“Syria and the Arab ‘Spring’: a Report on Joshua Landis’s Lecture”
Guest Writer: John Claborn

Friday, March 30, 2012

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[On March 29, Joshua Landis (Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma) spoke at a CAS/MillerComm presentation hosted by the Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies in collaboration with the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory. John Claborn (English) a graduate student affiliate of the Unit and recipient of a Unit for Criticism travel grant reports]

"Syria and the Arab 'Spring'"

Written by John Claborn (English)

“Whither Syria?,” the title of this talk, shows us how precarious the situation in Syria is – from day to day, week to week, month to month, we don’t know whether the Assad regime will stand or fall. Of course, most Americans—and perhaps western academics as well—know Syria as a country that borders Iraq and supported insurgents against U. S. forces. Thankfully, Landis’s talk was accessible for those without much knowledge about the Middle East.

Landis’s talk was introduced by Illinois historian Kenneth Cuno, who highlighted Landis’s recent appearances on shows such as Democracy Now! and Charlie Rose. Landis also writes “Syria Comment,” a blog on the topic.

Landis organized his lecture around four problems or questions: why is the Assad regime “doomed”? What are the strengths of the regime? What are the weaknesses of the opposition? What is the economic and regional context for these events?

Giving us some history on the Assad rule, Landis pointed out that minoritarian regimes are not unusual in the Levant (e.g. the Jews in 1940s Palestine, the Christians in Lebanon, the Sunnis in Iraq), but Syria stands as the last minoritarian regime in the region. Though they dominate the current government, Alawite Muslims comprise only 12% of the population, while Sunni Muslims over 70%. The Ba’athist Assad regime maintained power by keeping their sons as military officers, instead of sending them abroad for education. Class also played a role, fueling a dynamic between the rural poor who supported overthrowing the regime and the urban upper class who were made nervous by disruption.

The conflict in Syria, which has left thousands dead, is a reminder still of the so-called Arab Spring of 2010, which saw the fall of regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, with uprisings in Bahrain (violently stamped out by Saudi Arabia). While in the past the opposition to Assad has been scattered, it is becoming more unified and it is gaining more support due to the collapse of the economy.

Most of the questions revolved around U. S. intervention in Syria. We went into Libya under certain circumstances, plus an unstable Syria weakens Iraq. Why doesn’t the U.S. intervene? Perhaps this is because the U. S. sees the conflict as a civil war, but more likely U.S. non-intervention just highlights the inconsistency of foreign policy. Syria, Landis was pointed out, is Russia’s strongest ally in the Middle East—perhaps another reason not to intervene. Read more

Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 5.1/2
"Things Aren't Perfect"
Guest Writer: Lilya Kaganovsky

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

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[The first in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 5 of AMC's Mad Men, prior to the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing

"Things Aren't Perfect"

Written by Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic/Comparative Literature/Media & Cinema Studies)

Mad Men is growing old. I don’t mean that as a criticism;I mean that the show, without being a Bildungsroman (since no one ever grows wiser here, only older), is fundamentally about what it means to be an adult. Don has turned forty. Sally’s voice has dropped an octave. Joan has had a baby. Pete lives in the suburbs. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has entered a period of “stability” (“stable,” as Pete tells us, is that “step backwards between successful and failing”).

Even the ads for Miller 64 aired during the premiere point us to a certain demographic: “brewed for the better you.” The ad opens with an alarm clock about to turn to 6:30am and a picture of someone’s five-year old daughter on the nightstand. We are then treated to a daily routine of working out (“We run a mile before breakfast” goes the song), eating healthy (“I had a salad for lunch”), and the promise, that after a day of “balance” to have a Miller 64 with dinner because, “I’ve worked off my paunch.” Like the Heinz baked beans campaign pitched by Peggy in this episode, which imagines a “bean ballet” set to classical music and strikes the clients as old-fashioned, the Miller 64 ad is not targeted at the young “college” crowd, but at the many Mad Men viewers who, like Don, are turning forty. (“When you’re forty, how old will I be?” Don asks his son Bobby. “You'll be dead,” replies Bobby.) For his fortieth birthday, Harry gives Don a cane and Megan calls him an old man. As Betty tells Don in the Season 4 finale line repeated in the teaser that preceded Season 5’s two-hour premiere, “Things aren’t perfect.”


Season 5 opens with a picket line. Initial close ups of white police officers and passersby are quickly replaced by medium shots of black women and men carrying signs demanding work. This is the Civil Rights Movement, but it is also Occupy Wall Street, with these protests meant to reflect not only on our past, but also on our most recent historical moment. Our next series of shots takes us inside an office, which we immediately recognize as the part of an ad agency, even though we don’t know any of the four men working there: we suspect (and we will be proved wrong) that we are looking at the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce “creative” team — their obvious youth speaking to the next generation of Mad Men. Instead, the agency is Y&R: Young & Rubicam and, living up to their agency’s name, they react to the protests with an appropriate degree of childishness: annoyed by the noise coming from the street, they decide to “cool off” the protesters by first pouring and then throwing bags of ice water out the window. (There is an entire discourse of paper bags, barf bags, and body bags that runs through the episode.)


The opening sequence speaks to a series of changes that have taken places since we last saw our favorite characters seven months earlier (seven months by the show’s clock, seventeen months by ours). Trudy and Joan have both had their babies and each is looking a little worse for wear. As Pete Campbell puts it in his inimitable way, “there was a time when she wouldn’t leave the house in a robe.” Pete of course is speaking about Trudy, but his comment carries over to our first glimpse of Joan (preceded by a baby’s bottom and a hand applying diaper rash cream), still wearing a robe and pajamas in the middle of the afternoon. As her mother sarcastically notes, “You know you’re not exactly at your fighting weight.” (Joan begs to differ.)

