Jani Scandura - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Jani Scandura
Victorian Studies, 1997
the early lists, such as the "lawyer's clerk," the "German professor of histor... more the early lists, such as the "lawyer's clerk," the "German professor of history," or the "mad doctor-loves girl," evolve through successive revisions into familiar names: Jonathan Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward.' Curiously, however, three central characters in an early list never show up in the published text: an Undertaker, an "Undertaker's Man," and a "Maid engaged to [the] Undertaker's Man" (43). In a novel obsessed both with occupation and the technologies of death, why not include the undertaker and his brood? After all, the undertaker profited most by death and made his living in corpses. Stoker made a crucial choice in seeming to rid his text of the undertaker and centering it around the Count. For like the vampire Dracula, nineteenth-century undertakers were themselves imaginatively slippery subjects, constructed by a complex discourse that critics largely have ignored.2 So pronounced was the undertaker&#...
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2010
M/C Journal, 2010
“We can smell only what is in the process of wasting away...”—G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures ... more “We can smell only what is in the process of wasting away...”—G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures On Fine Art Vol 1 Smell—this is the sense of weight experiences by someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu—Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust”The odour first hits you at the entrance to The Citizen Betrayed, the Hungarian national exhibit located on the second floor of block 18 at the main camp of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Acrid. Potent. Familiar. You dismiss it without thought. Certainly, it is nothing like the sweet, sickly smell that some visitors swear clings phantasmatically to Crematoria I in the main camp. Nothing like the “unimaginable” and “vile” odour of death, of burning flesh, that survivors remembered decades after their imprisonment in the camps (Weiss). Nothing like the stench that Nazi perpetrators had feared “betrayed the truth about which people round Birkenau had begun to whisper” (Rindisbacher 144) The smell is sweat—rank, but ordinary, no doubt the olfactory residue of another tired tourist. It is July, after all, and hot. Auschwitz is packed with visitors: summer pilgrims from Israel; Irish teenagers on study tours; camera-bedecked American couples; a smattering of scholars; and occasionally family members of survivors or the dead. These are ordinary people. Well-fed people. People who have traveled by busload from hotels in Krakow that morning. People who sweat. Only later, when you pass by the entrance a second time en route to the far end of the exhibit, and then (if you are honest with yourself), only with certainty the following day when you return and the smell still clings, does it occur to you: the odour is intentional and synthesied. You make the assessment logically. Smell dissipates quickly. A natural smell, a real odour (that is, an odour that emanates from an actual, living person in real-time) could not remain so strong and undiluted thirty minutes after you first notice it, could not still be there the next day. You decide then that it is part of the installation, a somber choral undertone to the glass-projected photograph of a Jewish Hungarian women descending from a boxcar at Birkenau sometime during that horrible spring and summer of 1944. The installation is multi-sensory, monumental, and moving. The rhythmic recording of a train beats and fades like a pumping heart. Cubes of glass entomb piles of train rocks, plaster-cast clothing, brass shoes. Clear glass pathways cut ice-like across shards of crystal and swerve through light bulb-lit tunnels. Reproductions of historical photographs, like the one at the entrance, are blow up and printed on huge glass screens or projected onto the cement cell walls. The installation makes an implicit critique of the well-known displays of glass-encased objects at Auschwitz—the piles of suitcases, shoes, hair, eye glasses, prostheses—anonymous objects and shorn hair stolen by the Nazis, found by the Soviets when they liberated the camps, then put on display when the memorial was established soon after. The original exhibitions at Auschwitz-Birkenau largely metaphorize the magnitude of the Nazis’ nefarious project, highlighting the obscene number of people killed at the camps. (“Behind clean glass/ the stiff hair lies/ of those suffocated in gas chambers…” [Ròzewicz]) Even today, the sheer quantity of leftover items, each signifying a lost person—many lost people—is difficult to digest. The piles of objects entombed in glass-fronted rooms are mostly anonymous in the display; claims made to ownership of suitcases and paintings by descendents or survivors have spurred lawsuits (Lodkowski). The Hungarian installation both skirts the issue of particularity and foregrounds it. There are no historical objects included in the exhibit; and the installation’s heavy-use of glass is intentionally metaphorical, signifying the apparent transparency yet impenetrability of the past to the present. László Rajk, Jr., the Hungarian architect and former Member of Parliament who designed the exhibit, describes his vision as an attempt to create “a fragment of the present in the space of the past surrounding it” (186). Rajik, whose own personal and familial history is deeply intertwined with the complexities of twentieth century Hungary, was troubled by ethical questions when constructing his design for the installation. He asks in an essay he wrote for a catalogue that accompanied the opening of the exhibit in 2004, “Can individual objects be displayed without any attempt at personalization? Can a dish, a toothbrush or a shoe be exhibited without our knowing whom they belonged to?” (186).Anonymity bothers Rajik. He decides that since, in his view, the past is experienced proximally, though at a distance like a thought on the tip of your tongue, he will design an installation in which the past is present but impossible to touch. Reflecting on his final design, he explains, “The actual surface of the exhibition (an…
Cultural Critique, 2016
Jani Scandura, “Sad Effects.” Cultural Critique 91 (Winter 2016): 153-170.
