Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the &q... more Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the "Superbrats of Hollywood" to the political cinema of the Third World. Yet in 1968, he abandoned one of the most brilliant careers in French cinema to pursue his investigations into sound and image on the periphery of the industry he had rejected. Following a protected childhood in Switzerland in the Second World War, the post-war years saw Godard as a troubled adolescent in Paris, where the prescribed courses of the Sorbonne were ignored in favour of the extraordinary teaching of Andre Bazin, the greatest of film critics. In the pages of "Cahiers du Cinema", Godard - together with Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol - hammered out an aesthetic that would take the world by storm as the young critics swapped pens for cameras at the end of the 1950s to create the cinema of the nouvelle vague. Hugely prolific in his first 10 years - "A Bout de Souffle", "Le Petit Soldat", "Le Mepris," "Pierrot Le Fou", "Alphaville", "Made in USA" and many others all appeared in the 1960s - Godard became and remains one of the most adventurous and enigmatic film-directors at work in the world today.
The project has held two seminars a year since then and the result of some of the work to date ca... more The project has held two seminars a year since then and the result of some of the work to date can be found at keyword.pitt.edu. To help complete the project, members Jonathan Arac and Colin MacCabe jointly directed a graduate seminar at Pittsburgh in the spring of 2016. This aimed to serve two purposes: making the research to date a resource for Pitt graduate students and also using a younger set of researchers to generate the final words for the project. The seminar had three phases. For the first five weeks we studied the books that Williams had been writing when he composed Keywords. The most directly important of these was Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958). Keywords was the workbook from which he had written Culture and Society and he had originally wished to include it as an appendix to that book. However, Williams explicitly considered both his novel Border Country (1960) and The Long Revolution (1961) as forming a trilogy with Culture and Society and we considered all three books in some depth. It is worth recording that Williams's novel, written in Britain in the fifties, strongly held the attention of American graduate students seven decades later, and that there was general astonishment that The Long Revolution was not better known. It was relatively difficult to explain to students that the humanism and historicism of The Long Revolution meant that the generation who had taken Althusser as their model of Marxism had not really engaged with Williams's vision of socialist humanism. After five weeks reading Williams, two seminars then placed Williams in context, first of all looking at the theories of language, particularly those of Richards and Empson that Williams would have encountered as a Cambridge undergraduate and then looking at both William Empson's and Quentin Skinner's critical reviews of Keywords.
Der Titel dieses Vortrags1 bezieht sich auf eine Schrift Fredric Jamesons2, in der er textanalyti... more Der Titel dieses Vortrags1 bezieht sich auf eine Schrift Fredric Jamesons2, in der er textanalytisch eine Reihe von Filmen untersucht, die aus einer grosen Vielfalt von Landern mit sehr unterschiedlichen technologischen Niveaus stammen und sich jeweils an ein sehr unterschiedliches Publikum richten. Der Begriff der geopolitischen Asthetik, den Jameson in dieser Analyse entwickelt, bezieht sich weder auf die nationalen Kulturen, in denen die Filmemacher verwurzelt sind, noch auf die Technologien, die sie verwenden, noch auf das jeweilige Publikum, fur das die Filme vermarktet werden. Vielmehr spielen diese Faktoren fur die geopolitische Asthetik allenfalls insoweit eine Rolle, wie sie fur das politische Unbewuste der Filme von Bedeutung sind, die Jameson untersucht.
On Pornography was written in the context of the intense cultural—political debates in the 1970s ... more On Pornography was written in the context of the intense cultural—political debates in the 1970s and 1980s in which pornography was recast as problematic after its neat inclusion in a discourse of sexual liberation and the rights of the private individual (rights to which Clarence Thomas was famously to appeal in the US Senate hearing on his confirmation as Supreme Court Justice when he indicated that he would refuse to answer questions concerning the privacy of his bedroom and so his use of pornography). Decisive here were the debates within and from feminism, one major emphasis of which sharply refocused pornography as a matter not of freedom of expression but of the exercising of a form of power directed first and foremost against women. Perceived as such, pornography raised questions of legal and social control which prompted a variety of reponses, including within feminism (one significant example of which is crystallised in the dual emphasis in the name of the British organisation Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship).
In the course of the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Highlands of Scotland were subjec... more In the course of the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Highlands of Scotland were subject to a process of ideological appropriation that turned them from a perceived alien province of no interest into a site of romance, the world of a romantic imagination epitomised at the end of the process by Walter Scott’s ballad-epic The Lady of the Lake (1810). Womack analyses this cultural construction from its inception after the defeat of the Jacobite clans at Culloden in 1746 and shows how, in ‘a covert complementarity’, it accompanies ‘improvement’, the dominant theme of British discourse concerning the Highlands. Though ‘romance’and Improvement’ may seem opposites, they prove, in fact, to have been closely related: romance serves to settle the contradictions to which improvement gives rise within ‘a kind of reservation in which the values [the latter] provokes and suppresses can be contained — that is, preserved, but also imprisoned’.