Pete, meanwhile, has switched places with Don. An over-the-shoulder shot of Pete on the train is meant to remind us of our first glimpses of Don in Season 1: Pete has replaced Don on the commuter train moving between the city and its suburbs. While Don and Megan have moved into a gorgeous modern flat with a visible Manhattan skyline and audible traffic, Pete and Trudy have bought a house in the suburbs, and the shock of seeing their home for the first time is quite profound: nothing remains of the young modern couple with their well-appointed flat on the upper (upper) East side. Instead, Pete walks into what we first take to be the Drapers’ old kitchen, with the same kitchen cabinets and old-fashioned wallpaper. (To be clear, it is actually a different set, and we see a clear shot of a galley kitchen with a double sink on the right and a double stove on the left, as Pete despondently eats dry cereal out of a box — Trudy, it seems, has not yet mastered Betty’s homemaking skills.) The dingy-patterned wall paper, linoleum floor, and dark wood kitchen cabinets with their wrought-iron hinges no longer speak to the sense of bourgeois stability we first got from the Drapers’ home, before the cracks began to show. What might have passed for proper suburban upper-middle-class style five years earlier, now, in 1966, looks unbelievably shabby and depressing.

Style-wise, Season 5 does not disappoint: 1966 looks great, maybe even better than 1960 — skirts are shorter, heels are flatter, hair is longer. The colors, open space, and interior design that we first glimpsed in Palm Springs (Season 2, Episode 11, “The Jet Set”) are now part of the new Drapers’ new Manhattan home, and while we might miss Betty and her fainting couch, we know that Don has once again made the right move (“Marry early and often,” Ken Cosgrove’s wife jokes, looking at the plumper Jane Sterling.) But we also note those who are being left behind — not just Roger, who has no clients, no meetings, and has to share a secretary with Don, or Bert Cooper who waits patiently in the conference room for a meeting that’s taking place in the hallway, or Lane, who tries to seduce a young woman over the phone — but also Joan, Trudy, Jane, and even Peggy, whose clothes all speak to women aging out of the desirable twenty-something demographic. (We have yet to see Betty, of course, but I imagine that she, like Grace Kelly in Rear Window, always knows how to wear proper clothes.)

Mad Men has always been concerned with age because, unlike so much television, it is not a show about being young (it stars a leading man, for example, who even in his twenties always looked “mature”). And while we tend to associate the 1960s profoundly with youth, Mad Men wants us to see what it would have been like to live through it as adults — the “college kids” “sitting in” are not our focus. Instead, we are placed firmly inside the corporate world of bourgeois white conformism. As the Heinz client points out, speaking metaphorically for an entire generation, “beans” are not good by themselves, they are really better in a group.

Indeed, the Heinz baked beans ad campaign is one of the places we see this concern with age manifest itself. Peggy’s attempt to elevate the baked beans to the “art of supper” with new micro-photography and humor backfires, but the point is well taken: the desire to take something of humble origins to new heights. The clients wonder about the “message” — what will the viewer take away from the ad? Peggy’s claim is that it puts beans on your mind and shows you have a sense of humor, because beans are portrayed as far more important than they are. “Did you ever see beans up close?” asks the client, “They’re slimy… they look better in a group… beans is the war, the Depression, bomb shelters. We have to erase that.” “They have to be cool,” he continues, “I want kids in college… they have a hot plate, they’re sitting in… maybe it’s someone with a picket sign saying, 'We want beans!'”


A similar age gap manifests itself in Megan’s misguided desire to throw Don a surprise birthday party — she imagines that everyone loves birthdays (and surprises), while Don, as he puts it, hates to be the center of attention. That is of course not quite true: what Don hates is being the butt of a joke, which is precisely what he becomes. The title of the episode, “A Little Kiss,” is a translation of the French song Megan sings at Don’s surprise party, and it is of course not the first time that the show gives us a performance that reminds us that we are watching a spectacle. (Previous memorable sequences included Roger in blackface singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” Pete and Trudy dancing the Charleston, and Joan performing her own French song “C’est magnifique” while playing an accordion [“My Old Kentucky Home,” Season 3, Episode 3]). Megan’s “Zou bisou bisou” routine recalls Brigitte Bardot’s famous over-the-top dance in the 1956 …And God Created Woman — and while Megan is not as curvy or brilliantly seductive as BeBe (earlier, she admits to being a bad actress), the dance is excessive in the same way, breaking the bourgeois codes of propriety by turning on all the men in the room, except for Don. As is typical for Mad Men, the dance is then performed again and again as a kind of comic/traumatic repetition: first by Roger, then by Harry, then by Lane.

