"Creative misreading and bricolage writing: A structural appraisal of a poststructuralist debate". Portuguese Review of the History of the Book, vol. 11 (22), 2007, pp. 89–104. (original) (raw)
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Luso-Brazilian Review, 2003
Around the time of the quincentennary of the arrival of the Portuguese on the shores of what would become a sumptuous South American country, Brazil engaged in serial stocktaking about the nation, the unfolding of its destiny, and questions of identity with indigenous, African, and Lusitanian substance.' Academic inquiry about the concept of Brazil, the direction of its historical formation, and its multifarious cultural complex have also reached new crossroads in North America, as exemplified by the concept and realization of this volume. In the present appraisal of the functions of the master term culture and of its inseparable mate civilization in the sphere of Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian studies, I will refer primarily to the latter constituent of our hyphenated identifier within the purview of programs in language-literature departments. This contribution to the assessment of the status of our field has been shaped somewhat in the mold of Sander Gilman's public addresses on the humanities in transformation. In this encompassing domain, a most prominent aspect of the last two decades has been the paradigm shift from the study of literature to that of discursive practices, an evolving and anxiety-ridden dialectic of literary criticism and cultural critique. Telling symptoms bf the ever-increasing relevance, some would say urgency, of reconsidering keywords in our area is an issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association that features a presidential address on cultural competence and transcending monolingualism, as well as an installment of the section "The Changing Profession" called "Why Major in Literature-What Do We Tell Our ~tudents?"~ Part of a provisional response may lie in the very meshing of literature with the pair culture & civilization. Concomitant issues pertain to the implications of such an affair for an already significantly diversified scholarship and curricula in modem languages. The word culture is a dauntingly polyvalent term used in many disciplines to signify a full range of human endeavor. Culture, in a word, is everything. In foreign-language humanities, it usually denotes the essay and beaux arts, often verbal folklore and film as well. In a fresh study of globalization, the "conventional social scientific sense" to be applied is summarized "as the beliefs, values, and lifestyles of ordinary people in their everyday existence" (Berger 2), which includes modem mass-media entertainment. The anthropological outlook encompasses tribal, traditional rural, or urban combinations of shared practices, leamed behaviors, symbolic communication, and adaptation within a society (Bodley). "The complexity of the idea of culture is nowhere demonstrated more graphically than in the fact that its most eminent theorist in postwar Britain, Raymond Williams, defines it at various times to mean a standard of perfection, a habit of mind, the arts, general intellectual development, a whole way of life, a signifying system, a structure of
Interespacios. El periodismo cultural y la transformación de la percepción estética mundial
REGAC, 2019
Wolfgang Iser claims 1. Every literary text is designed to include the act of reception, an activity that introduces the recipient as an agent into the production of the artwork. Reception is an act of completion, without which the art remains fragmentary. My own considerations are nourished by these thoughts. In order to find out more about the meaning and role of art in society, we have to look at those practices that engage art with society; it means detecting those points of intersection that intertwine artistic fiction and the constitution of social meaning. I claim that these interspaces between artistic text and social meaning are the discursive laboratories that make operative the specificities of artistic fiction. Conversely, they bring to light the particular role artistic production takes within society. Interspaces are those spaces where art participates in politics, which, in Jacques Rancière's words, is the "partition of the visible and the sayable", an "intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world" 2 , which he elsewhere terms a "regime of meaning" 3. It is in the interspaces that art develops the power to shape a society's 'social imaginary significations' 4. Due to the participatory nature of reception the resulting interpretations are not stable. With reference to Wolfgang Iser, I will therefore conceptualize the act of reception as a performance. Each interpretation of the same artwork results in a different staging of the 1 These thoughts are developed both in Wolfgang Iser. (1970). Die Appellstruktur der Texte.
