Mark Wallace | Dublin City University (original) (raw)
Papers by Mark Wallace
Between: Rivista dell'Associazione di Teoria e Storia Comparata della Letteratura, Nov 30, 2012
Thomas Carlyle was among the most influential writers in the English language during the 19th cen... more Thomas Carlyle was among the most influential writers in the English language during the 19th century, but is now ostensibly absent from cultural memory. Nevertheless, his ideas may be seen to live on indirectly in the works of the writers he influenced, one of whom is Elizabeth Gaskell. The 2004 adaptation of Gaskell’s North and South provides an instance of a modern approach to Carlylean ideas embodied in the source text. The adaptation finds itself in dialogue with Carlylean notions of heroism and leadership, modifying these notions for acceptance with a 21st century audience. The treatment of the Carlylean content of Gaskell’s novel is both revealing of socio-political ideals latent in modern audiences and a demonstration of the transmission and transmutation of ideologies through narrative and across media.
Books by Mark Wallace
Among the vehicles for personal, national or global expressions and exchanges around cultural mat... more Among the vehicles for personal, national or global expressions and exchanges around cultural matters, the arts have always held a pivotal position. The diverse range of approaches and of study texts in (Re) Writing Without Borders: Contemporary Intermedial Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts celebrates the proliferation of word and image media, and the porosity between them, and attests to the continuing relevance of literature and the visual arts in producing and reproducing meaning within contemporary contexts. The essays gathered here examine cross-artistic encounters with a view to capture the most up-to-date interaction between literature and the visual arts.
Book Chapters by Mark Wallace
En Busca de Agua Caliente, by H.G. Wells, trans. Arturo Gonzalo Aizpiri., 2020
I provided an introduction to the first Spanish translation of H.G. Wells' book, In Search of Hot... more I provided an introduction to the first Spanish translation of H.G. Wells' book, In Search of Hot Water (En Busca de Aqua Caliente). The introduction was translated into Spanish by the book's translator, Arturo Gonzalo Aizpiri. The book, one of Wells' least known, is a collection of essays published in 1939 dealing with topical issues including the international tensions preceding WWII. The translation was published by Ediciones Evohé in 2020.
Cronin B., MagShamhráin R., Preuschoff N., eds., Adaptation Considered as a Collaborative Art: Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, Palgrave Macmillan., 2020
This chapter considers the significance of adapting a much older source text and proposes the te... more This chapter considers the significance of adapting a much older source text and proposes the term transtemporal adaptation to describe the result, building on Linda Hutcheon’s analysis of transculturality in adaptations. Transtemporal adaptations are proposed as a form of “arguing with the past”, in the terms of Gillian Beer. Sherlock (2010–) is an exemplary text, one in which is inscribed the tension between Doyle’s nineteenth-century ideals and the Freudian narrative of personal development that is dominant in twenty-first-century popular culture, a tension manifest in the depiction of the detective’s (a)sexuality. The relation between adapter and source is revealed to be a collaboration marked by conflict and the mutually incompatible demands of fidelity to the source and adherence to dominant narrative formations within the adaptation’s own context.
(Re)Writing Without Borders: Contemporary Intermedial Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts, 2018
Television and film adaptations of literary narrative works are frequently produced at a signific... more Television and film adaptations of literary narrative works are frequently produced at a significant distance in time from the production of the source. This essay investigates the conditioning effect that this temporal relation has on the narrative as adapted. Using the 2007 BBC series based on Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist as the primary case study, this essay proposes the notion of transtemporality as a useful tool for conceptualizing and studying narrative adaptations. It is argued that transtemporality produces an ideological tension in adaptations, one that can be isolated through comparative study of the adaptation and its source in their cultural and generic contexts.
Project documents by Mark Wallace
The Guidelines for Universities Engaging in Social Responsibility are the final output of the Era... more The Guidelines for Universities Engaging in Social Responsibility are the final output of the Erasmus+ UNIBILITY project. The Guidelines are designed to offer an accessible set of recommendations and examples of good practice for universities as they respond to their changing social role in a variety of contexts.
The Guidelines are aimed primarily at a university readership: management; research, teaching and administrative staff; and students. They are also designed to be accessible to relevant policy makers and community partners.
The Guidelines were written by the UNIBILITY partners and edited by Mark Wallace (Dublin City University) and Katharina Resch (University of Vienna). Full authorial details can be found in the document.