Don’s concern over being the butt of a joke (“You’re wondering what they’re laughing about. It’s not you,” Roger tells him; but a few scenes later, admits that he is in fact making fun of him). On some level, Don understands that his impulsive marriage to a woman nearly half his age makes him both comical and clichéd. His defense mechanism is to exercise total control over the woman he’s married, making sure that he is still our man: he demands that Megan open her blouse in his office, assumes that his own work schedule always takes priority (even when it seems he has nothing to do), and uses a fair amount of force to subdue his sex-kitten-turned-pouty-teenager. (As Don famously says to Ken in “The Hobo Code,” “you’ll realize in your private life that at a certain point seduction is over, and force is actually being requested.” [Season 1, Episode 8])

This concern over being the butt of a joke leads us back to the prank with which the episode started—the ad execs throwing water bombs out the Y& R office window. Y & R’s childish prank becomes a sign of their immaturity and bigotry, yet, in this episode, it is also an interesting device because it accomplishes, in a subtle way, a crossing of a racial divide that brings the problem of race “home,” or in this case, from the street into the office. To rub salt in their competitor’s wounds, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce puts an ad in the Times claiming to be “An equal opportunity employer. Our windows don’t open. We are committed to proving that Madison Avenue isn’t all wet.” Rather than Y & R, however, Joan becomes the ad’s first victim, assuming that it is meant as an advertisement for her own position. Reassured by Lane that she is as needed as ever, she tries to put into words her feeling of isolation: while Lane assures her that “Nothing’s happened,” she reminds him that, “Something always happens. Things are different. Someone tells a joke and you don’t know what they’re talking about.” “There’ve been no jokes, not without you,” Lane says. “Not even at my expense?” Joan asks.

The “equal opportunity” ad is of course a joke precisely at her expense, as a series of humiliations precede the revelation of truth. While Joan initially suspects that the ad is not real, she nevertheless brings the baby to the office to see for herself — and her first set of encounters, from difficulties opening the door, to a receptionist who has never heard of her, to learning that her job is being handled by two other secretaries — leads her to a tearful breakdown in Lane’s office. (As Mary Jacobus has long ago argued, a joke is almost always at woman’s expense.Indeed, as the episode draws to a close, SCDP is in fact in the process of hiring a new girl — and the imaginary threat of replacement is made real.)

But while Joan may be the joke’s first victim, she is not its only one. Because by the time the episode is over, the joke has played out to its logical conclusion: stepping out the elevator, Don and Megan find that the SCDP lobby is full of job seekers, black men and women who have answered the want ad. While SCDP thought it was addressing itself to its competition, it was really hailing a very different group — unconsciously, it was speaking to the group that we see picketing outside the Madison Avenue offices. For the first time ever, I think, Mad Men has a message, and it is about the fact that the outside world is about to be brought inside.

The letter, Lacan says, always arrives at its destination.


 Read more

"Upstairs, Downton?"
Guest Writer: Cecily Garber

Friday, March 23, 2012

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Bates (Brendan Coyle) and Anna (Joanne Froggatt) of Downton Abbey
[Below Cecily Garber, a grad student affiliate in English and recipient of a Unit for Criticism travel grant last fall, writes about the representation of class politics in Downton Abbey.]

Upstairs, Downton?

Written by Cecily Garber (English)

While I am as much a fan of Downton Abbey as any other lover of costume drama laced with intrigue and social commentary, a brief dip into the 1970s British series Upstairs, Downstairs, from which Downton clearly takes many cues, has made me think twice about how much social commentary Downton really has, particularly on economic disparity and class differences. Granted, I have only seen the first season of both Downton and Upstairs, Downstairs, but that is enough for me to know that many strands of Downton’s plot are inspired by Upstairs, Downstairs (e.g., both feature gay footmen involved with aristocratic houseguests, daughters with radical political ideas at odds with family heritage, and butlers with an unshakeable sense of dignity and propriety who run the house impeccably). But more interesting than superficial similarities are the ways that parallel strands of Downton and Upstairs, Downstairs play out differently, revealing different attitudes toward the master-servant relationships that are at the heart of both series.

Downton’s first episode features a stranger’s arrival at the estate, a convention that promises to initiate the audience into the customs of the great house by showing how the stranger, in this case the new valet Bates, adjusts to a new way of life. But Bates does not ask the kind of questions that an audience unfamiliar with Downton’s well-oiled system of service would ask. Rather, he appears to be immediately at home and, in fact, relieved to have arrived in this new world. Upon seeing his small and spare room in the attic, containing a twin bed, small dresser, and nightstand all washed cream white, he says, “Oh, yes, I shall be very comfortable here.” Bates is an outsider at Downton, but mostly because he is lame, not because he finds its habits objectionable or unusual. When learning his new duties from the footman, Bates opens a case of snuffboxes, which the master collects; “Strange,” he says, “how we live with this pirate’s hoard within our reach, yet none of it’s ours.” When he does finally remark on the strangeness of master-servant relationships, he doesn’t criticize it and uses the pronoun “we” when voicing this thought; already on his first full day, Bates identifies himself with his fellow servants and his place at Downton so much that he can articulate its inequities as an unquestionable commonplace.


Sarah (Pauline Collins) and Rose (Jean Marsh) of Upstairs, Downstairs
Upstairs, Downstairs opens with the arrival of a stranger too, but one that is a much ruder awakening. The young Clémence is to be the new under housemaid, and she presents herself by knocking on the front door of 165 Eaton Place in central London, the setting of the show. She is shooed to the basement door (unlike Bates who knows to go there and is first seen inside the house below ground). Upon entering the house, she is re-clothed and re-named and thrust into a world that looks unfair and illogical to her. “Clémence” is thought not to be a servant’s name, so she is quickly rechristened the simpler “Sarah.” Sarah questions the butler's authority, asking, “What makes you my better, I just want to know?”

Over subsequent episodes Sarah continues to question the way things are done, pushing the audience to question the system of service too. When she wakes up, she complains about the cold room and floor and the ill fit of the second-hand uniform she has to wear. In Downton the servants’ rooms generally look quite pleasant, washed with light and marked with a shabby chic grace, whereas in Upstairs, Downstairs the rooms are much darker. Sarah complains repeatedly about being stuffed in the attic at night and relegated to the basement for much of the day. She ends up leaving, not because she has an injury like Bates, but of her own volition because she has great imagination and an irrepressible personality, and she wants to see more of the world.


