Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Review Of Hye Hean Chung's "Media Heterotopias: Digital Effects And Material Labor In Global Film Production", Amy Wong

Amy Wong

Beijing World Park—which opened in 1993 with much fanfare—boasts of its inclusion of over one hundred “famous scenic spots and historical sites” of the world in miniature. As tourists walk through the outdoor park’s grounds, they are promised “the world” without having to leave Beijing.1 In a single visit, they might chance upon the Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the moai of Easter Island. Jia Zhangke’s film The World (2004) takes place in the park and tells the story of two of its employees, Tao and Taisheng. As Hye Jean Chung …

Teaching Dystopia, Amy Wong

Amy Wong

This year, those of us who work in college classrooms kicked off our semesters with the spectacle of Trump’s inauguration: its bluffed militarism, its dark vision, its citation, in effect, of Bane, from the Batman dystopia The Dark Knight Rises. Everything about the inauguration presaged the bitter, disputatious, spectacle-driven manias that have come to mark the 45th Presidency. It was clear, on that grey January day, that dystopia was newly in vogue as he intoned: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. We all bleed …

Late-Victorian Novels, Microsociology, And Bad Dialogue, Amy Wong

Amy Wong

This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to "invisible" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of …

Politics, Inclusion, And Social Practice, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Amy Wong

Amy Wong

"In the wake of the American election, Elaine Hadley’s 'Closing Remarks' from v21’s b2o issue—that we are writing, living, and teaching in a 'critical moment, some might even say a survivalist moment' in which 'the power of positive psychology does not seem adequate to the times'—appear chilling in their urgency. Hadley cautions against a pleasure and optimism largely disengaged from feminist and class critiques, as well as from what she calls 'Politics with a big P.'"

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The Poetics Of Talk In Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island, Amy Wong

Amy Wong

This essay considers the relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson’s well-loved adventure classic Treasure Island and his philosophical commitments to talk. For Stevenson, talking and adventuring share an experiential poetics that emphasizes responsiveness to unpredictable interactions. By examining several of Stevenson’s prose pieces, including “Talk and Talkers” and “My First Book” as well as Treasure Island, this essay argues that the novel aspires to translate the poetics of talk into a print medium. Treasure Island imagines itself as a form of “living print,” a work that, like Long John Silver’s parrot, seems more dynamic than print typically is, yet is …

Arthur Conan Doyle's "Great New Adventure Story": Journalism In The Lost World, Amy Wong

Amy Wong

This essay discusses the critical engagements of Arthur Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) with the rise of journalistic professionalism at the turn of the century. With a focus on features from the novel’s serial publication in George Newnes’s illustrated periodical, the Strand Magazine, this essay argues that this popular work of fiction self-consciously positions itself against what had become a fairly mainstream ideological and generic split between literature and journalism. Through its masquerade as a first-person account mediated by a professional network of journalists and editors, The Lost World integrates conventions of literary romance and objective journalism to combat …

Town-Talk And The Cause Célèbre Of Robert Browning’S The Ring And The Book, Amy R. Wong

Amy Wong

This essay examines Browning’s relentless preoccupation with generating such forms of “idle talk” in The Ring and the Book.³ For the most part, critics from the time of the poem’s initial publication to the present day have focused their energies on speakers directly involved in the case— Pompilia (on her deathbed), Guido, Caponsacchi—or the Pope, as he crafts his learned pronouncement^.4 Those who have devoted attention to the first three town talkers, including scholars such as Mary Rose Sullivan and William E. Buckler, give accounts that tend to individualize these personae in ways that obscure the significance of …