Thesis Chapters by Mark Wallace
![Research paper thumbnail of The Unspeakable Victorian: Thomas Carlyle, Ideology and Adaptation [Abstract, Introduction and Chapter One]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/51698306/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This thesis aims to provide an analysis of comparative ideologies through close reading of 19th-c... more This thesis aims to provide an analysis of comparative ideologies through close reading of 19th-century fictional texts and their 20th-/21st-century film and television adaptations, isolating similarities and differences in the presentation of specific socio-political issues. The fictional texts in question have been chosen for their display of a complex and substantial dialogue with the writings of the 19th-century political and cultural commentator Thomas Carlyle, a dialogue whose existence is established through documentary evidence and close reading of the texts themselves. By extending the analysis of these texts to their later screen adaptations, Carlyle’s ideas become a background against which changing assumptions about the human condition and changing modes of narrativizing said condition come into relief. The suitability of Carlyle for such a study is demonstrated by an examination of his reception history, which establishes him both as a virtually ubiquitous influence on the Anglophone literature of his day and as a near perfect ideological Other for a 21st-century reader in Western culture, articulating stances at odds with ideological tendencies within contemporary culture and embodied in dominant generic tropes of contemporary narrative. Relevant adaptations are considered as a form of reading Carlyle, one whose elements of debate and struggle with the ideological otherness of the text is explored using Gillian Beer’s concept of “‘arguing with the past”’. The importance of a re-consideration of Carlyle’s ideas within the context of 21st-century narratives and cultural assumptions is argued using Paul Feyerabend’s conception of knowledge as “‘an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives”’, wherein even failed views must be retained and re-worked to add to the content of the whole.
Conference Presentations by Mark Wallace
Thomas Carlyle’s enormous influence on his contemporaries is not in doubt. That his reputation de... more Thomas Carlyle’s enormous influence on his contemporaries is not in doubt. That his reputation declined precipitately in the 20th century is also uncontested. Several convincing circumstantial reasons for this decline have been put forward, ranging from the perceived link to Nazi ideology to the effect of James Anthony Froude’s iconoclastic biography. Such reasoning leaves open the possibility that within Carlylean thought there is an essential core of continuing relevance, when abstracted from historical circumstance. The viability of such a view can be examined by reading Carlyle into influential and popular contemporary artworks, and thus relating him to the structure of feeling from which they spring. A useful test case in this method is The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the final film in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. This is so because the film is avowed by its creators to be heavily indebted to Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859), itself greatly influenced by Dickens’ multiple readings of Carlyle’s French Revolution (1838). Several questions can then be asked about The Dark Knight Rises: To what extent is the Carlylean influence present in the film, mediated through Dickens? Can an extended comparison be drawn between the philosophy of history in Carlyle’s work, and that in Nolan’s? If so, what are the historical and cultural factors that give rise to the re-emergence of such a philosophy at this time? And, finally, can a more thorough re-engagement with Carlyle’s texts provide useful tools for such reflections on history as are present in contemporary popular culture, as represented by The Dark Knight Rises?
The transition from the romantic period to the early Victorian saw a move from the view of imagin... more The transition from the romantic period to the early Victorian saw a move from the view of imagination as creation to that of imagination as representation. This return to an earlier mode was partially inspired by the influential social and moral teachings of Thomas Carlyle – considered a philosopher by his contemporaries, if not by ours – and signalled a profound shift in the content and tone of narrative fiction during that period: literature was compelled to engage with social realities and class relations; the genre of “The Condition-of-England” novel was born. This period was unusual in the close relation between literature and philosophy (as the latter term was then understood), and their common engagement with the specific social reality that surrounded them. The influence of the writings, theoretical and literary, of that period, lives on today in popular culture, as can be clearly seen in Christopher Nolan’s Batman blockbuster, The Dark Knight Rises (2011), which expressly invokes Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and, thus, at second- hand recalls Thomas Carlyle’s 1838 history of the French Revolution and his theories of revolution and mob violence, as well as his dicta concerning the function of literature (and, by extension/analogy, film). Carlyle’s philosophy of history, mediated through the literature of Dickens, is seen in Nolan’s film to regain relevance in our own age; demonstrating that, far from perpetuating an ancient quarrel, philosophy and literature (and the narrative arts in general) can be mutually influential in a positive manner, promoting a model of the imagination that strives to represent and to understand society, and to provide insight into the emergent Structures of Feeling (in Raymond Williams’ term) at a given time.