A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950
Choice Reviews Online, 2002
If searched for the ebook Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital in pdf format, in that case you ... more If searched for the ebook Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital in pdf format, in that case you come on to correct website. We presented full variant of this book in txt, ePub, DjVu, PDF, doc forms. You can reading online Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital either downloading. Also, on our site you may reading guides and other artistic books online, or download their as well. We like invite consideration what our site does not store the eBook itself, but we provide reference to website whereat you can load or reading online. So if have must to downloading Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital pdf, then you have come on to correct website. We have Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital DjVu, txt, ePub, doc, PDF forms. We will be happy if you will be back us over.
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 2002
Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression Jani Scandura Mucking around in the mess... more Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression Jani Scandura Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era "dumps," places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of "depressive modernity," an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity-capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration-are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place.
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 2002
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature
The presence (or absence) of compositional precursors and leftovers raise for critics and editors... more The presence (or absence) of compositional precursors and leftovers raise for critics and editors methodological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic questions: What gets collected and preserved? What does not—for what reasons? How can these materials be interpreted? And to what ends? A draft may refer to written materials that never attain printed form as well as early manuscript compositions and fair copies, typescripts, digital text, scribbles, doodles, leftovers, or other marginalia and extraneous materials that may or may not find their way into archives. The manuscript draft came of age following the invention of printing, although unfinished or working drafts only began to be self-consciously collected with the emergence of the state archive in the late 18th century. The draft is, therefore, intimately connected to the archival, whether the archive is taken as a material site, a discursive structure, or a depository of feeling. Any interpretation of drafts must take into ...
Cultures of Obsolescence, 2015
Cultures of Obsolescence, 2015
Place, Modernity, American Depression, 2008
Place, Modernity, American Depression, 2008
Victorian Studies, 1997
the early lists, such as the "lawyer's clerk," the "German professor of histor... more the early lists, such as the "lawyer's clerk," the "German professor of history," or the "mad doctor-loves girl," evolve through successive revisions into familiar names: Jonathan Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward.' Curiously, however, three central characters in an early list never show up in the published text: an Undertaker, an "Undertaker's Man," and a "Maid engaged to [the] Undertaker's Man" (43). In a novel obsessed both with occupation and the technologies of death, why not include the undertaker and his brood? After all, the undertaker profited most by death and made his living in corpses. Stoker made a crucial choice in seeming to rid his text of the undertaker and centering it around the Count. For like the vampire Dracula, nineteenth-century undertakers were themselves imaginatively slippery subjects, constructed by a complex discourse that critics largely have ignored.2 So pronounced was the undertaker&#...
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2010
M/C Journal, 2010
“We can smell only what is in the process of wasting away...”—G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures ... more “We can smell only what is in the process of wasting away...”—G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures On Fine Art Vol 1 Smell—this is the sense of weight experiences by someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu—Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust”The odour first hits you at the entrance to The Citizen Betrayed, the Hungarian national exhibit located on the second floor of block 18 at the main camp of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Acrid. Potent. Familiar. You dismiss it without thought. Certainly, it is nothing like the sweet, sickly smell that some visitors swear clings phantasmatically to Crematoria I in the main camp. Nothing like the “unimaginable” and “vile” odour of death, of burning flesh, that survivors remembered decades after their imprisonment in the camps (Weiss). Nothing like the stench that Nazi perpetrators had feared “betrayed the truth about which people round Birkenau had begun to whisper” (Rindisbacher 144) The smell is sweat—rank, but ordinary, no doubt the olfactory residue of another tired tourist. It is July, after all, and hot. Auschwitz is packed with visitors: summer pilgrims from Israel; Irish teenagers on study tours; camera-bedecked American couples; a smattering of scholars; and occasionally family members of survivors or the dead. These are ordinary people. Well-fed people. People who have traveled by busload from hotels in Krakow that morning. People who sweat. Only later, when you pass by the entrance a second time en route to the far end of the exhibit, and then (if you are honest with yourself), only with certainty the following day when you return and the smell still clings, does it occur to you: the odour is intentional and synthesied. You make the assessment logically. Smell dissipates quickly. A natural smell, a real odour (that is, an odour that emanates from an actual, living person in real-time) could not remain so strong and undiluted thirty minutes after you first notice it, could not still be there the next day. You decide then that it is part of the installation, a somber choral undertone to the glass-projected photograph of a Jewish Hungarian women descending from a boxcar at Birkenau sometime during that horrible spring and summer of 1944. The installation is multi-sensory, monumental, and moving. The rhythmic recording of a train beats and fades like a pumping heart. Cubes of glass entomb piles of train rocks, plaster-cast clothing, brass shoes. Clear glass pathways cut ice-like across shards of crystal and swerve through light bulb-lit tunnels. Reproductions of historical photographs, like the one at the entrance, are blow up and printed on huge glass screens or projected onto the cement cell walls. The installation makes an implicit critique of the well-known displays