American, British and Canadian Studies, 2018
Literary and Cultural Circulation is made up of eighteen chapters by different authors who explore this broad issue through different frameworks. Consequently, the meaning of literary circulation varies throughout the volume, according to the purposes of each text and the specificities of each object of analysis. The quality of the essays is undeniable and, despite the differences between them, circulation, considered in its broadest sense, is the main subject explored in the texts that vary, in short, around two main aspects. One of them is the perspective from which circulation is understood. In this respect, the essays can be divided into four main thematic axes that address the role of circulation: 1) in specific authors or for a specific genre, 2) in the postcolonial condition, 3) in our times, that is, in the digital and culture industry age, and 4) in the formation of a national interpretation. Since the starting point determines the point of arrival and the specific results of circulation, the texts also differ from one another in terms of the various implications of circulation taken into account. Thus, various essays discuss the consequences of circulation for literary production, for the expression of subaltern groups, for the acclimatization of European ideas in the Americas, for reading, for culture and for literature, approaching also the theoretical issues that surround this subject as well as the methodological and market implications of this propensity of literature to circulate. Due to the very size of this book, it would not be possible to present the main ideas of all the essays. I will try instead to present the ideas of at least one of the essays from each axis. The contributors are scholars and/or professors from different countries (United States, Brazil and Spain) who, as I noted, have dealt with this academic and cultural debate in different ways in their research. Diversity, a hallmark of literary
CONVOCATORIA DOSSIER "Sentidos y Emociones con historia" revista PASADO ABIERTO
Se convoca a la presentación de artículos para el aporte de re-lecturas y avances en investigaciones relacionadas con los sentidos y las emociones en perspectiva histórica. A lo largo de la historia, las sociedades han percibido y sentido sus realidades de diferentes formas y maneras, evidenciando la existencia de jerarquías sensoriales y emocionales que es necesario identificar y distinguir para profundizar nuestra comprensión de los tiempos pretéritos. Es por ello que nos interesa estudiar, en diversos ámbitos y épocas históricas, qué papel representaron las percepciones sensoriales y emocionales en las configuraciones sociales, políticas y culturales. El diálogo interdisciplinario entre Sentidos y Emociones es necesario dado que ambos campos de estudio mantienen su plena vigencia y actualidad, aunque no siempre han encontrado espacios propios para su encuentro.
What does the typewriter tell us? Notes on writing of a modern Brazil
Contracampo - Brazilian Journal of Comunication, 2018
The article discusses the history of the media written by Friedrich Kittler, seeking to expand the theoretical-methodological perspectives for the research of historicity in the communicational processes.Based on Brazilian empirical cases (epistolary material, newspaper articles, advertisements), the typewriter is used as a written communication medium that participated in a relevant way in the modernization of the country at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.At the time of the appearance of the first technical media, according to Kittler, the invention of an ambiguous apparatus, perceived as both tool and technology, provided a new relationship with writing and a change in the “discursive network”, simultaneously with the impact of optical and sound inventions, especially the film and the gramophone.When considering the historically situated technical conditions for the discursive articulation, we will seek to explore dilemmas proper to the history of the media in regions that are generally classified as peripheral, such as Brazil.
The Role of Written Tradition in Dumbravioara, Mures County
Vilmos KESZEG (ed.) À QUI APPARTIENT LA TRADITION? / WHO OWNS THE TRADITION? Cluj-Napoca 2014. ISBN 978-606-8178-69-1, 2014
Actes du colloque / Th e Acts of the Symposium À qui appartient la tradition? À quoi sert-elle? La tradition entre culture, utilisateur et entrepreneur / Who owns the tradition? What is its purpose? Tradition between culture, user and contractor Ed. Vilmos KESZEG Cluj-Napoca 2014 4 Comité d' organisation du colloque / Organizing Committee Ph.D. -ethnographe / ethnographer Hungarian University Federation from Cluj-Napoca, Romania TÖTSZEGI Tekla, Ph.D. -muséographe / museologist Le Musée Ethnografi que de Transylvanie, Cluj-Napoca, Roumanie / Th e Ethnographical Museum of Transilvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Colocviul À qui appartient la tradition? À quoi sert-elle? La tradition entre culture, utilisateur et entrepreneur / Who owns the tradition? What is its purpose? Tradition between culture, user and contractor şi publicarea volumului a fost fi nanţat de UEFISCDI în cadrul programului IDEI_WORKSHOP-URI ECPLORATORII 8WE_COMPETITIA 2012.