The Sherlock Holmes story "Charles Augustus Milverton" has proven a particularly fertile source f... more The Sherlock Holmes story "Charles Augustus Milverton" has proven a particularly fertile source for adapters, in part because it has the noteworthy feature of depicting Holmes in an unwonted incursion into the romantic sphere, when he seduces and becomes engaged to a housemaid for information-gathering purposes. Differences in the treatment of this textual moment in retellings of the story provide opportunities to reflect, à la Žižek, on how "one of the best ways to detect shifts in the ideological constellation is to compare successive retellings of the same story". Specifically, the narratives of heroic celibacy that Doyle was able to draw on from 19th-century thinkers and sages, notably Thomas Carlyle, are absent from contemporary cultural discourse, creating an irresoluble tension in presentations of Holmes in modern adaptations, particularly the BBC series Sherlock (2010- ): the felt imperative of fidelity to Doyle's character dictates that the character remain celibate, but the construction and development of character in popular culture is reliant on tropes of romance and sexuality. The result is a series whose formal meaning includes a portrayal of Holmes as celibate, but whose experiential meaning, to use Stanley Fish's term, includes a constant interrogation of Holmes' celibate status and his sexual being, particularly notable in the series' expanded adaptation of the seduction storyline from "Charles Augustus Milverton", in which Sherlock's professional motivation for the seduction is carefully kept from the viewer, who is thus compelled to experience Sherlock as a conventionally sexual being for the duration of the storyline. Such narrative choices are related to the absence of Carlylean ideals of Heroic celibacy and to what asexuality scholar Mark Corrigan has called the "sexual assumption", whereby sexual attraction is seen as both universal and uniform. and its absence is explicable in terms of an distinguishable pathology.
The ideology of the Victorian sage and cultural prophet Thomas Carlyle is absent from any major s... more The ideology of the Victorian sage and cultural prophet Thomas Carlyle is absent from any major stream of contemporary thought, yet his influence on his own contemporaries was profound, and ensures that his own work lives on in some measure through them. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was acknowledged by its director Christopher Nolan to be heavily influenced by Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), a novel whose overwhelming indebtedness to Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (1838) is well documented. This paper will examine the residual presence of Carlyle’s politico-social ideology in Nolan’s film, which emerges as a work of cultural prophecy, one concerned with positing a palingenetic model of society, the social construction of identity, and the importance of the dynamism of the Hero-figure to society. All of this denotes an adherence to many aspects of Carlyle’s thought, received at second hand, and divorced from the connotations which attach to Carlyle as writer and historical figure.
Talks by Mark Wallace
Between: Rivista dell'Associazione di Teoria e Storia Comparata della Letteratura, Nov 30, 2012
Thomas Carlyle was among the most influential writers in the English language during the 19th cen... more Thomas Carlyle was among the most influential writers in the English language during the 19th century, but is now ostensibly absent from cultural memory. Nevertheless, his ideas may be seen to live on indirectly in the works of the writers he influenced, one of whom is Elizabeth Gaskell. The 2004 adaptation of Gaskell’s North and South provides an instance of a modern approach to Carlylean ideas embodied in the source text. The adaptation finds itself in dialogue with Carlylean notions of heroism and leadership, modifying these notions for acceptance with a 21st century audience. The treatment of the Carlylean content of Gaskell’s novel is both revealing of socio-political ideals latent in modern audiences and a demonstration of the transmission and transmutation of ideologies through narrative and across media.
Among the vehicles for personal, national or global expressions and exchanges around cultural mat... more Among the vehicles for personal, national or global expressions and exchanges around cultural matters, the arts have always held a pivotal position. The diverse range of approaches and of study texts in (Re) Writing Without Borders: Contemporary Intermedial Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts celebrates the proliferation of word and image media, and the porosity between them, and attests to the continuing relevance of literature and the visual arts in producing and reproducing meaning within contemporary contexts. The essays gathered here examine cross-artistic encounters with a view to capture the most up-to-date interaction between literature and the visual arts.
En Busca de Agua Caliente, by H.G. Wells, trans. Arturo Gonzalo Aizpiri., 2020
I provided an introduction to the first Spanish translation of H.G. Wells' book, In Search of Hot... more I provided an introduction to the first Spanish translation of H.G. Wells' book, In Search of Hot Water (En Busca de Aqua Caliente). The introduction was translated into Spanish by the book's translator, Arturo Gonzalo Aizpiri. The book, one of Wells' least known, is a collection of essays published in 1939 dealing with topical issues including the international tensions preceding WWII. The translation was published by Ediciones Evohé in 2020.
