Some
Reference Points for Discussion
|
Preliminary Class Business
|
  |
|
A First Approach to the Problem
of Art in the Information Age:
Two Works of the Art of Memory:
(1) William Gibson's "Agrippa
(A Book of the Dead)" (1992)
- How to read a work of art in the age of information? Foundational
issues.
- Example of approaches to aesthetic reading in the early
to mid 20th-century: New
Criticism and formalism
- "images," "metaphors," and "motifs"
versus "themes"
- "patterns" or "structures" of
"irony / ambiguity /paradox"
- Form vs. Meaning
- Agrippa's physical form
- Peter Schwenger's article, pp. 617-18
Photo by Megan Boody; reproduced
here temporarily for use in instruction |
-
"Mechanism" & Media —> Form
vs. Meaning
(Hardware & Software)
- "Materialities of Communication" / "Schriftlichkeitsgeschichte"
- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, ed.,
Materialities of Communication, trans. William
Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994)
- Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary
to Hugh's "Didascalion" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1993)
- Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900,
trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1990)
- Media Studies / Information Culture Studies (e.g.,
Wendy Chun's course at Brown U., Rhetoric
of New Media)
|
| |
|
A Reading of William Gibson's "Agrippa
(A Book of the Dead)" (1992)
- What the poem is about
- Who am I? Tradition of confessional autobiography,
e.g., St. Augustine's Confessions, "proems"
in Milton's Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's "Tintern
Abbey" or Prelude, Sylvia Plath's poetry and
The Bell Jar, but with a difference:
- Object-orientation of the poem: self as part
of a world of external objects and external people (lines
117
ff., 206
ff., in "Agrippa")
- Discontinuity effects: the interrupted self
(24
ff., 98
ff., 264
ff., death of father, Gibson's father's work on the
atom bomb)
- Who am I as a writer? (220
ff.)
- Inspiration from the internality of the "heart"
- Inspiration from discontinuous externality
of the traffic-light timers. Authorial self and the
inspiration of the "mechanism" (not "nature,"
not "soul" except in the externalized form
of the trucks on the highway)
- What is writing?
- A poem about the act of inscription (writing)
(lines 1
ff.)
- A poem about inscription juxtaposed with photography
("flash" effect of turning time into isolated
moments)
-
A poem about inscription juxtaposed with "new media"
of the 20th century (radio, advertisements, etc.)
(178
ff.) (cf., first sentence of Gibson's Neuromancer:
"The sky above the port was the color of television,
tuned to a dead channel.") Effect of turning time
into "sound-bite" or "dead-air"
moments.
-
A poem about writing as narrative continuity versus
writing as "random-access" information ("random-access
memory")
- Poem as "linking" or "browsing"
(cf., Google
search on memory + photographs)
- Poem as a set of database records
- Cf., E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What
Every American Needs to Know: "To be culturally
literate is to possess the basic information needed
to thrive in the modern world" (p. 1); the
"list" of cultural literacy (appendix)
- This is who I am: the physical
form of Agrippa
|
| |
|
(2) William Wordsworth, "Tintern
Abbey" (1798)
To be continued next time in juxtaposition with the works by
Fredric Jameson on postmodern art.
|
| |
|
- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, ed., Materialities
of Communication, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1994)
- Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary
to Hugh's "Didascalion" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1993)
- Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900,
trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1990)
- E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American
Needs to Know (New York: Random House, 1987)
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
|
| |
|