An anonymous tweet takes up Downton Abbey as a text for our times. 
In Downton, it is the unlikeable characters who lack integrity--for example, the lady’s maid O’Brien and the footman Thomas--who most often express strong discontent with their place and bring to light the cold facts of the servant-master relationship. Characters like Branson the chauffer, who question the system from sounder moral grounds, are marginal compared to Sarah. Upstairs, Downstairs thoroughly questions rules that the good servants in Downton quietly accept. I won’t give away the punch line of a pivotal episode of Upstairs, Downstairs’ first season, "I Dies of Love," in case any reader cares to it dig up, but I will say that it makes a mockery of the masters’ “benevolence,” their efforts to improve their servants’ lives; it clearly underscores the dark consequences of the stark differences between opportunities open to different classes.

In light of the growing income disparity in this country and elsewhere, it seems that the forty-year old series Upstairs, Downstairs, at least its first season, is more critically engaged in social debates than the infectious but hagiographic Downton Abbey. Considering the turbulent political atmosphere of 1971, the year of Upstairs, Downstairs’ first season, the earlier show’s more radical outlook may come as no surprise; at a time when “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland were nearly at their peak and debates about immigration to Britain were stormy too, class politics might have seemed relatively tame and well-trod. But then as now unemployment was exceptionally high—in 1971 it reached a post-WWII peak in the U.K.—which is perhaps one reason the unlikely show became so popular (the first season did not air until almost a year after it had been shot, and then at the unpromising time of 10 PM on Sunday evenings, yet went on to run for four more seasons, and ended to its producers’ great dismay only by its creators’ firm decision to do so). Period drama fans today, like their counterparts in 1971, might well appreciate less glorification and more defamiliarization of class differences that speak to disparity experienced in their own lives. Read more

“Modern Brains: Literary Studies and the Cognitive Sciences”
Guest Writer: Katherine Skwarczek

Friday, March 16, 2012

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[On March 9-10, 2012, the British Modernities Group (BMG) held its annual graduate student conference, “Modern Brains: Literary Studies and the Cognitive Sciences.” The following was written by Katherine Skwarczek, a BMG member who attended the conference.]

Written by Katherine Skwarczek (English)

“Modern Brains: Literary Studies and the Cognitive Sciences,” the graduate student conference organized by the British Modernities Group, provided a platform for working through the aims and methodologies of an area of study broadly labeled “cognitive literary criticism.” Working within a new and interdisciplinary field provides both exciting opportunities and potential challenges. The speakers presenting on the first day of the two-day event were able to reassure us about any possible errors on our part: mistakes are normal—productive, even.

In her keynote address, Kara Federmeier introduced the audience to the N400, a measurement of the brain’s electrical response to meaningful stimuli, such as words or images. Federmeier presented neuroscientific research that used the N400 response to study the brain’s processing of such stimuli. In particular, Federmeier focused on how our minds generate meaning from language. Although she presented experiments that considered very small pieces of language input—words or a few short sentences—Federmeier’s conclusion was clear: our cognitive processing of meaning is highly sensitive to context.



Kara Federmeier
Although Federmeier dismissed the pop psychology notion that a sharp distinction exists between “right-brained” or “left-brained” individuals (both hemispheres can comprehend meaning), she did suggest that our two hemispheres process meaning in different ways. Because the left hemisphere has almost exclusive access to speech, its method of making meaning relies heavily on prediction. That is, the left can make maximal use of context clues to “predict” the meaning of a word before it is even perceived.

The mistakes arise here: because the left hemisphere is so adept at making predictions, it must also be adept at correcting meanings when they turn out to be wrong, as they frequently are. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, does not generate predictions and thus leaves the possibility of meaning open for longer, allowing for more flexibility. What happens, however, if this normal pattern of making meaning is disrupted? Federmeier examined the case of aging adults. As processing capability declines, older adults were less able to ready their “predictions” in time. Knowing what we do about the dual nature of generating meaning, these results may not have to scare us. Instead of assuming that comprehension becomes worse as we age, it is possible that it simply becomes different. Aging adults are less able to predict, but may therefore be more open to the possibility of alternative meanings when processing language. Less prediction, more flexibility.

In an earlier presentation on digital reading practices, Stacy Nall also considered the possible benefits of making mistakes. Basing her talk around the image of “getting lost in a book,” Nall argued that the discontinuous reading practices that characterize the perusal of digital media are a result of the changing material reality of such reading. Nall focused on hands in particular as an integral part of the physical system of reading. The less immediate relationship of our hands to digital texts results in a different ontological reality. This new reality is not necessarily inferior, but the “messiness” of digital reading should be accounted for in our classrooms and in our own practices.

Though the conference’s intended focus was cognition and literature, both of these terms proved to be productively unstable. Literature expanded to mean language, meaning-making, rhetoric, aesthetics, and pedagogy, while cognition proved to be a multi-faceted object of study (and, indeed, critique) as well as a surprisingly pliable methodology.

This variability is the result of cognitive science’s necessarily interdisciplinary nature and complex history. In his introductory remarks, Andrew Gaedtke traced a genealogy of cognitive science: its origins as an antidote to the black box of behaviorism, its on-and-off relationship with computers and AI, and its most recent emphasis on embodiment and environment. This last permutation received considerable attention from the conference presenters.

According to Gaedtke, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch were among the first to offer a theory of mind as inseparable from its environment and of thought as continuous with action. This theory has other permutations in recent theories of cognition, such as Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s extended mind theory, which argues that the brain is only one part of a cognitive network that extends the work of cognition into the environment.



