Vol 5 No 3 - Page 2

Canonical Values vs. the Law of Large Numbers: The Canadian Literary Canon in the Age of Big Data

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

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 Abstract

In this article, I propose an alternative technique to the traditional method of constitution of the literary canon. Instead of basing the determination of the canon on different values, I scrutinize the Modern Language Association International Bibliography database in order to determine the most cited authors and literary works. Specifically, I study Canadian literature. Thus, through the process of data mining, I obtain a sample of over 25,000 references that allows us to observe the chronological evolution and the linguistic distribution of the critical bibliography about Canadian literature. This quantitative technique yields a corpus of 151 titles and 295 writers that are cited more than 10 times in the database. Consequently, this bibliography is not the result of subjective selection criteria, but is based on the law of large numbers. Furthermore, this study shows that the quantitative analysis of bibliographic databases is an effective way to bring new light to the field of literary studies. Keep Reading

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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

Clothes Make the (Wo)Man: Eighteenth-Century Materialism and the Creation of the Female Subject

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Aubrey L. C. Mishou, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland

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 Abstract

At once controversial for the change in their construction, and useful in terms of creation the female shape and subject, women’s clothing comes to play a large role in the creation of the female subject in eighteenth-century English novels.  Female authors and clothing manufacturers alike utilize the subject of clothing in order to create an autonomous space for the female body.  By manipulating the means through which their body may be read (i.e. through clothing and undergarments), women gain a kind of power that reflects their emerging status as consumers and individuals. “Clothes Make the (Wo)Man,” argues that authors such as Lady Montague and Samuel Richardson utilize the theme of female clothing to both confirm the rising social and capitalist power of the female figure in the eighteenth-century marketplace, and reduce this rising female to the subjectivity of her clothing in order to situate her under patriarchal economical control, respectively. Keep Reading

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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

Confused Reality: The War Masks in Japanese Author, Hikaru Okuizumi’s The Stones Cry Out and Argentine Author, Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”

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Rachel McCoppin, University of Minnesota Crookston

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Carl Jung connects the idea that the mask is the persona one presents to the world; “the persona acts…to conceal the true nature of the individual.  It is a social role or mask which acts as a mediator between the inner world and the social world, and which constitutes the compromise between the individual and society” (Hudson 54).  The concept of the mask as persona is common in literature, and global modernity is no exception.  Oftentimes characters are so enveloped within false or unreliable personas that they fool and confuse the reader.  The masks they wear serves as a front to society and the characters they interact with, but sometimes characters are so effectively masked that they become unclear of their own realities, and become unreliable narrators.  Keep Reading

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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

The Importance of Being Postmodern: Oscar Wilde and the Untimely

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Jonathan Kemp, Birkbeck College, University of London
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“It is to criticism that the future belongs”

– Oscar Wilde[1]

 “In protesting the independence of criticism,

Wilde sounds like an ancestral …Roland Barthes”

– Richard Ellmann[2]

 “Postmodern is not to be taken in the periodizing sense”

– Jean-François Lyotard[3]

 The above three quotations delineate the typography of a particular trajectory within literary theory which covers more or less the entire span of the twentieth century.  Wilde’s prediction in 1891 seems to find its answer in Lyotard’s claim less than a hundred years later that postmodernism must not in any way be understood as a temporal marker, but rather as an aesthetic attitude or position.  For, if we are ‘in’ the postmodern we are in it precisely because we always already inhabit the possibility of its recognition, presentation or expression.  As such, texts or artworks that predate the critical emergence of the term can nevertheless be understood to be postmodern – and usefully so.  For it gives us permission to name, once again, though differently, perhaps, a particular phenomenon, or a particular convergence of phenomena; one we most typically name the avant garde.  In this essay I would like to use the above three quotations as markers for the trajectory of my argument.  In this sense, I will be using Wilde and Lyotard as both meetings points and end points for an arc that loops around to create a circuit, or a band, upon which – or within which – we might usefully place the concept of the postmodern/avant garde in ways which will shed light upon the notion of the untimely.  I would suggest that the postmodern and the untimely are, in short, other ways of naming and apprehending the avant garde as that which emerges without consensus, but which contains within it the criteria for its own assessment.  As Ellmann comments, Wilde seems, in his formulation of a new kind of art-criticism, to express something that Roland Barthes would develop sixty odd years later[4]: the self-sufficiency of criticism as an end in itself, or as a new form of aesthetic expression.  In this sense, Wilde’s work will be understood as posthumous, or untimely.[5]  That is, avant garde. Keep Reading

