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a set of sharp and cogent notes

drink deep

Aug 9, 2009 1

Zadie Smith on Joseph O’Neill

Culture

Lee Konstantinou

The term Realism uncomfortably conflates an epistemology with a genre. Genres have histories — they rise, they fall, sometimes they rise again — but epistemologies, though historically constrained, must by necessity claim to have an objective, if still contingent, character. Smith’s claim against lyrical Realism is based on an assessment of the failure of the literary marketplace to sustain multiple roads, but the particulars of her attack grow out of an assessment of the particular epistemic failures of focusing on deep subjectivity and hypercomplex personalities as the expense of the political, the existential, and other dimensions of the Real.

Nov 9, 2008 0

Media Theory and Postmodernist Fiction

Culture

Kevin Hilke

Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 book Understanding Media, advances the notion that as the globe becomes increasingly interconnected by electronic technology it becomes “no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.” The effect of this “implosive factor,” McLuhan maintains, is to alter the position of marginalized subjects, who “can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, and we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.”

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