David Herman
Keynote speaker David Herman has explored such an extended mind model of cognition in the context of modernist literature. Herman’s recent work approaches the protagonists of modernist texts not as “internalists” focused on the inner workings of their own minds but rather as participants in a distributed flow between agent and environment. In a related presentation on Virginia Woolf, Aleksandra Hernandez applied Herman’s model of cognition to Mrs. Dalloway. She urged us to see Woolf’s protagonist as a flâneuse, a version of the traditionally male 19th-century flâneur, but one who aspires to a de-centering of consciousness and whose extended self emerges through interaction with aspects of the environment (objects, people, and spaces). Although the extended mind model of cognition breaks down the inside/outside boundaries in a pleasingly post-Cartesian way, it also reminds us that the mind and the environment are co-constitutive.


Uexküll's drawing of the Umwelten of a human and of a bee
In his keynote address, David Herman complicated the extended mind model of cognition by considering non-human animals both as part of the cognitive environment and as minds worthy of serious attention. Herman called upon Edwin Hutchins’s concept of “cognitive ecology,” the contextual study of cognitive phenomena that considers all elements of a cognitive ecosystem to be interdependent, and connected it to the concept of Umwelt. Developed by early 20th-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt is the moment-by-moment construction of the world based on the relationship between an organism and its surroundings. Organisms can share the same surroundings but have their own Umwelt, as shown in Uexküll’s illustration (right), which portrays a meadow as experienced by a human (top) and by a bee (bottom). Same environment; different experience.

Uexküll suggests that “the best way to find out that no two human Umwelten are the same is to have yourself be led through unknown territory by someone familiar with it.” Herman argued that literary texts can function as precisely such unconventional guides. His primary example was Virginia Woolf’s biographical novel Flush, told from the perspective of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog.

Herman presented a post-humanist version of the extended mind model of cognition, one that emphasized the continuity between the human and nonhuman, provided a narrative pathway to nonhuman world-building, offered an ecological view of consciousness, and, perhaps most useful to a literary scholar studying more typical characters, provided a way of “ecologically” understanding the narrative representation of consciousness applicable to human and nonhuman minds. I would note, though, that these remain narrative representations. Herman emphasized the important role that narrative plays in both creating worlds and in making sense of the world (what he termed “worlding the story” and “storying the world,” respectively), and philosophers of mind like Daniel Dennett have used narrative metaphors in explaining consciousness. Such an emphasis on narration makes me wonder if this model distinguishes between consciousness and other cognitive processes and to what extent it relies on the generation of a record to understand the mind. Woolf’s Flush cannot write, cannot understand what Barrett Browning does when she writes, and yet his mental life is created by and through narrative. Does this force us to make a distinction between the human and nonhuman after all? Possibly not: Flush could create a record in some other, non-written way. Do we thereby expand our notion of narrative, or do we generate another model completely?

Although terminology like “cognitive literary criticism” feels trendy, the conference reflexively questioned its own uses and applications of the term, asking what cognitive science brings that is new to the study of the humanities. In tacit response to such a challenge, several scholars worked with information gleaned from cognitive science to revisit literary texts. Claire Barber, for instance, asked us to re-consider autistic stereotypies (commonly called “stimming”), like hand-flapping or face-tapping, as possibly productive ways of meaning-making and managing environmental stimuli. Doing so also allows us to see the correlates of such behavior represented in modernist literature.

Louis Slimak borrowed not from cognitive research but from its methodology, designing an experiment in his classroom to gauge how biographical information about a text informed students’ reading of a particular work. In an interesting twist on Kara Federmeier’s address earlier in the conference, Slimak argued that readers are, indeed, sensitive to such biographical context. Federmeier had pointed out at the conclusion of her talk what she thought would be welcome news to literary scholars, that the more we know about a person who produces a text and the context of its creation, the better our chances of understanding the author’s intentions. Slimak’s pedagogical experiment showed that this prediction of authorial intention can lead to mis-reading.

But at least we needn’t worry about our messy reading habits. We can just blame our messy brains. Read more

Faculty Lecture, Margaret Flinn: "1930s 'Banlieutopia' and the Films of Julien Duvivier"
Guest Writer: Cameron Riopelle

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

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Duvivier 1934 
[On Monday, March 12, 2012, Margaret Flinn, (French, Media & Cinema Studies), gave the Unit for Criticism’s annual faculty lecture titled "1930s 'Banlieutopia' and the Films of Julien Duvivier". Below is a response from Cameron Riopelle, a graduate student in Sociology]

“Cinema and the Curious Property of Heterotopia”

Written by Cameron Riopelle (Sociology)

"Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space."
--Michel Foucault “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault, 25)

The modern banlieue (French suburbs) are often sites of poverty, ghettoization, and unrest. The banlieues house mostly poor immigrant communities. Banlieues have been represented in the cinema, sometimes exploitively, through realism or action-oriented representation, or both. Often the movies taking place in these suburbs depict North African characters. This genre is known as Cinéma de banlieue or “banlieue cinema.”

In the period between World Wars I and II, however, the banlieues were represented in movies as working-class utopias. At this time, occupants of the banlieue were primarily white and working-class. Accordingly, Popular Front filmmakers idealized these communities. Although filmmaker Julien Duvivier was considered a second-rate film director by French film critics of his time, and though his works were apolitical, he shared in this idealization of the suburbs.