CFP. Subaltern Writing and Popular Memory in the Early Modern World
This issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies seeks to interrogate how common men and women used different modes of writing to keep, shape, and contest social memory in the early modern world. Studies on popular senses of the past, such as Andy Wood's, have brought to light the complex interrelation between custom, collective memory, and social struggle. A usable past was key in conflicts over economic and political resources in the present. As the systematic regulation of reading and writing (Guillory), literacy was the basis for persistent forms of exclusion-particularly when gender and racial regimes of inequality intersected with class. But literacy was also a site of contestation. Subalternity did not entail a complete deprivation of access to the written word, and scholarship on partial literacies, collective reading, or informal schooling, among other topics, increasingly emphasizes the centrality of the letter in the daily lives of the popular classes (Petrucci, Castillo Gómez). Memory and writing played a crucial role in litigation, local political culture, and the everyday economies of the poor and middling sorts. This special issue aims at building on this scholarship by focusing on the role of subaltern writing and popular literacies in the production, transmission, and dispute of the historical in local communities throughout the early modern world. In Europe, the printing press, the Reformation, and the so-called, in classic scholarship, 'educational revolutions' (Stone, Kagan) all contributed significantly to the raise literacy rates during the early modern period, although institutional contexts and learning experiences varied widely-and hierarchically-throughout the period. The military revolution, on its part, gave way to large-scale modes of socialization that relied, to a certain extent, on writing and reading (Amelang). Moreover, the mobilization associated with the 'first globalization' prompted or accelerated the emergence of a number of genres of writing that circulated widely and throughout a heterogenous social body, from relaciones, to avvisi, newsheets, broadside prints, etc. At the same time, European imperial aggression and expansion destroyed or radically transformed very disparate literate cultures, writing ecologies, and cultures of memory. To what extent did these large-scale historical developments affected the role of writing in the spatial and material plotting of popular memory at the local or regional levels? In colonial Latin America, as Ángel Rama argued in his influential The Lettered City, imperial bureaucracy was not only an instrumental conglomerate of administrative practices, people, and institutions to conduct government, but also a perfect exclusionary machine to build and maintain colonial power through the unequal distribution of literacy. Several scholars, however, have substantially qualified Rama's claims: mestizos, indios, and people of African descent challenged this exclusionary system and used writing, translation, and interpretation in strategic and creative ways to build a place for themselves in colonial society, as well as to contest the memory of conquest and colonization (Rappaport, Jouve Martín, Brewer-García, etc.). While specific uses and traditions of popular writing are many times too fragile or invisible, several strands of scholarship have striven to retrieve and interrogate them. Scholars have studied the different historical regimes of preservation and destruction, the kinds of policies and institutions have allowed for the storage or disappearance of subaltern written memory. Historians such as
Critique of Anthropology, 2006
In a now much read critique, Derrida claimed to show the weakness and the supposed contradictions of Lévi-Strauss's interpretation of writing and his characterization of modern industrial society by the pathology of written communication. Lévi-Strauss is tweaked for ethnocentrism, subjectivism, empiricism, truism, archaism, primitivist utopia, epigenesism, sloppy thinking, theology and metaphysics, in short for everything at odds with what is normally understood as Lévi-Straussian analysis. It is my contention in this paper to argue that, by misconstruing Lévi-Strauss's actual theoretical and epistemological contribution to general knowledge, Derrida's reading of Tristes Tropiques is exemplary and influential in that it joins together all the essential didactic elements of 'deconstructionist' criticism, and seems to be what exactly 'crit-lit' deconstructionism is all about, which in the last analysis turns into an arrogant scholastics that only ignorance or deliberate misinformation could allow.
Writing as a reflection of the civilization from Antiquity to the Modern Times
In the paper, a short discussion on the role of writing in the history of humanity is presented. The origins of writing are analyzed and some facts of modern script inventions are found to confirm its two-fold nature, both from economical (trade) and spiritual (religious) needs. Similar development of writing in different world regions and identical internal structure of logographic scripts can be the evidence for the universality of human thinking. A correlation between the types of civilization and the "philosophy" of writing is pointed.