Search results for "critical code studies working group"
| Results 951 - 1000 of 1083
|
Page 20 of 22
|
|
Sorted by: Relevance | Sort by: Date
|
Results per-page: 10 | 20 | 50 | All
|
[…]once comfortably removed, now interfering at every turn of every written phrase. A novelist working in print can seek (either unconsciously or, like Berry, with fertile self-consciousness) a more lasting, more consistent basis for exploring the fictions, inconsistencies, and less than frank expressions of everyday communication. But the result will be more reflective than creative. The frankness of communication is not, and cannot be, the truth of fiction. To be meaningful, fiction needs to dissemble, and it needs to revel in the awareness that nothing—literally, nothing—can stop the production of meaning, and still different meanings, from spoken words and written […]
[…]Its underlying faith is that human subjectivity, both collective and individual, is self-critical. Because reality as we presently live it—what Tabbi characterizes, in words from Frank, as “living too peacefully in THIS NOW HERE”—is so self-defeating, humans simply must overcome themselves. I can see two ways of understanding Tabbi’s reservations about this Hegelian metanarrative, one associated with Lyotard, the other with Wittgenstein. In Lyotard’s famous characterization of postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (The Postmodern Condition [1979; translation 1984]), any representation of “an untamed America” or of anything else our culture has “cast out” would depend for its legitimation on Hegel’s […]
[…]does not need to be the solidarity of mass culture. Group identity doesn’t have to promote group-think along racial, gendered, or nationalist lines, not when the identity that writers do share, generally, comes in the first place from membership in (or aspiration to) the professional classes that maintain the current world-system. Wallerstein, no less than Wittgenstein, should be required reading in literary seminars and writing workshops because the loss of an “outside” and the appearance of new constraints on creativity are not exclusively philosophical propositions. (See Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction [2004].) Rather, the discovery of a “surprising,” “untamed,” […]
[…]That is, either Slade is a man working for a medium-sized U.S. business, a medium-sized man working for a U.S. business, or a businessman working for a medium-sized U.S. The ambiguity appears to be intentional, and each reading can be supported. The beheading of Brent Marshall is described as not going very smoothly “because of Marshall’s exceptionally thick neck.” Thus the brutality of the slaying is blamed on Marshall, a Virginia “thick-neck” of the type we have learned to feel less compassion for over the years because a thick neck represents a “dumb jock,” “a red neck,” “a hick.” “Big […]
[…]prose invites careful examination, a gradual, rigorous state of attention designed to produce critical intelligence rather than a commercial transaction. Even if many of the characters are psychologically trapped in one way or another, the multiple space of their juxtaposed and intersecting thoughts and feelings indicates that a crucial aesthetic transformation has taken place, a demonstration of what fiction at its subversive best can offer, a rehumanized model of time. A media capitalist like Milo Magnani may be delighted that so many people can be herded into controlled environments like the mall and the theater, where their behavior can be […]
[…]please look hard at these two short passages in Pagolak. Each points to narakaviri, to this critical moment in namele. The first enacts the way up to it (pakanu), and the second the way down from it (plot). You can enter these passages. What I propose is not reasonable, not unreasonable. Enter these two passages. You have no need for more knowledge. Your awareness is equal to the task. This is a task: like all tasks correctly performed, it leads to revelation. Move (as I did) through the first passage to the last, become the bodily metamorphosis that this movement […]
[…]as confidence men – des arnaqueurs); at the end of the book he is convinced that his wife is working with them and against him. In frequenting these criminals, he has gradually picked up their jargon, and in his last letter to his wife he denounces her in terms drawn entirely from that jargon: This chump never blowed you were turned out to hopscotch. You let him find the leather, and he copped you for the pure quill, when you’re nothing but a crow. It took a long time to bobble him but now you’ve knocked him good and he […]
[…]Corrections Corporation,” “HLM Justice,” “Tindell Concrete Products,” “The Dick Group of Companies.” David Matlin’s book brings before us startling evidence from Prison Inc., like this pitch, a promotion by the “American Correctional Association,” which gleefully reports to potential investors that: The prison industry continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. With the number of inmates incarcerated in our nation’s prison’s jails and detention rates approaching 1.5 million the need for…new products and services continues to be an industry priority…and unlimited opportunity for your company to profit from this multi-billion dollar industry (61) So is this sick industry just another example […]