Margaret Flinn, University of Illinois professor of French and Media & Cinema Studies, discussed this shared idealization in Foucauldian terms, drawing on two Duvivier films Au Bonheur des Dames (1930) and La Belle Equipe (1936). Ignoring the obligatory movie romance plots, in both movies the filmmaker is concerned with the relationship between city center and banlieue. The banlieues are portrayed as places where working-class characters go to escape, relax, be free, and close to nature. They are therefore utopic in a mainstream sense but not in a Foucault’s sense. According to Foucault, a utopia is a space without -- and the banlieue only make sense in the context of place, especially since in these films the space of the banlieue is intentionally created as a space in which actors will perform the drama (Foucault, 24).

Banlieue and city are defined in relation to one another. A dichotomous list appears simple at first glance: 

CITY                           BANLIEUE
Real                            Idyllic
Dystopian                  Utopian
Industrial                    Pastoral
Dirty                             Clean
Technological            Natural
Moral                            Immoral
Individual                     Collective

La Haine 1995
However, Flinn complicates these terms by bringing in Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. By introducing human action into these apparently utopian spaces, both on the part of characters acting out plots and audience members watching the screen in the real world, the banlieues are not utopic but heterotopic, having "the curious property of being in relation to all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to mirror, designate, or reflect" (Foucault, 24). Contradiction arises as these connections between real/unreal and place/non-place seem to co-exist. All the counteractions between city and suburb that appear dichotomous in fact exist simultaneously in all places at once in the (represented) city center, the (represented) banlieues, as well as the real-world referents known to the audience.

Flinn thus argues that the two Duvivier films depict utopian banlieues that become heterotopic upon their viewing. There emerges an ungrounded simultaneity between the act of observation and the constructions of reality such viewership entails. Behind the viewer’s perception of the film is the director’s construction of a physical set. And in between is the contradiction of an odd rectangular room (movie showing space) with the two-dimensional screen on which is projected a reflection of the three-dimensional world.
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"The place of human interaction in the digital humanities": John Unsworth's Call for Collaborative Humanities Research"
Guest Writer: Jenelle Grant

Friday, March 9, 2012

posted under , , , , by Unit for Criticism


Title page of Bacon's Instauration Magna (1620). The Latin inscription at the bottom reads "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."
[On Friday, March 2, 2012, John Unsworth, former Dean of the Graduate School for Library and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, spoke at a lecture sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The below contribution is from Jenelle Grant]

"The place of human interaction in the digital humanities: John Unsworth’s Call for Collaborative Humanities Research"

Written by Jenelle Grant (French)

Following the digital turn and the subsequent imperative to digitize, humanities scholars find themselves in a gold-mine: billions of images, sounds, and pages of text… digitally-stored and digitally-born "objects" awaiting investigation. In the most utopian of knowledge temples, a Digital Humanities Center, physical barriers between researcher and collections of libraries, archives, and museums around the world would dissolve in an instant. Yet the very size of virtual collections and their labyrinthine infrastructures can hide glittering objects from view, obscuring humanities scholars’ paths. In addition to non-profit collections, such as the HathiTrust which stores the fruit of Google’s scanning project (10,103,655 volumes as of Friday March 2, 2012), commercial digitization also continues: eight hours of content are uploaded every minute to YouTube, for example. Such rapid collection and production of digital cultural artifacts places nothing less than a "computational imperative" on you.

Yes, I said you. Whether you simply need to print a recent journal article from JSTOR or are ready to immerse yourself in Franco Moretti's method of analytics, computational analysis dawns essential to venturing into the obscure, unexplored regions of this digital new world. It may even be fair to say it is the latest form of “light” that Francis Bacon, 17th-century Englishman and father of empirical science, describes here:
…if a man could succeed […] in kindling a light in nature, a light which should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge; and so, […] should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world, that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human race. ("Prœmium," Of the Interpretation of Nature [1603]).
Exactly how such a light is best kindled in our era was the theme of Friday’s Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities address by digital humanities expert, and former dean of Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, John Unsworth in his talk "Merchants of Light, Depredators and Pioneers: I’ll take my digital humanities with Bacon!"


John Unsworth
Unsworth began by questioning the impetus to streamline and centralize the creation and curation of digital collections at the cost of losing the personnel necessary to navigating these collections. He disagreed with conclusions in Diane Zorich’s 2008 survey of Digital Humanities Centers, illustrating how she privileges collectively maintained virtual "resources" over locally managed research “centers” or institutional libraries. Unsworth proposes instead that digital resources must maintain ties to physical place and that they need to be structured in order to respond to local researchers’ collective practices. In this way, large repositories of digital objects ("Big Data") will necessarily reduce duplication and become increasingly accessible, a point on which he agrees with Zorich. But for Unsworth as opposed to the top-down Zorich, this task must be accomplished through demand-driven creation of resources and computational tools: that is, resources are only as valuable as the researchers committed to using them and taking them into their classrooms and studies.

This research- and researcher-motivated approach, he continued, is only possible in an environment of informed collaboration between experts with variable skill-sets—domain expertise, collection management, information technology. The future of digital humanities depends on disrupting current institutional hierarchies that separate faculty in academic departments from library and information science specialists and computer analysts. In order to imagine such a function-driven model of collaborative research in the humanities using digital resources and tools, he turns to a liberal reading of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), in which the writer envisions a new kind of university centered around performing and analyzing experiments.

Unsworth sees in Bacon’s movement away from the Aristotelian structure of the early- modern university a parallel to an epistemological shift that he seems to believe is currently taking place in the humanities: the "End of Theory." Both, he implied, call for a rejection of a search for ontologies, taxonomies, and hypotheses, and a turn toward the observation of patterns and correlations. (Unsworth did not define what he meant by the "End of Theory": the parallels listed on his PowerPoint slide led me to believe he equated Bacon’s move toward empiricism with certain digital humanities scholars’ move away from some schools of critical theory—particularly, perhaps, close reading.) In the place, then, of "theory" to structure and cohere researchers’ work in the humanities, Unsworth puts forth the possibility of scholarly communities formed out of the observing functions performed by the researchers.

