Oct 9, 2009 0
In their press release, the Nobel Committee says they gave Herta Müller this year’s Prize in Literature for how she, “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” I don’t think you can argue that the dispossessed’s landscape should not be depicted. The problem is that the Nobel Committee now only gives the Prize in Literature to people who write about this topic.
Nov 23, 2008 0
At first I thought it was the best book I had ever read. By the time I decided to finish it, I thought that it might be the worst.
Nov 9, 2008 0
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.”
Nov 2, 2008 2
In presenting us with a subject that is a fundamental, inextricable component of an evolving media ecology, Pynchon suggests a new way to figure the subject within the contemporary new media ecologies we inhabit today: as aware but not omniscient, as embedded but not oppressed, as effective but not emancipated; as an elemental, potentially compelling, actantal force.
