of Blood and Soil, and the call for total war, especially as expressed by Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in his 1943 “Total War Address.”Kolberg demonstrates both the power of Nazi political propaganda and its limitations as a political tool.

The twentieth century saw a marked increase in totalitarian states. These states, in seekingcomplete control of their populations, each deployed what the French Marxist Philosopher Louis Althusser has termed Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses. According to Althusser (1971/2009), a Repressive State Apparatus controls the populace through physical violence and threats. It contains such institutions as “the Army, the Police, the Courts, and the Prisons” (p. 302). The Ideological State Apparatus controls the populace through ideology. It relies on private institutions, such as family structures, churches, political parties, and communications industries, to represent “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser, 1971/2009, p. 304). The boundaries between the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatus are somewhat porous. The Repressive State Apparatus relies on some form of ideology for its structure, and the Ideological State Apparatus relies on some form of violence for its implementation. Still, it is the Ideological State Apparatus that offers citizens a sense of belonging and purpose. It recruits the people’s active participation in the state’s goals by constructing and proposing imaginary relationships between them and the state. In the twentieth century, an important tool of any state’s Ideological State Apparatus was its film industry. This paper will examine how two of twentieth century’s most repressive totalitarian regimes, Maoist China and the Third Reich, deployed their national feature film industries as propaganda tools, which aimed to spur their citizens to support the state’s ideological goals.

Maoist China

In May of 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong launched The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Its stated goal was to enforce communism in the country by removing capitalist, traditional and cultural elements from Chinese society, and to impose Maoist orthodoxy within the Chinese Communist Party. During the years from 1966 to 1976, this movement became the biggest non-wartime concentrated social and political upheaval in world history. Following Mao’s edicts, a nation of over 800 million responded to the whims of one man to purge the country of noncommunist, revisionist thought and art (Clark, 2008).

The revolution marked the return of Mao Zedong to a position of power after the failed Great Leap Forward. The movement paralyzed China politically and significantly affected the country economically and socially. Millions of people were persecuted in the violent factional struggles that ensued across the country, and suffered a wide range of abuses including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sustained harassment, and seizure of property. A large segment of the population was forcibly displaced, most notably the transfer of urban youth to rural regions during the Down to the Countryside Movement. Historical relics and artifacts were destroyed. Cultural and religious sites were ransacked (Tsou, 1986; Dreyer, 2000).

The success or failure of communist regimes to transform the attitudes and behavior of populations is an apt example of the use of propaganda within the wider application of political culture theory. Gabriel A. Almond (1983) proposed that political culture theory ascribes some importance to political attitudes, beliefs, values, and emotions in the explanation of political, structural, and behavioral phenomena such as national cohesion, patterns of mass cleavage, modes of dealing with political conflict, the extent and level of political participation, and the compliance with authority. The communist experience has been particularly important as an approach to studying propaganda and political culture theory application because from one point of view it represents a genuine effort to “falsify” it. The attitudes that communist regimes encounter where they seize power are often viewed as false consciousness, which may include nationalism, religious belief systems, ethnic subcultural propensities, or economic views. These attitudes have been viewed as the consequences of preexisting class structure and the underlying mode of production, which are transmitted by the associated agents of indoctrination. Communist movements/regimes seek to eliminate or to undermine the legitimacy of these preexisting processes and frameworks and replace them with a new and thoroughly penetrative set. The goal is to reshape the society and transform the thinking of its citizens toward a new paradigm of education and actions.

According to Dittmer (1977), one of the main purposes of the Cultural Revolution was to change the people’s ways of thinking and relating to one another, a pragmatic objective concerning the trinary relationship among elites, masses, and the target to which considerations of political theory and propaganda were focused. By drawing attention of the masses to the target’s deviation from the norm, and by dramatizing that deviation by means of exaggerated contentious symbolism, the elites sought to persuade the masses to embrace and incorporate the norms. Another benefit was to permit the masses to displace regressed negative emotions against the target. This allowed elites to seek enhancement of solidarity within the community and increase the masses’ support and commitment to the societal norms. The implications of this propagandistic process for the target were that that he should rectify his deviation through self-criticism and reintegrate himself within society. In the end, the target may hope to atone for his sins and become a model of the type of moral transformation expected by the masses…Access Full Text of the Article

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

De-Essentialising Indigeneity: Locating Hybridity in Variously Indigenous Performative Texts

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Sibendu Chakraborty, Rabin Mukherjee College, Kolkata                

Abstract

Australian Indigenous literature in general and theatre in particular has been found to chart a trajectory of self-reflexivity. What I mean to show in this paper is this sense of inherent scepticism which indigenous theatre unfolds in course of its identity formations. The politics of inclusivity and ‘othering’ that regulate the domain of identity formations seem to stereotype essentialised identity around specific fantasies of exclusivity, cultural alterity, marginality, physicality and morality. The articulation and representations of full blooded Aborigines, half-castes and other successive generations of culturally diluted Aborigines problemetises the notion of indigeneity resulting in a complex interplay of inter-racial, socio-political, economic and cultural dialog. Thus Aboriginal theatre often grapples with these crosscurrents of diversity of identity formations along essentialised and hybrid representations of Aborigines. By decoupling indigeneity from certain fixed phenotypical traits I seek to uncover the hybridity of indigeneity as articulated through variously indigenous performative texts.