Cronin B., MagShamhráin R., Preuschoff N., eds., Adaptation Considered as a Collaborative Art: Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, Palgrave Macmillan., 2020
This chapter considers the significance of adapting a much older source text and proposes the te... more This chapter considers the significance of adapting a much older source text and proposes the term transtemporal adaptation to describe the result, building on Linda Hutcheon’s analysis of transculturality in adaptations. Transtemporal adaptations are proposed as a form of “arguing with the past”, in the terms of Gillian Beer. Sherlock (2010–) is an exemplary text, one in which is inscribed the tension between Doyle’s nineteenth-century ideals and the Freudian narrative of personal development that is dominant in twenty-first-century popular culture, a tension manifest in the depiction of the detective’s (a)sexuality. The relation between adapter and source is revealed to be a collaboration marked by conflict and the mutually incompatible demands of fidelity to the source and adherence to dominant narrative formations within the adaptation’s own context.
(Re)Writing Without Borders: Contemporary Intermedial Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts, 2018
Television and film adaptations of literary narrative works are frequently produced at a signific... more Television and film adaptations of literary narrative works are frequently produced at a significant distance in time from the production of the source. This essay investigates the conditioning effect that this temporal relation has on the narrative as adapted. Using the 2007 BBC series based on Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist as the primary case study, this essay proposes the notion of transtemporality as a useful tool for conceptualizing and studying narrative adaptations. It is argued that transtemporality produces an ideological tension in adaptations, one that can be isolated through comparative study of the adaptation and its source in their cultural and generic contexts.
The Guidelines for Universities Engaging in Social Responsibility are the final output of the Era... more The Guidelines for Universities Engaging in Social Responsibility are the final output of the Erasmus+ UNIBILITY project. The Guidelines are designed to offer an accessible set of recommendations and examples of good practice for universities as they respond to their changing social role in a variety of contexts.
The Guidelines are aimed primarily at a university readership: management; research, teaching and administrative staff; and students. They are also designed to be accessible to relevant policy makers and community partners.
The Guidelines were written by the UNIBILITY partners and edited by Mark Wallace (Dublin City University) and Katharina Resch (University of Vienna). Full authorial details can be found in the document.
This thesis aims to provide an analysis of comparative ideologies through close reading of 19th-c... more This thesis aims to provide an analysis of comparative ideologies through close reading of 19th-century fictional texts and their 20th-/21st-century film and television adaptations, isolating similarities and differences in the presentation of specific socio-political issues. The fictional texts in question have been chosen for their display of a complex and substantial dialogue with the writings of the 19th-century political and cultural commentator Thomas Carlyle, a dialogue whose existence is established through documentary evidence and close reading of the texts themselves. By extending the analysis of these texts to their later screen adaptations, Carlyle’s ideas become a background against which changing assumptions about the human condition and changing modes of narrativizing said condition come into relief. The suitability of Carlyle for such a study is demonstrated by an examination of his reception history, which establishes him both as a virtually ubiquitous influence on the Anglophone literature of his day and as a near perfect ideological Other for a 21st-century reader in Western culture, articulating stances at odds with ideological tendencies within contemporary culture and embodied in dominant generic tropes of contemporary narrative. Relevant adaptations are considered as a form of reading Carlyle, one whose elements of debate and struggle with the ideological otherness of the text is explored using Gillian Beer’s concept of “‘arguing with the past”’. The importance of a re-consideration of Carlyle’s ideas within the context of 21st-century narratives and cultural assumptions is argued using Paul Feyerabend’s conception of knowledge as “‘an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives”’, wherein even failed views must be retained and re-worked to add to the content of the whole.
Thomas Carlyle’s enormous influence on his contemporaries is not in doubt. That his reputation de... more Thomas Carlyle’s enormous influence on his contemporaries is not in doubt. That his reputation declined precipitately in the 20th century is also uncontested. Several convincing circumstantial reasons for this decline have been put forward, ranging from the perceived link to Nazi ideology to the effect of James Anthony Froude’s iconoclastic biography. Such reasoning leaves open the possibility that within Carlylean thought there is an essential core of continuing relevance, when abstracted from historical circumstance. The viability of such a view can be examined by reading Carlyle into influential and popular contemporary artworks, and thus relating him to the structure of feeling from which they spring. A useful test case in this method is The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the final film in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. This is so because the film is avowed by its creators to be heavily indebted to Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859), itself greatly influenced by Dickens’ multiple readings of Carlyle’s French Revolution (1838). Several questions can then be asked about The Dark Knight Rises: To what extent is the Carlylean influence present in the film, mediated through Dickens? Can an extended comparison be drawn between the philosophy of history in Carlyle’s work, and that in Nolan’s? If so, what are the historical and cultural factors that give rise to the re-emergence of such a philosophy at this time? And, finally, can a more thorough re-engagement with Carlyle’s texts provide useful tools for such reflections on history as are present in contemporary popular culture, as represented by The Dark Knight Rises?