He adapts Bacon’s vocabulary describing distinct but interdependent roles in the New Atlantis’ utopian "Solomon’s House" (roles that include "Merchants of Light," and "Depredators") where each member contributes to the joint advancement of knowledge. Unsworth imagines contemporary researchers and librarians similarly working together on research projects in a range of roles: e.g., accessing and analyzing previous work, designing new projects, gathering the desired elements from the repositories of "Big Data," performing experiments, finding how new methods can be applied to other domains, and distilling and disseminating the new knowledge gleaned. He adds that new roles would, of course, have to be created to accommodate contemporary issues of intellectual property rights and the integration of commercial and non-profit digital resources.

So, how would we implement a shift toward such re-division of academic labor? Well, says Unsworth to humanities researchers, you don’t have to learn to program fluently (though you should probably learn some), but you do need to stop thinking of librarians as merely the care-takers of books owned by the university, and start thinking of them as your Virgil in a quest to accessing and doing work with objects stored in a variety of digital repositories. And information science specialists: he says it’s time to meet researchers in the fields they’re excited about and stop waiting for them to come to you with questions.

While Unworth’s idea that doing work in digital humanities could undo hierarchies in the research university system may seem only slightly less utopian than Bacon’s island population of scholars, his call to underscore the human element as the guarantor of future success of work in digital humanities is both inspiring and important. This is especially relevant in Illinois’ current environment of increased centralization, often at the cost of the specialists that make it possible to use our valuable resources. Furthermore, the benefit of collaboration across vastly diverse disciplines is exhibited by the existence of programs such as Illinois’ Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory the IPRH and even accidentally interdisciplinary environments such as MIT’s Building 20 (see Jonah Leher’s recent article in the New Yorker for more examples of the productivity of collaborating with people who see problems differently).


Hans Holbein the younger, The Ambassadors. 1533. The National Gallery, London. Click here to see the gigapixel-sized digital copy, courtesy of the Google Art Project.
Yet later while reflecting on Unsworth’s talk, even as I basked in the glow of the digitized pages of first-edition books I could consult in the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s collection without having to abandon my cat and dreamed of collaborating on a database that would make all 19th-century slang dictionaries searchable for diachronic and synchronic comparisons, something about the "Merchants of Light" made me uneasy. It was the term "merchant": defined simply as "a buyer and seller of commodities for profit." As Unsworth pointed out, digital humanities scholars cannot ignore the importance of commercial involvement in the creation of these "big data" resources, even if they are accessed and managed locally by non-profit educational institutions and independent centers. But his parallel with Bacon almost disguises an important effect of this commercial provenance. Bacon’s researchers observed the natural world; digital humanities researchers, however, observe data that has already been processed at least once by an interested party. What one "sees" is entirely dependent on how one looks, and how one looks in the digital humanities depends, at least in part, on the algorithms established by commercial entities: on the search terms entered, on the way objects are tagged and classified as they are entered into the repository.

Unsworth amusedly pointed out Bacon’s description of gilded luxury and the quasi-sanctified status surrounding the Head of his imagined university, the one to whom all the other functionaries report. But he failed to point out how this leadership figure, perhaps there by virtue of being a very successful merchant of "light," effectively reinstates a hierarchy even as he lauds its collaborative nature, or how such a Head might find his contemporary parallel not in the university, but in the commercial sector.

So in the end, I’ll "take my digital humanities with Bacon" as well: his 1603 description of such a bringer of new light contains an indication of its inherent threat. The citation abridged in at the beginning of my comments continues, "if a man could succeed […] in kindling a light in nature […] that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human race, the propagator of man’s empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities." I underline the power wielded by the one to provide light not to suggest that I fear librarians may one day conquer the university and subdue creative, independent, scholarly research. But I do fear that Google certainly could if it wanted to. Unsworth trusts in the fact that it is not in Google’s economic interest to do so. I, however, will remain vigilant. Read more

"Who is This 'We' That Has Yet to Sing in Our Already Too Familiar land? A Response to Larry Grossberg"
Guest Writer: Robert Mejia

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism


A frame from Erykah Badu's video "Window Seat" (2010) 

 [On Friday March 2, Lawrence Grossberg spoke at a CAS MillerComm lecture hosted by the Institute for Communications Research. In the following post guest blogger Rober Mejia describe Grossberg's lecture while also discussing the keynote lecture at the March 2-3 Institute of Communications Research 2012 Alumni & Friends Reunion Conference]


"Who is This 'We' That Has Yet to Sing in Our Already Too Familiar Land? A Response to Larry Grossberg" 





Written by Robert Mejia (Institute of Communications Research) 

The affective investment Larry Grossberg has had in the path of Cultural Studies should not go unrecognized. As the only U.S. student to have studied at both the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (under Stuart Hall) and the Institute of Communications Research (under James Carey), Grossberg took direct part in an intellectual exchange that was just beginning to occur in the late-1960s. His name is associated with several of the most significant publications and conferences in the history of cultural studies, including Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988 [conference in 1983]) and Cultural Studies (1991 [conference in 1990]), and he has continued to operate as a significant intellectual force through his long tenure as editor of Cultural Studies (1990-Present) and, most recently, through his publication of Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010). 