Key Words: stereotype, cultural alterity, Aboriginal theatre, hybridity, de-essentialising indigeneity, performative texts

“The continual questioning of who we really are is the essence of Australian nationalism.”

(Lattas 1990: 54)[1]

 

“It seems to me, then, that generalizations about Aboriginal literary discourse must be grounded in a reading of individual Aboriginal (inter)texts which will reveal their destination, their less or greater openness, in terms either of an interethnic or of an intraethnic dialogue.”

(Riemenschneider 1997: 177)[2]

Australian history writes itself into performance by utilising the double narrative threads of inclusion and exclusion, attraction and repulsion, idealisation and marginalisation. To contextualise its relevance to the notion of the Derridean ‘difference’ we need to scrutinise the essential ambiguities that accompanies the nation-building endeavour. The dominant trope of politically, culturally, economically marginalising the Aborigines by imposing on them a supposed tag of inferiority and inconformity is counter balanced by a corresponding ideology of identifying them as timeless and spiritually dominant or sacred. Hence, “white Australians displace Aboriginal cultures and bestow on themselves an antiquity and historical past which their recent arrival and colonial status precludes” (Dibble and Macintyre 1992: 93). This essentialist strategy of demeaning the Aborigines on one hand and simultaneously qualifying them for homogenous sacred affiliations on the other opens up spaces for critical attention and subsequently loads the discourse with an indulgence of looking for crosscurrents that might somehow tilt the balance towards ‘hybridity’. What I mean to show in my paper is this subtle interplay of discursive strategies which while making way for one kind of ideology engages itself in a performative gesture of articulating another range of essentialist interpretation.

Negotiating Indigeneity and Postcoloniality

Vitally connected to this issue of double narrative is the presence and application of rituals which directly or tangentially make theatre presentational, representational or manifestational. (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 55-60) The reception of Aboriginal theatre cuts across such diverse anticipations of actor-audience relationship expanding or contracting the gap to adapt itself to the desired mode of dramaturgy. But before going into all those details let us look at the term ‘indigenous’ to locate its significance in the discourse of Aboriginal performativity. The adjective ‘indigenous’ has the noun form, ‘indigines’ taken from the Latin ‘indigenus’ denoting “‘born in’, ‘native to’” (Hodge and Mishra 1990: 25). Hodge and Mishra go on to mention that “[m]any Aborigines prefer one of the names from heir own languages, Koori, Murri, Nyoongar, names which signify the plurality of nations of the Aboriginal people. In Australia the coloniser’s name concedes the whole case: the white ‘bastards’[3] do not after all try to deny the priority of Aboriginal rights” (1990: 25). Kevin Gilbert grappling with this task of defining Aboriginality notes:

But what is Aboriginality? Is it being tribal? Who is an Aboriginal? Is he or she someone who feels that other Aboriginals were somewhat dirty, lazy, drunken, bludging? Is an Aboriginal anyone who has some degree of Aboriginal blood in his or her veins and who has demonstrably been disadvantaged by that? Or is an Aboriginal someone who has had the reserve experience? Is Aboriginality institutionalised gutlessness, an acceptance of the label ‘the most powerless people on earth’? Or is Aboriginality, when all the definitions have been exhausted a yearning for a different way of being, a wholeness that was presumed to have existed [before 1788]? (1978: 184)[4]

Indigenous identity in the twenty-first century might be strategically divided into ‘Indigenous One’ and ‘Indigenous Two’. Richard Borshay Lee makes critical elucidation while he notes

[1] Quoted in Brian Dibble and Margaret Macintyre 1992. ‘Hybridity in Jack Davis’s No Sugar’ Westerly 37(4): 93.

[2] See Dieter Riemenschneider. 1997 ‘Aboriginal Literary Discourses and Australian Literature’, Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia (Cross cultures 28; Amsterdam: Rodopi). 177.

[3] See Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra 1990 ‘The Bastard Complex’ in Dark Side of the Dream, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, pp. 23-49. Hodge and Mishra notes that: “The complexities of what is at issue here can be seen in the curious of the word ‘bastard’ in Australian male colloquial speech. …but it can also express high solidarity between male ‘mates’ … It is the solidary meaning which is most worthy of note, because it is this usage that is definitionally Australian: only a true mate can call his ‘mate’ a ‘bastard’” (23).

[4] See Adam Shoemaker 2004 ‘Aboriginality and Black Australian Drama’ in Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988, ANU E Press, doi: <http://epress.anu.edu.au/bwwp/pdf_instructions.html>

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

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