[…]of novelists but also those critical writers who keep the discussion of novels going. We present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary fictions. In gathering critical writing by imaginative authors, our aim is not to review books instantly. Reviews in print media often arrive much faster than the more considered treatment one finds in ebr. An appearance in print generally does not mean that current writing is going to remain available, or up for discussion, for long. So rather than attempt to pace our own writing with the narrow shelf-life […]
[…]bone covered with leather, soon swept away by time. For 30,000 years or so men lived in small groups, wandering a known landscape bounded by focal points of natural landmarks – mountain peaks, lakes, rocks. They followed animal migration routes and salmon runs and ripening fruits and nuts. When the ice advanced, they retreated, and when the ice retreated they returned to fill the ecological niches for which, by their intelligence and adaptability, they were increasingly well suited. They adapted to circumstance without forcing the world to adapt to them. Of course, technology was already changing in the upper Paleolithic. […]
[…]claims that the sublime is “itself a system, one that morphs and adapts to each period’s critical caprice” (5). While I believe that stretches the definition of system, I am well-persuaded that the ecosublime is, as he argues, an efficient term for describing an alertness to holism often found in contemporary represented or mediated environments. Less so am I convinced, however, that the sublime or the ecosublime bodes much for non-fictional worlds, i.e., our own. Rozelle argues that “there is no effective difference between the natural sublime and the rhetorical ecosublime; both have the power to bring the viewer, reader, […]
[…]very quick and sure about something. It’s more deliberate. It’s more like you’ve been working in the light of day and then you see one day that it’s getting dark early, that it doesn’t matter where you are – it won’t do any good. It’s a reflective thing. Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door – something jerks it open and you’re shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it [as seeing and hearing Mike Seeger did for Dylan, in this account]” (Dylan 2004: […]
[…]components of writing’s conditions: why write with any assumption that you are making some critical extension outwards from your own person, some glorious annex to your personality? Words are conditioned by and toward their own occasions. Why write thinking you will be rewarded for it, encouraged to continue, given money, sex, and fame? “If I Were Writing This. . .” has the immediate effect of showing that “The Invoice” was indeed a direct appeal for encouragement of an immediate sort. Both poems affirm that communication cannot easily effect what is desired (money and sex), though one chafes at the feeling […]
[…]internally elaborating, writerly persona that is distinctive of ebr – unafraid of sustained critical thought (aka ‘theory’), attentive to current events (aka ‘ideology critique’), professional in presentation but never for a moment forgetting that we’re writers here. Generally when I ask people to write for ebr…well, they write for ebr. I personally don’t know of any good reason to read a review or critical essay in any medium, if in the process I don’t learn something new about writing. I don’t mean just finding out about a work under review, or informing oneself about what’s current in media, academia, and […]
[…]characters. This step helps players develop their characters more thoroughly and engages the whole group in each player’s story. For the gamemaster, however, it’s an opportunity to be sure that the free-form nature of character creation hasn’t left the character missing important details. Question and answer is important for: – Engagement: Listening to a player talk about their character is widely recognized as dull. It’s like listening to someone recount a dream: it means a lot more to the talker than to the listener. The Q&A process, however, turns the monologue into a dialogue. It makes character exposition much more […]
[…]world – like, let’s get out of this confinement, Thoreau kind of thing. Seems to be a theme working its way in from the fringes. MZD: And looking for real sources of empowerment, real sources of freedom. Not simply becoming part of the rock-n-roll revolution, which has already been corporatized by these cannibalistic groups that orchestrate and entangle teens, sell them this idea that they’re liberating themselves. KB: Punkwear at the Gap. MZD: Exactly. KB: Commodifying the rogue. MZD: What’s the album again? KB: Funeral. “If my parents are crying, then I’ll dig a tunnel from my window to yours. […]