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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

The Concept of Crisis in Art and Science

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Eleni Gemtou,  University of Athens, Greece

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Abstract

The concept of crisis in art and science is to be investigated through two approaches: a historical-sociological and a philosophical-ontological one. In the framework of the historical-sociological approach, the crisis that has been affecting both the scientific and the artistic community, has been due to external sociological causes or to the psychological inabilities and personal ambitions of their members. The traditional notions of pure science and high value-laden art have been often neglected, as both scientists and artists deviated from the ideal principles of their working codes. This approach reveals common structures and behaviors in human communities, independent from the differences in subjects, methodologies and purposes they serve. The philosophical–ontological approach to art and science and to the course of their development leads, however, to the opposite conclusion: both art and science as rational systems are incompatible with the concept of crisis due to different reasons in each case. Keep Reading

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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

Practice, Performance and the Performer : Analyzing the role of ‘Preparation’ in Kathak Dance

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Shruti Ghosh, Macquarie University, Sydney

 Yatohastostatodrishtiryato, Drishtitatomana

Yatomanatatobhava, Yatobhavatato rasa

Tatradwabhnayaseba, Pradhaanmitikathyake

(Where the hand goes  the eyes follow, where the eyes go the mind follows, where the mind goes there is feeling, where there is feeling there is emotion)

 Introduction

 This is one of those popular slokas from Natya Sastra [ii] that is oft repeated by the teachers, students and practitioners of Indian classical dance. It is one of those quintessential imperatives that are drilled into the minds of the performers in course of their training. Interrogating the instant reception and popularity of the sloka, I notice its efficacy perhaps lies in its prescriptive tone through which it spells out certain ‘know how s’ about Nritya or acting in dance and indicates how to prepare oneself for acting. Our understanding of the nuances of the sloka would be limited if we consider only the component of acting. I shall therefore also include in my discussion, the other aspect i.e. Nritta, which refers to the abstract dance movements.  How do I prepare myself as a Kathak dancer is the question I have often asked. What do I prepare and for whom? In an attempt to address these questions, this paper analyses the role of ‘preparation’ in a dance practice. There are two crucial components which form part of preparation – ‘dancer’s individual preparation’ and ‘audience reception’. I note further that, an interrogation of the concept of ‘preparation’ also yields varying understanding of ‘Performance’. Keep Reading

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The Portability of Indianness: Some Propositions

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Pramod K. Nayar,  University of Hyderabad, India

We live in the age of portability. When the Government of India (GoI) offered Mobile Number Portability (commonly abbreviated as MNP) and the eventual abolition of national ‘roaming charges’ it was only one more instance of what might be called the portability-ethos of our everyday lives. Our everyday lives can go with us anywhere we go in India. Indeed, I am proposing here that we perform Indianness in the form of a certain portability. Keep Reading

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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

Two Book Reviews: Postcolonial Theory in the Global Age: Interdisciplinary Essays and Bollywood and Globalisation: The Global Power of Popular Hindi Cinema

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Postcolonial Theory in the Global Age: Interdisciplinary Essays

Edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi and Martin Kich.

Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland, 2013

Vi + 206

$45

ISBN 978-0-786-47552-0

Bollywood and Globalisation: The Global Power of Popular Hindi Cinema Keep Reading

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Four Poems of David Garrett Izzo

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Poems and Bones

A poem lasts,
bones change into oil,
One is a verbal artifact,
oil comes from dead things,
turns all cars into hearses:
“I see dead people.”

Dinosaur bones went into the ground,
deeply, the pressure turned them into fossil fuel.

Barney is your passenger today and every day.