It goes without saying that the field of contemporary cultural studies is indebted to the early and ongoing work of Larry Grossberg. And yet, though I am fond of much of what Grossberg writes, including the selections we read from his recent book, I cannot help but wonder who the “we” is in the “how can we sing—in a strange land?” And for whom is this land strange? 

Interestingly enough, Aisha Durham gave a related lecture on the following day called,“Black to the Future: Old School Lessons for a New Hip Hop Generation.” Like Grossberg, Durham questioned the possibility for alternative politics in our contemporary moment. In her case the question was less “how can we sing?” than why do so many fail to hear those who have already begun singing? Rephrasing the question as such allows us to complicate the main suggestions touched on during Grossberg’s lecture: 
  • We should develop rigorous and theoretically consistent models. 
  • We should find means for contemporary counter-culture to enter the popular. 
  • We are not yet pessimistic enough to undertake the work necessary for grasping the complexity of our contemporary political moment. 







A second frame from Erykah Badu's "Window Seat" (2010)
Theoretical Consistency

Grossberg characterized the work of much of contemporary critical theory as “opportunistic” in substituting the theorist’s own politics for methodological rigor. His claim is that cultural studies (or more generally the academic leftwing) has criticized dominant knowledge paradigms such as science only to uphold the authority of those same paradigms whenever it became politically expedient to do so. This methodological inconsistency, he believes, has played into the hands of conservative politics, while the postmodern destabilization of the “real” has made it difficult to act in the name of ethical political action. Although Grossberg’s concern is relevant, I am uncertain if “we” have all had equal ability or desire to operate so opportunistically. 

I am reminded of Barbara Christian’s The Race for Theorywhich expresses concern that the very moment at which “the literature of blacks, women of South America and Africa, etc.” were beginning to receive significant national and international attention is when this “overtly ‘political’ literature was being preempted by a new Western concept proclaiming that reality does not exist.” Is Christian part of the “we” referred to in Grossberg’s talk? The problem with such uncritical use of the pronoun is that it often means some combination of White, Male, Western, Middle-to-Upper-Class, able-bodied, Academic Professional, etc. 

Entering the Popular 

Asking about whom the “we” stands for in the talk’s title matters in terms of Grossberg’s suggestion that contemporary counter-culture is in need of a means through which to politically engage the popular. The insinuation of this claim, however, betrays the combination of the “we” that he imagines as constituting the popular; for, as Durham suggested in her talk, many populations have not stopped singing. Rock-and-roll was influenced by African American artists from the south, such as Muddy Waters. Hence, it could be argued that what “we” conceive of as counter-culture was at least a partial cooptation of radical politics by much less radical (and, in many cases, overtly commercial) interests. In general, I agree with Grossberg’s contention regarding the limits of an all-or-nothing conception of politics; however, I still believe that it is worth noting that it seems as though “counter-culture” is often recognized as existing only when white populations participate.


Matt and Kim in "Lessons Learned" (2009)
This assumption, too, illuminates the significance of Durham’s lecture, for her analysis of the reception of Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat” illustrates that the question is not so much “how can we sing” but, rather, why can this “we” not yet hear those who have already begun to sing? For those unfamiliar with “Window Seat,” the music video features Badu walking through the streets of Dallas, singing lyrics such as “I need you to want me / need you to miss me / I need your attention” as she slowly disrobes. Durham explains that Badu’s music video was inspired by Matt and Kim’s music video for “Lessons Learned.” Whereas Matt and Kim’s nudity in “Lessons Learned” was meant to convey an idea of “just not giving a fuck anymore” and resulted in an apology from the police officers on scene who attempted to break up the filming, Badu was cited for disorderly conduct and her actions generated a significant amount of controversy. As Durham suggests, the question of singing is not so much a matter of production as it is one of the policing of consumption—that is the “we” who refuse to see those who have already begun to sing. 

Optimism of the Will, Pessimism of the Intellect 

I will conclude this response to Larry Grossberg’s presentation with a discussion of pessimism. As his lecture came to an end, Paula Treichler asked how “we” can find the political courage to act in a moment so overwhelmed with pessimism about the possibility of any significant effect (in the face of events such as Citizens United). Grossberg’s response was that “we” are not yet pessimistic enough—and here, I would agree. To the extent that the “we” formulated by Grossberg refers to those in possession of some semblance of privilege—whether real or imagined—I do not think that many of those of his intended audience yet carry the sense of desperation needed to undertake the scholarly work necessary to contribute to a larger—i.e., beyond tenure—problem. This is not to propose a false binary between academic work and political or any other kind of work; rather, I suggest that too often, graduate students and faculty are taught to think in terms of interesting questions as opposed to necessary questions. Although interesting questions have a place in the academy, and are not always separate from those of necessary questions, the stance taken matters. 

In other words, what is at stake if one is lazy when engaging with an intellectual question—what is at stake? Tenure? No. For we all know that a wrong published answer is worth more than the correct, but unpublished, answer when the question is one of tenure. But when the questions are those of how cuts to Women, Infants and Children (WIC) funding will affect your sister and nephew, or how the economic recovery is affecting your father, and how much you can afford to help support them on a graduate student’s salary, then you had better be damn right when answering your questions—because in moments such as these, one does not have the luxury of getting it wrong and still being right; one must live with the consequences. 


Until “we,” whomever they may be, understand this—understand that some questions are more than just questions, but rather a matter of life—then “we” will continue to produce interesting questions for the tenured (or not) faculty to ponder, but “we” will fail to ask the questions and produce the answers that are needed at this particular moment.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Aisha Durham and Amanda Murphyao for their feedback and support in the writing of this response.
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