[…]is the eloquent phrase “eternal networks”). This DJ/VJ writing style makes way for a kind of critical overwriting that, at its core, is underwritten by the creative unconscious. Think of it as a mash-up of open content, social software, critical media literacy, and manifest hackerdom. It’s fully invested in narrative thinking, in processing the digital art persona as a distributed political fiction. Rosi Bradiotti, in the introduction to her book Nomadic Subjects says: The nomadic subject is a myth, that is to say a political fiction, that allows me to think through and move across established categories and levels of […]
[…]characters who must work together to solve a murder that one of them committed. The members of the group are assigned characters, each of whom knows certain key facts about the others. They take turns to present pieces of evidence that can be canceled out or combined to form chains of means, motive, and opportunity, until one character has their guilt “proven” to the satisfaction of the group. Each Youdunnit case is about a specific murder – the specifics of the crime and the various potential murderers are all detailed – but can be played multiple times with different outcomes, […]
[…]body counts, gratuitous obscenities, and treacherous women. ‘[S]tandardized formulas were grouped around equally standardized themes, such as the council, the gathering of the army, the challenge, the despoiling of the vanquished, the hero’s shield, and so on and on’ (Ong, 1982:23). Even so, street-level credibility did not guarantee memorable, dramatic performances. Words had to flow. Bards, across the globe, were duty-bound to rock a house party at the drop of a hat. Their skills and exploits were later documented in printed accounts such as The Mwindo Epic (West Africa), The Tale of the Heike (Japan), the Bible (for example, in […]
[…]Twofers or conjoined twins are sufficiently present and visible that they form a distinct minority group, demanding civil rights and proclaiming pride in their identities – San Francisco, in particular, is a haven for twofers, just as it is in actuality for gays and lesbians. Half Life is narrated (or, more accurately, written, since the process of writing the text we read is itself narrated within that text) by Nora, who feels alienated both from the twofer community, and from “singleton” (i.e. “normal,” unicephalous) society. Her twin, Blanche, has been asleep since childhood (since puberty? this is hinted but not […]
[…]looked at him curiously, let go of the pendant and nodded. “The ad was very explicit. It’s a code, you know. I don’t lie in the ad. I said who I was and what I wanted. I’m divorced, have been for eleven years. I don’t want another husband, nor do I want a Long Term Relationship. Secret encounters, occasionally, purely physical. Only one requirement.” “Well-endowed,” Kenneth managed, still leaning forward into his frozen smile. “Exactly. These ads are sometimes successful, sometimes not. This time, I fear, not.” Kenneth didn’t really want this woman, but he couldn’t stop now. “You haven’t […]
[…]and Walter Benn Michaels) this electropoetics release proceeds from the premise that literary studies must come to terms with the fact that it is no longer business as usual – No matter how you look at it, speed is a morally coded concept. With its etymological roots tied at the groin to success, to think speed is to invoke a java applet alternating flashing SPEED / All Others Pay Cash. that writing in the information/digital age both upsets humanist assumptions and makes clear the ways in which the information/digital age upsets many of our assumptions about time and space, body […]
[…]than the (sometimes quite distant) approximations Jackson unearths from comparative religious studies. Here’s a quotation from philosopher of science Bas Van Fraassen that says it more clearly: There is a reason why metaphysics sounds so passé, so vieux jeu today; for intellectually challenging perplexities and paradoxes it has been far surpassed by theoretical science. Do the concepts of the Trinity, the soul, haecceity, universals, prime matter, and potentiality baffle you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherness of closed space-times, event-horizons, EPR correlations, and bootstrap models. (258) This, in short, is the problem that Jackson has. Religion is presented alongside mathematics, […]
[…]However, I think it’s very likely that story-game designers will eventually discover that it’s critical for the former (emotional investment in character and story) to be different and separate from the latter (investment in winning). If they are not discrete, one or the other – probably the story – becomes the redheaded stepchild. That is to say, we will be exactly where we are today, with story-games whose narratives consist of nothing more than accounts of connected events. Perhaps the most interesting tension that could arise in a story-game would be a tension between a player’s ego-based interest in winning […]
[…]to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. . . . I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety – those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot. (160-61) King is a lone writer, with total control over the outcome of his story. Many Storytellers fancy themselves to be a kind of “performance novelist,” acting out […]