There is perhaps no more debilitating feature of modern thought than the almost unbridgeable divi... more There is perhaps no more debilitating feature of modern thought than the almost unbridgeable division in the modern academy between science and the humanities. The dangers that C. P. Snow attempted to indicate in his 1959 Rede Lecture The Two Cultures have only increased in the decades since he wrote and no amount of Leavisite fulmination can get over the divide. If the history and philosophy of science can now be considered one of the key disciplines for defining the relations across the disciplines, it is still not the necessary point of reference that it should be. Stanley Shostak takes Cinderella as his muse, when, as a practising biologist, he sets out to describe the historical rise to power and the contemporary inadequacy of molecular biology. He reads the story of the rise to supremacy of the study of the gene as the death of the Cinderella of sciences, biology. His heretical account questions at every level the current dominance of molecular biology and suggests that it depends on a series of factors that have nothing to do with the kind of disinterested inquiry which science is meant to represent. His call for a much richer and more diverse biology makes clear how damaging the current divide between science and humanities is to both parties.
It has been argued that Joyce’s texts grant a primacy to the material of language over the fugiti... more It has been argued that Joyce’s texts grant a primacy to the material of language over the fugitive meanings that attach to it. As such they offer a different experience and have different political consequences, from the classic realist text which they displace. The realist text is organised to confer an identity on the reader through an exclusion of language. We become deaf to the shifting of the signifier as we become fixated in meaning. As we read Joyce, however, a surplus of meaning enables us to hear the crowd of voices that compose us. Voices that bear witness to the incompatible discourses that have traversed our flesh. Joyce’s formal experiments deal with our very substance and when Beckett states that Joyce’s writing ‘is not about something, it is that something itself’ (Beckett 1929, p. 14), he points not to an empty formalism but to an encounter with those constitutive processes that render us sexed and civil subjects. Joyce’s writing concentrates on the relations of language, desire and power; of discourse, sexuality and politics.
This book addresses itself to the problem of understanding the relations between psychoanalysis a... more This book addresses itself to the problem of understanding the relations between psychoanalysis and language not only in terms of contemporary linguistic and philosophical conceptions of language but also in relation to the wider field of the human sciences.
Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the &q... more Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the "Superbrats of Hollywood" to the political cinema of the Third World. Yet in 1968, he abandoned one of the most brilliant careers in French cinema to pursue his investigations into sound and image on the periphery of the industry he had rejected. Following a protected childhood in Switzerland in the Second World War, the post-war years saw Godard as a troubled adolescent in Paris, where the prescribed courses of the Sorbonne were ignored in favour of the extraordinary teaching of Andre Bazin, the greatest of film critics. In the pages of "Cahiers du Cinema", Godard - together with Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol - hammered out an aesthetic that would take the world by storm as the young critics swapped pens for cameras at the end of the 1950s to create the cinema of the nouvelle vague. Hugely prolific in his first 10 years - "A Bout de Souffle", "Le Petit Soldat", "Le Mepris," "Pierrot Le Fou", "Alphaville", "Made in USA" and many others all appeared in the 1960s - Godard became and remains one of the most adventurous and enigmatic film-directors at work in the world today.
The project has held two seminars a year since then and the result of some of the work to date ca... more The project has held two seminars a year since then and the result of some of the work to date can be found at keyword.pitt.edu. To help complete the project, members Jonathan Arac and Colin MacCabe jointly directed a graduate seminar at Pittsburgh in the spring of 2016. This aimed to serve two purposes: making the research to date a resource for Pitt graduate students and also using a younger set of researchers to generate the final words for the project. The seminar had three phases. For the first five weeks we studied the books that Williams had been writing when he composed Keywords. The most directly important of these was Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958). Keywords was the workbook from which he had written Culture and Society and he had originally wished to include it as an appendix to that book. However, Williams explicitly considered both his novel Border Country (1960) and The Long Revolution (1961) as forming a trilogy with Culture and Society and we considered all three books in some depth. It is worth recording that Williams's novel, written in Britain in the fifties, strongly held the attention of American graduate students seven decades later, and that there was general astonishment that The Long Revolution was not better known. It was relatively difficult to explain to students that the humanism and historicism of The Long Revolution meant that the generation who had taken Althusser as their model of Marxism had not really engaged with Williams's vision of socialist humanism. After five weeks reading Williams, two seminars then placed Williams in context, first of all looking at the theories of language, particularly those of Richards and Empson that Williams would have encountered as a Cambridge undergraduate and then looking at both William Empson's and Quentin Skinner's critical reviews of Keywords.
