Julian Murphet

Narrative and media

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?

Character and Event

Since Aristotle, “character” has tended to be thought in dialectical conjunction with its antipode, “plot.” But these two moments – the one allegorizing the theological horizon of predestination and Totality, the other standing in for subjective particularity and the gesture of free will – are ceaselessly reabsorbed into one another in the phenomenology of reading, as what had at first appeared to be the imposition of a grand design is subsequently revealed to have been the random convergence of dissociated wills; before this latter is again unveiled as the cunning of authorial reason after all. This dialectic, out of time and itself a kind of allegory for historical experience, occludes certain determinations that have, in modernity, differentiated the concept of “character” both from itself and from its narrative situations: determinations of historicity, of form, and of media. These cannot be approached separately, but must be faced squarely in their knotted convolution. What their involvement with the given problematic suggests is that, alongside this dominant dialectic of plot and character, a minor dialectic, of critical reflexivity and the relentless auto-correction of partial syntheses internal to the concept of “character,” must also be registered. It is this latter dialectic that will be the focus of what follows, whose first part sketches a provisional theory of modern “character” as something in determinate excess of the sheerly narratological schemata with which it has tended to be thought. For the motor engine of literary and theatrical reflexivity is one that builds new characterological systems out of the remnants of the immediate past, before these again are metamorphosed into their own caricatures during the next stage of revision and generic differentiation. “Character” is situated at the very crux of this dialectic: in a perennial process of reification, as the new modes of narrativization and literary discursivity stabilize into reliable forms; but also the privileged site for reflexive modification and renewal – in something like a perfect analogue for the development of modern subjectivity, which is itself drawn into a ceaseless dialectic of substantiation, self-estrangement and sublation throughout modernity. Part two then looks to a particular text, Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1955 film Ordet, as a practical demonstration and manifesto for a new theory of character, at an obtuse angle to the

Gertrude Stein’s Machinery of Perception

The emergence of cinema can be shown to have been heralded — in France as nowhere else — as the salvation of a literature which, according to Georg Lukacs, was ‘based on ad hoc observation’ and ‘must perforce be superficial’.1 If Naturalism was the misguided attempt ‘to make literature scientific, to transform it into an applied natural science, into sociology’ (p. 140), then cinema, belonging technically to that ‘scientific’ paradigm, might relieve literature of its ‘paltry and schematic’ descriptive vocation, and liberate its humanistic potentials once more. Certainly for Andre Gide, the newer recording media prompted a radical reconsideration of the novel’s properties: Just as photography in the past freed painting from its concern for a certain sort of accuracy, so the phonograph will eventually no doubt rid the novel of the kind of dialogue which is drawn from the life and which realists take so much pride in. Outward events, accidents, traumatisms, belong to the cinema. The novel should leave them to it. Even the description of the characters does not seem to me properly to belong to the genre. No; this does not seem to me the business of the pure novel (and in art, as in everything else, purity is the only thing I care about).2

‘Events listening to their own tremors’: Zukofsky and objective anachrony

Starting from the point that Louis Zukofsky and Objectivism are already anachronisms in literary history, the essay tracks some of the consequences of that for a materialist reading of the poems, especially the epic “A”. If an epic is a poem that “includes history” (Pound), then there are various ways in which that inclusion can be construed. Zukofsky, who sets out with a Poundian technique of temporal juxtaposition within a compositional field, gradually transforms his aesthetic in a more acutely anachronistic direction. When mere juxtaposition failed to re-ignite the spark of historical hope bequeathed by the past, he found that the concentrated force-field of “new” historical contents in anachronistic, extinct formal frames could accomplish the miracle: a momentary restitution of the lost light of dead labour.

The Mole and the Multiple: A Chiasmus of Character

In this essay, the return of character as a literary-critical concept is explored for what it tells us about the intricate relations between the one and the multiple in the long modern period. The contemporary resurgence of character studies stops short at the dawn of the twentieth century; and for good reason. It is with the modern novel that literary character begins to undergo, and rapidly develops, its most radical encounter with multiplicity—to the extent that its achieved unity gives way. At the same time, the emergence of commercial cinema, which typically regressed to a very primitive model of character in its narrative logic, stimulated these literary experiments with characterological erosion from within. However, the subsequent trend of novels being written for the screen, and of films beginning to do their own multiple-thinking, suggests a curious double chiasmus, whose logic might provide a key to the thinking of subjective constitution in the late modern period.

Narrative and Media: The genres of television

Each medium develops its own ways of telling stories. These different ways of telling stories encompass the devices of the plot, the technical aspects of the medium, and the codes and conventions of types of stories. Another way of putting this, which employs terms you will have encountered in earlier chapters, is that different media allow different possibilities of diegesis (telling the story) and mimesis (performance) and the relation between the two. Whether as readers (audiences) of texts or as producers of them, we recognise these combinations and categorise them, in order to advise or predict what kind of story this is going to be. These categories of story may be identified as genres (the French word for types or kinds). On the one hand, genres can be seen as offering an important way of framing texts that assists comprehension. Genre knowledge orientates competent readers towards appropriate attitudes, assumptions and expectations about a text, which are useful in making sense of it. On the other hand, genres may be seen ideologically, as constraining interpretation, as limiting the available meanings of the text. What is a genre? Texts concerned with the study of television, such as Williams (1990), Tulloch (2000) or Creeber (2001), offer genres (or forms, as Williams calls them) of television program, such as news, drama, ‘variety’, sport, advertising, ‘cop series’, soap opera, documentary, cartoons, situation comedy, childrens television and ‘popular entertainment’. Some of these are broken down still further by Creeber (2001).

Aesthetic Perception and "the flaw": Towards a Jamesonian Account of Late James

James’s late novels turn upon the need to resolve representational issues arising from the eruption of an excessive pleasure within composed “pictures” of civility. The acute dialectical tensions between “picture” and “scene” that result draw attention to a certain limitation in Jameson’s influential new account of the interplay between récit and affect in nineteenth-century fiction. Narrative takes its cue from affective seizures, and affect is felt in the discrepancies between mutually contaminating points of view. This unique balance of forces suggests a specific historical conjuncture in the first age of finance capital.

Narrative and Media: Frontmatter

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?

Narrative and Media: Television: narratives and ideology

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?