[…](Imps, Mancubi, Pinky Demons, etc.) Marines Mars base Moving through corridors Opening doors Color-Coded keycards Triggered events Different levels With these lists, I was able to focus in on the things that board games were good and bad at, and the things I needed to retain the Doom “identity.” Obviously the board game wasn’t going to be able to rely on any sort of animated graphics or sound. Additionally, there was no way to capture the freewheeling adrenaline blast of the computer game – board games simply played too slowly for that. However, board games had their strengths. They were […]
[…]but nonetheless, as the player solves subplot after subplot, he always has the feeling that he is working toward it by increasing his character’s skills. Hence, in a role-playing game, an obstacle is never just an obstacle, but also an opportunity to reach a higher level or find a magical sword which will later serve to finish the ultimate quest. Turnau (2004) notes that the growth idea is also present in Tolkien’s work, especially in Lord of the Rings which he describes as a “sort of cross between Arthurian legend and the Bildungsroman.” However, he notes a profound difference between […]
[…]life is a worthy one, in my opinion. I’ve presented here only one example of story and gameplay working together, instead of being segregated. Gameplay and story need not be at odds with one another. And story need not be confined to the ghetto of cinematics. Reference And Then There Were None. Awe Games. […]
[…]to operate incorrectly. There are limits to what this proceduralism can accomplish. A competent group of Dungeons & Dragons players can simulate any eventuality and deal with any action or communication attempted by the players, while even the best computer RPG can barely prevent the dialogue of computer-controlled characters from becoming painfully repetitious. Any action too far outside those already imagined by a computer game’s design team is usually either met with an uninteresting response or is simply impossible to carry out. But this is only to say that given our current state of technological advancement, there are things that […]
[…]However, I think it’s very likely that story-game designers will eventually discover that it’s critical for the former (emotional investment in character and story) to be different and separate from the latter (investment in winning). If they are not discrete, one or the other – probably the story – becomes the redheaded stepchild. That is to say, we will be exactly where we are today, with story-games whose narratives consist of nothing more than accounts of connected events. Perhaps the most interesting tension that could arise in a story-game would be a tension between a player’s ego-based interest in winning […]
[…]level, the materiality of the keys is not what you want either – you need the information encoded in them, the patterns that allow them to mesh with the patterns encoded in the lock of your car, your office, and your apartment door. The keys are the material substrate for the articulation of information within patterns of presence and absence (the notches and grooves cut in the keys); but also, their absence is an event articulated within a pattern that forms the superstructural information of their presence. You may assume that their loss has not been articulated by randomness, and […]
[…]has stopped, and other bits of routine maintenance; it finishes with diagrams of a clock’s inner workings that are almost embarrassingly intimate and far too complex for you to follow. >reverse link lavori to repair Bending your will and all your attention, you manage to make a reverse-link between The Lavori d’Aracne and Clock Repair, feeling their properties begin to merge together. >read repair The book now turns out to be all about how to construct different types of time-keeping device and false clock using nothing more than household objects and the power of the Lavori. How often this is […]
[…]a love affair turned bad, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.” Comparing media forms is a natural critical impulse in an increasingly transmedia world. Ryan rightly notes that certain types of plot better lend themselves to various modes of narration, and that the failure in Murray’s original example is really the failure of immersion. The myth of the Holodeck exists in part because the Holodeck is presented as a non-mediated environment, a truly immersive world, lacking interfaces of control Outside an invisible oral/aural call and response to the computer at the borders of the narrative.: truly in all respects the […]
[…]resists this traditional reading of literature, for even if one were to crack open the internal working of Pax and independently read the database of textual pieces Moulthrop has coded, such an action would in no way approach the event of reading his work – not only would it eliminate the chronological borders and flow of the work, but, as per Moulthrop’s description, Pax relies upon a random value generator, and so could not be ultimately ordered (153). Thus he has ensured that Pax only exists as a literary event, a textual instrument being played in a literary way, rather […]