Poems will last as long as trees grow
Poems on the internet will last as long as there is electricity
It comes from (all at once now) fossil fuel

(Is there a pattern here?)

More like a circle that’s been expanding since the big bang,
What goes around comes around.

Watch careful now, the verbal artifacts are here!

Rabid Dances

Everybody rushes!
Everybody gushes!

Down the stairs, up the stairs,
Various hairs on heads and faces.
Late for class, late for meeting,
Up the stairs, down the stairs.
Wow, is that guy still alive!
Whoa, Joe gained weight!
There’s that dick from O’Hara’s class.

Everybody rushes!
Mass transit of faces,
Dashes, lashes, gnashed teeth,
Growls, frowns, grad school.

Are there any Connections to be made here!

Dickens wanted connections!
E.M. Forster wanted connections!
They’re both dead,
still, no connections.
Huxley said of the lives inside our heads,
“each of us is an impenetrable strong box of solitary confinement.”
But Huxley is dead!

Does anyone really know anyone?
Does anyone care to know anyone for more than just grunt and sweat?

How real are the dead bodies on C.S.I?
How real are the dead bodies on the news?
Is there any difference unless the dead body is someone we really knew?
(This does not mean crying
over Access Hollywood’s account of a celebrity death;
Princess Di Dies and the world stops;
The son of the neighbor we just wave to in passing
Dies in a car crash—no big deal.
Reality TV—
About as real as Candid Camera used to be.
If it was really real, Simon Cowell would be dead already
And the public would cry for him too;
The folks on Survivor would be on murder charges.
Nah, not real—but definitely shallow.
Who swallows this bullshit?

Everybody rushes!
Everybody gushes!

Bikeman: Carolina Flyer

The legs are as pistons,
putting distance on the blacktop at 90 revolutions per minute the muses
implore: Allez!  Allez!   (Go!  Go! )
nature cajoles him to push this two-wheeled chariot.

All the rider knows is daylight past the Marriot
onto black ribbons of road that crisscross
a patchwork of grasses green
trees brown in shades as diverse
as the sights and sounds of rough and sky.

Rabbits bound. Turtles lounge. Horses carouse.
brown cows make chocolate milk.
Eagles soar ‘round Falls Lake.
smaller birds sing the glory of flight,

And I, no less than they,
hurtle along as our twin Rorschach shadows keep us company ‘neath the Sun-God.

Double-wheeled Pegasus, release me from trouble,
set me free as the trees rush backward,
and the Canadian Geese honk approval
at this solo flyer.

To ride all my days on this sleek, steel steed.
Nature’s love and my bike are all I need.

 

Flashback: Dredging up

Random invasions of mind’s-eye flash cards
Ancient past to fast forward,
Each a stabbing image in a tragicomic montage.

Youthful indiscretions.
Puke-inducing confessions.

A towel-shrouded lamp for “mood” lighting,
Damp summer sweat,
drops collecting in her belly button, dripping from mine.
Heat on heat—
Fuzz to fuzz,
and grunts,
primal smells.

He worried!
She said, “It’s just sex!”
That he couldn’t live without, fooled that it was love.
She loved the friction of rubbing sweat on sweat.

But he was a nouveaux Byron
vexed by contemplation of premature ejaculation.

The pain came and went,
Drowning the ego in a facsimile of raw oysters and a danger sign:

Slippery When  Wet.

David Garrett Izzo is an emeritus English Professor who has published 17 books and 60 essays of literary scholarship, as well as three novels, three plays, a short story, and poems. David has published extensively on the Perennial Spiritual Philosophy of Mysticism (Vedanta) as applied to literature. He is inspired by Aldous Huxley, Bruce Springsteen, his wife Carol and their five cats: Huxley, Max, Princess, Phoebe, and Luca. Two of his novels are fantasies with cats as characters: Maximus in Catland and Purring Heights. www.davidgarrettizzo.com

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The Poetics of John Ashbery

Gargi Bhattacharya, Rabindra Bharati University Download PDF Version Abstract John Ashbery (1927- ) takes the postmodernist polysemy of meaning in

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