The transition from the romantic period to the early Victorian saw a move from the view of imagin... more The transition from the romantic period to the early Victorian saw a move from the view of imagination as creation to that of imagination as representation. This return to an earlier mode was partially inspired by the influential social and moral teachings of Thomas Carlyle – considered a philosopher by his contemporaries, if not by ours – and signalled a profound shift in the content and tone of narrative fiction during that period: literature was compelled to engage with social realities and class relations; the genre of “The Condition-of-England” novel was born. This period was unusual in the close relation between literature and philosophy (as the latter term was then understood), and their common engagement with the specific social reality that surrounded them. The influence of the writings, theoretical and literary, of that period, lives on today in popular culture, as can be clearly seen in Christopher Nolan’s Batman blockbuster, The Dark Knight Rises (2011), which expressly invokes Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and, thus, at second- hand recalls Thomas Carlyle’s 1838 history of the French Revolution and his theories of revolution and mob violence, as well as his dicta concerning the function of literature (and, by extension/analogy, film). Carlyle’s philosophy of history, mediated through the literature of Dickens, is seen in Nolan’s film to regain relevance in our own age; demonstrating that, far from perpetuating an ancient quarrel, philosophy and literature (and the narrative arts in general) can be mutually influential in a positive manner, promoting a model of the imagination that strives to represent and to understand society, and to provide insight into the emergent Structures of Feeling (in Raymond Williams’ term) at a given time.
The Sherlock Holmes story "Charles Augustus Milverton" has proven a particularly fertile source f... more The Sherlock Holmes story "Charles Augustus Milverton" has proven a particularly fertile source for adapters, in part because it has the noteworthy feature of depicting Holmes in an unwonted incursion into the romantic sphere, when he seduces and becomes engaged to a housemaid for information-gathering purposes. Differences in the treatment of this textual moment in retellings of the story provide opportunities to reflect, à la Žižek, on how "one of the best ways to detect shifts in the ideological constellation is to compare successive retellings of the same story". Specifically, the narratives of heroic celibacy that Doyle was able to draw on from 19th-century thinkers and sages, notably Thomas Carlyle, are absent from contemporary cultural discourse, creating an irresoluble tension in presentations of Holmes in modern adaptations, particularly the BBC series Sherlock (2010- ): the felt imperative of fidelity to Doyle's character dictates that the character remain celibate, but the construction and development of character in popular culture is reliant on tropes of romance and sexuality. The result is a series whose formal meaning includes a portrayal of Holmes as celibate, but whose experiential meaning, to use Stanley Fish's term, includes a constant interrogation of Holmes' celibate status and his sexual being, particularly notable in the series' expanded adaptation of the seduction storyline from "Charles Augustus Milverton", in which Sherlock's professional motivation for the seduction is carefully kept from the viewer, who is thus compelled to experience Sherlock as a conventionally sexual being for the duration of the storyline. Such narrative choices are related to the absence of Carlylean ideals of Heroic celibacy and to what asexuality scholar Mark Corrigan has called the "sexual assumption", whereby sexual attraction is seen as both universal and uniform. and its absence is explicable in terms of an distinguishable pathology.
The ideology of the Victorian sage and cultural prophet Thomas Carlyle is absent from any major s... more The ideology of the Victorian sage and cultural prophet Thomas Carlyle is absent from any major stream of contemporary thought, yet his influence on his own contemporaries was profound, and ensures that his own work lives on in some measure through them. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was acknowledged by its director Christopher Nolan to be heavily influenced by Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), a novel whose overwhelming indebtedness to Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (1838) is well documented. This paper will examine the residual presence of Carlyle’s politico-social ideology in Nolan’s film, which emerges as a work of cultural prophecy, one concerned with positing a palingenetic model of society, the social construction of identity, and the importance of the dynamism of the Hero-figure to society. All of this denotes an adherence to many aspects of Carlyle’s thought, received at second hand, and divorced from the connotations which attach to Carlyle as writer and historical figure.