[…]to implicate the participant as a charged body in public space whose movement and presence become critical agents in structuring the meaning of the work. The primary theme of alienation and the plight of the social outcast is played out through a series of physical tableaus and boundary crossings enacted by the participant as she walks through the urban landscape listening to a patchwork of location-specific spoken narratives delivered in different voices. My hope was to cast the participant into a cycle of alienation and ambivalence as the point of view in the story shifted across narrator, creature, doctor, and […]
[…]the ways the scene builds to another choice. For example, the audience enjoys watching the scene code-named “Seduction.” However, they are also elated when the woman announces that, if the man doesn’t stop wooing her, she will either kiss or slap him. The “cruel” part of the fate role is exemplified by the audience’s delight in controlling whether or not this living human being – separated from them only by a stage and the social constructs of traditional theater – is embraced by soft lips or repeatedly smacked across the face. The nature of the show caused a great deal […]
[…]also occasionally have individual goals that cause them to cooperate or compete within the group. The Gamemaster (GM) – the person who is responsible for setting up and administrating the game progress and often telling the story as it develops – influences the process by choosing which NPCs may appear and by giving the different characters different challenges and goals, and can ultimately determine the entire outcome of the game, depending on how much power the group has agreed to put in the hands of the GM. If our dwarf tries to stab the human he has been paid to […]
[…]abundance of stories I discovered and the tight network between the quests in the series. As I was working on helping Maybell and Tommy Joe to get together, other members of their families asked me for help. One had lost a necklace, which led to my having to slay boars so that she could bake a pie for the horrid little boy at the neighboring farm, who refused to tell me where he’d lost the necklace he’d stolen from her, unless I got him that particular pie. Finally, he told me that a vicious kobold in the nearby mines had […]
[…]as possible at every point. So much for suspense. That would be a fair statement of Klein’s working procedure. Regarding Newman, this is more exact: he is saying, I believe, that the truth of corporate power, despite the obfuscation that Evan is professionally in charge of, is already limpid; there is no call for Pynchonesque paranoia. That is why Evan must be professionally in charge of obfuscation. At the beginning of the novel, Chano, tired and hopeless, tries to discourage direct action against water privatization and depletion. Ayalo responds: “Speak truth to power, pinto? You think power don’t know?” (13). […]
[…]durée of the current world-system. Consenstein, Peter. Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. A “cognitive approach” to literary analysis that does not lapse into facile explanation. Consenstein might productively be read with The Work of Fiction (Palgrave 2003), a collection edited by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, and my own Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota 2002). These books are useful for anyone wishing to know where literature and the cognitive sciences intersect (and also how to recognize the much larger area of motor and perceptual concerns where the two fields have nothing at all in common). Consenstein, like […]
[…]scholars who can add their own entries and further annotate the existing ones from our MLA group. Not least, networked media are used at the point where in-depth scholarly work today is done, not in 20-minute presentations at over priced, climate controlled rooms using proprietary technology whose requirements, more often than not, distract from the written and visual concepts being presented. The majority of annotations contributed by our panelists continue, not surprisingly, to reference books in print. Where websites are referenced, however, these are not just presented as links but, using the database designed by ebr site architect Ewan Branda, […]
[…]also animated the scientistic wing of the culture wars, which have combined with bona fide science studies to remind us how inextricably entangled the lines between physical, natural, social, and philosophical ideas and convictions have become, or for that matter, have always been. Here, too, religion and politics still thrash about like many-armed creatures of the deep perpetually locked in mortal struggle. In particular, the psychosocial consequences of evolutionary biological discourse continue to be wrangled over by the “neo-Darwinist” advocates of sociobiology and its cognitive sibling, evolutionary psychology, on the one hand, and the “post-Darwinist” challengers to adaptationist evolutionary dogmas, […]