Der Titel dieses Vortrags1 bezieht sich auf eine Schrift Fredric Jamesons2, in der er textanalyti... more Der Titel dieses Vortrags1 bezieht sich auf eine Schrift Fredric Jamesons2, in der er textanalytisch eine Reihe von Filmen untersucht, die aus einer grosen Vielfalt von Landern mit sehr unterschiedlichen technologischen Niveaus stammen und sich jeweils an ein sehr unterschiedliches Publikum richten. Der Begriff der geopolitischen Asthetik, den Jameson in dieser Analyse entwickelt, bezieht sich weder auf die nationalen Kulturen, in denen die Filmemacher verwurzelt sind, noch auf die Technologien, die sie verwenden, noch auf das jeweilige Publikum, fur das die Filme vermarktet werden. Vielmehr spielen diese Faktoren fur die geopolitische Asthetik allenfalls insoweit eine Rolle, wie sie fur das politische Unbewuste der Filme von Bedeutung sind, die Jameson untersucht.
On Pornography was written in the context of the intense cultural—political debates in the 1970s ... more On Pornography was written in the context of the intense cultural—political debates in the 1970s and 1980s in which pornography was recast as problematic after its neat inclusion in a discourse of sexual liberation and the rights of the private individual (rights to which Clarence Thomas was famously to appeal in the US Senate hearing on his confirmation as Supreme Court Justice when he indicated that he would refuse to answer questions concerning the privacy of his bedroom and so his use of pornography). Decisive here were the debates within and from feminism, one major emphasis of which sharply refocused pornography as a matter not of freedom of expression but of the exercising of a form of power directed first and foremost against women. Perceived as such, pornography raised questions of legal and social control which prompted a variety of reponses, including within feminism (one significant example of which is crystallised in the dual emphasis in the name of the British organisation Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship).
In the course of the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Highlands of Scotland were subjec... more In the course of the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Highlands of Scotland were subject to a process of ideological appropriation that turned them from a perceived alien province of no interest into a site of romance, the world of a romantic imagination epitomised at the end of the process by Walter Scott’s ballad-epic The Lady of the Lake (1810). Womack analyses this cultural construction from its inception after the defeat of the Jacobite clans at Culloden in 1746 and shows how, in ‘a covert complementarity’, it accompanies ‘improvement’, the dominant theme of British discourse concerning the Highlands. Though ‘romance’and Improvement’ may seem opposites, they prove, in fact, to have been closely related: romance serves to settle the contradictions to which improvement gives rise within ‘a kind of reservation in which the values [the latter] provokes and suppresses can be contained — that is, preserved, but also imprisoned’.
There is perhaps no more debilitating feature of modern thought than the almost unbridgeable divi... more There is perhaps no more debilitating feature of modern thought than the almost unbridgeable division in the modern academy between science and the humanities. The dangers that C. P. Snow attempted to indicate in his 1959 Rede Lecture The Two Cultures have only increased in the decades since he wrote and no amount of Leavisite fulmination can get over the divide. If the history and philosophy of science can now be considered one of the key disciplines for defining the relations across the disciplines, it is still not the necessary point of reference that it should be. Stanley Shostak takes Cinderella as his muse, when, as a practising biologist, he sets out to describe the historical rise to power and the contemporary inadequacy of molecular biology. He reads the story of the rise to supremacy of the study of the gene as the death of the Cinderella of sciences, biology. His heretical account questions at every level the current dominance of molecular biology and suggests that it depends on a series of factors that have nothing to do with the kind of disinterested inquiry which science is meant to represent. His call for a much richer and more diverse biology makes clear how damaging the current divide between science and humanities is to both parties.
It has been argued that Joyce’s texts grant a primacy to the material of language over the fugiti... more It has been argued that Joyce’s texts grant a primacy to the material of language over the fugitive meanings that attach to it. As such they offer a different experience and have different political consequences, from the classic realist text which they displace. The realist text is organised to confer an identity on the reader through an exclusion of language. We become deaf to the shifting of the signifier as we become fixated in meaning. As we read Joyce, however, a surplus of meaning enables us to hear the crowd of voices that compose us. Voices that bear witness to the incompatible discourses that have traversed our flesh. Joyce’s formal experiments deal with our very substance and when Beckett states that Joyce’s writing ‘is not about something, it is that something itself’ (Beckett 1929, p. 14), he points not to an empty formalism but to an encounter with those constitutive processes that render us sexed and civil subjects. Joyce’s writing concentrates on the relations of language, desire and power; of discourse, sexuality and politics.