of glass-encased objects at Auschwitz—the piles of suitcases, shoes, hair, eye glasses, prostheses—anonymous objects and shorn hair stolen by the Nazis, found by the Soviets when they liberated the camps, then put on display when the memorial was established soon after. The original exhibitions at Auschwitz-Birkenau largely metaphorize the magnitude of the Nazis’ nefarious project, highlighting the obscene number of people killed at the camps. (“Behind clean glass/ the stiff hair lies/ of those suffocated in gas chambers…” [Ròzewicz]) Even today, the sheer quantity of leftover items, each signifying a lost person—many lost people—is difficult to digest. The piles of objects entombed in glass-fronted rooms are mostly anonymous in the display; claims made to ownership of suitcases and paintings by descendents or survivors have spurred lawsuits (Lodkowski). The Hungarian installation both skirts the issue of particularity and foregrounds it. There are no historical objects included in the exhibit; and the installation’s heavy-use of glass is intentionally metaphorical, signifying the apparent transparency yet impenetrability of the past to the present. László Rajk, Jr., the Hungarian architect and former Member of Parliament who designed the exhibit, describes his vision as an attempt to create “a fragment of the present in the space of the past surrounding it” (186). Rajik, whose own personal and familial history is deeply intertwined with the complexities of twentieth century Hungary, was troubled by ethical questions when constructing his design for the installation. He asks in an essay he wrote for a catalogue that accompanied the opening of the exhibit in 2004, “Can individual objects be displayed without any attempt at personalization? Can a dish, a toothbrush or a shoe be exhibited without our knowing whom they belonged to?” (186).Anonymity bothers Rajik. He decides that since, in his view, the past is experienced proximally, though at a distance like a thought on the tip of your tongue, he will design an installation in which the past is present but impossible to touch. Reflecting on his final design, he explains, “The actual surface of the exhibition (an…
Cultural Critique, 2016
Jani Scandura, “Sad Effects.” Cultural Critique 91 (Winter 2016): 153-170.
A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950
Choice Reviews Online, 2002
If searched for the ebook Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital in pdf format, in that case you ... more If searched for the ebook Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital in pdf format, in that case you come on to correct website. We presented full variant of this book in txt, ePub, DjVu, PDF, doc forms. You can reading online Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital either downloading. Also, on our site you may reading guides and other artistic books online, or download their as well. We like invite consideration what our site does not store the eBook itself, but we provide reference to website whereat you can load or reading online. So if have must to downloading Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital pdf, then you have come on to correct website. We have Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital DjVu, txt, ePub, doc, PDF forms. We will be happy if you will be back us over.
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 2002
Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression Jani Scandura Mucking around in the mess... more Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression Jani Scandura Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era "dumps," places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of "depressive modernity," an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity-capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration-are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place.
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 2002
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature
The presence (or absence) of compositional precursors and leftovers raise for critics and editors... more The presence (or absence) of compositional precursors and leftovers raise for critics and editors methodological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic questions: What gets collected and preserved? What does not—for what reasons? How can these materials be interpreted? And to what ends? A draft may refer to written materials that never attain printed form as well as early manuscript compositions and fair copies, typescripts, digital text, scribbles, doodles, leftovers, or other marginalia and extraneous materials that may or may not find their way into archives. The manuscript draft came of age following the invention of printing, although unfinished or working drafts only began to be self-consciously collected with the emergence of the state archive in the late 18th century. The draft is, therefore, intimately connected to the archival, whether the archive is taken as a material site, a discursive structure, or a depository of feeling. Any interpretation of drafts must take into ...
Cultures of Obsolescence, 2015
Cultures of Obsolescence, 2015
Place, Modernity, American Depression, 2008
Place, Modernity, American Depression, 2008
Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression, 2008
Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the Unite... more Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era “dumps,” places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of “depressive modernity,” an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity—capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration—are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place.
An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.
Modernism, Inc., 2000
Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Mo... more Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Modernism, Inc. provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture.
Organized around the idea of "incorporation"—embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism—Modernism, Inc. covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's "hot house style"; the president's penis in American political life; myth-making and the Hoover Dam; trauma, poetics, and the Armenian genocide; feminist kitsch and the recuperation of North America's "Great Lady painters"; Gertrude Stein and Jewish Social Science; the Reno Divorce Factory and the production of gender; Andy Razaf and Black Bolshevism. Collectively, the essays suggest that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is not one of rupture, belatedness, dilution, or extremity, but of haunting.
Modernism, Inc. looks at our ghosts, and at the unspeakable secrets of modernity from which they're derived.
Contributors: Maria Damon, Walter Kalidjian, Walter Lew, Janet Lyon, William J. Maxwell, Cary Nelson, John Timberman Newcombe, David G. Nicholls, Thomas Pepper, Paula Rabinowitz, Daniel Rosenberg, Marlon Ross, Jani Scandura, Kathleen Stewart, Julia Walker.