[…]throughout the book is, what if the future of the university is a future without cultural studies? What if cultural studies has no future? For all the earlier insistence upon rethinking the University, about not prejudging or determining its future iterations, the one thing that seems without question is that cultural studies will/should have a role. Cultural studies seems to serve here as the place of “justice,” that which is beyond critique. In the end I remained unconvinced of the centrality of this discipline; perhaps the future University has no disciplines, as Mark Taylor suggests, or at least none that […]
[…]the first two, the sociologist or historian of literature cannot be sure of the object he or she studies. What anyone calls the institutionalization of literature could turn out to be a fraud. Honda produces cars, but who can say whether any creative writing program produces literature? Criticism is the discipline of uncovering rational bases for saying it, and sociological and historical explanation, if they are to be coherent, necessarily presupposes criticism. This raises a fundamental question of whether McGurl, Lennon, and Glass are, in fact, talking about what someone concerned about the present of literature is concerned about. Every […]
[…]more and more towards the idea that artists had to start becoming ecologists, they had to start working with scientists, and they had to start working with people who had done mining, strip mining, coal mining. So, he spent the last couple years of his life writing to many different companies, including the Bingham Copper Mine to turn disused areas – these areas that had been marked by humans and then marked as waste – into artworks. He saw that as one way that he could make a real serious impact. By writing to everybody and then advertising the fact […]
[…]text, adopting – as in this essay – a version of that text’s constraint in his own critical writing. Not an impossible constraint, but an insistent one. Cumulatively, characters and events come to be defined by what they are not, as in this description of the housewife Susan Griffin: “the cut of her clothes wasn’t so domestic that a guy didn’t want to keep looking at her” (147). Each negation, in addition to asserting that something is not the case, also implicitly asserts Nufer’s allegiance to writing under conditions of deprivation and duress. Like an ascetic, he will not permit […]
[…]Author, “I had lost an entire African legacy including invaluable diagrams and cuneiform code books” (121). A German logician called Ludwig claims, approximately: linguistic limits demarcate an I’s entire available extra-linguistic domain, an I’s imaginative and earthly habitat. Do arbitrary, astringent linguistic boundaries also limn a distinct atmosphere? A cosmos? M: Maps. Alphabetical Africa frequently mentions maps, but does not contain many maps for inexperienced adventurers. Geographical hot-spots are mentioned, as are African continent’s disappearing landmass. Blueprints and drawings, however, are entirely absent. A book-incident map – charting characters, actions, events, etc. – could be infinitely helpful. Maybe I can […]
[…]is a kind of hyper-rational way of winning the game) * Madoff’s two chief programmers played a critical role in his own huge “Ponzi scheme,” not because they wrote programs, but because “they used their special computer skills to create sophisticated, credible and entirely phony trading records that were critical to the success of Madoff’s scheme” (“Madoff’s Former IT Experts Arrested”) * I put “Ponzi scheme” in quotation marks because it’s now clear that much of the entire market bubble was due to a different kind of computational deception. As Frontline recently reported, CFTC Chair Brooksley Born alerted Congress to […]
[…]play. Who is the implied spectator – what is the subject position for which Canyonlands codes? A witness perhaps. A silent witness, passive in her frozen inertia; perhaps a widow of the canyon, a grief stricken witness. This witness is unable to think, unable even to bear witness, perhaps, since the ekphrastic intensity of image and sound allow no space for her. She is crushed to a one-dimensional line between the superego of the desert and its dry voice of judgment, and the id of the capitalist enjoyment machine. There it is, unfolding onscreen, in all its terrible beauty and […]
[…]concepts (such as “postmodern” and “simulation”) which are in danger of degenerating from critical clarity into cliché. The scope of Punday’s argument is striking, as he ranges an analytical alphabet from Adorno to Žižek, and employs diverse and difficult critical concepts with remarkable clarity and fluency. However, there are certain points where the centrifugal forces and ambitions of the analysis appear to strain at the limits of the restrictive structuring motif. For example, although the grouping of Walker and Warhol under the archive heading highlights certain salient parallels between their respective projects, the absence of any commentary on their markedly […]