This book addresses itself to the problem of understanding the relations between psychoanalysis a... more This book addresses itself to the problem of understanding the relations between psychoanalysis and language not only in terms of contemporary linguistic and philosophical conceptions of language but also in relation to the wider field of the human sciences.
Fifty percent of Hollywood productions each year are adaptations--films that use an already publi... more Fifty percent of Hollywood productions each year are adaptations--films that use an already published book, dramatic work, or comic as their source material. If the original is well known, then for most spectators the question of whether these adaptations are "true to the spirit" of the original is central. The recent wave of adaptation studies dismisses the question of fidelity as irrelevant, mistaken, or an affront to the unstable nature of meaning itself. The essays gathered here, mixing the field's top authorities (Andrew, Gunning, Jameson, Mulvey, and Naremore) with fresh new voices, take the question of correspondence between source and adaptation as seriously as do producers and audiences. Spanning examples from Shakespeare to Ghost World, and addressing such notable directors as Welles, Kubrick, Hawks, Tarkovsky, and Ophuls, the contributors write against the grain of recent adaption studies by investigating the question of what fidelity might mean in its broadest and truest sense, what it might reveal of the adaptive process, and why it is still one of the richest veins of investigation in the study of cinema.
Keywords for Today takes us deep into the history of the language in order to better understand o... more Keywords for Today takes us deep into the history of the language in order to better understand our contemporary world. From nature to cultural appropriation and from black to terror, the most important words in political and cultural debate have complicated and complex histories. The aim of this book is to sketch these histories in order to illuminate debate. The book is based on Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, first published in 1976. There are approximately 85 new entries (ranging from access to youth), and approximately 40 entries retained from Williams (examples: nature, realism, violence) have had updates added covering the decades since Williams published.
The book is both a history of English covering much of the most important semantic change in the language and a handbook of current political and ideological debate. In a period when the deluge of information both real and fake makes political understanding more and more difficult, Keywords offers a crucial tool to distinguish meanings and to make judgments. Whether it is demonstrating how recent are the religious meanings of fundamentalism or how complicated is the linguistic history of queer, Keywords for Today constantly intrigues and enlightens.
Keywords for Today is an essential tool for any serious student of the humanities from freshman to professor. From culture to identity, from sexuality to socialism, Keywords for Today provides the crucial contexts and histories for our twenty-first century vocabulary. It is also a book of profound interest for anybody interested in the history of the language or current political debate.
The book is authored by the Keywords Project, an independent group of scholars who, with the support of the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the academic journal Critical Quarterly, have spent more than a decade preparing Keywords for Today.
Sylvia Adamson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Literary History, School of English, University of Sheffield Kathryn Allan, Senior Lecturer in the History of English, University College London Susan Z. Andrade, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh Jonathan Arac, Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh Jennifer Davis, Faculty of Law and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge Alan Durant, Professor of Communication in the School of Law, Middlesex University, London Philip Durkin, Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy, SOAS, University of London Stephen Heath, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Keeper of the Old Library Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh Seth Mehl, Research Associate, School of English, University of Sheffield Arjuna Parakrama, Senior Professor of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka Kellie Robertson, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland Holly Yanacek, Assistant Professor of German, James Madison University
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The book is both a history of English covering much of the most important semantic change in the language and a handbook of current political and ideological debate. In a period when the deluge of information both real and fake makes political understanding more and more difficult, Keywords offers a crucial tool to distinguish meanings and to make judgments. Whether it is demonstrating how recent are the religious meanings of fundamentalism or how complicated is the linguistic history of queer, Keywords for Today constantly intrigues and enlightens.
Keywords for Today is an essential tool for any serious student of the humanities from freshman to professor. From culture to identity, from sexuality to socialism, Keywords for Today provides the crucial contexts and histories for our twenty-first century vocabulary. It is also a book of profound interest for anybody interested in the history of the language or current political debate.
The book is authored by the Keywords Project, an independent group of scholars who, with the support of the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the academic journal Critical Quarterly, have spent more than a decade preparing Keywords for Today.
Sylvia Adamson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Literary History, School of English, University of Sheffield
Kathryn Allan, Senior Lecturer in the History of English, University College London
Susan Z. Andrade, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh
Jonathan Arac, Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh
Jennifer Davis, Faculty of Law and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge
Alan Durant, Professor of Communication in the School of Law, Middlesex University, London
Philip Durkin, Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary
Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy, SOAS, University of London
Stephen Heath, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Keeper of the Old Library
Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh
Seth Mehl, Research Associate, School of English, University of Sheffield
Arjuna Parakrama, Senior Professor of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Kellie Robertson, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland
Holly Yanacek, Assistant Professor of German, James Madison University