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Literary Cartography In An Age Of Interconnectedness: Review Of Spatiality, By Robert T. Tally Jr., Matt Hudson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Prior to the twentieth century, literary and cultural critics had been fascinated with the trajectory of time - of the remembrance of things past as situated inside of a historical canon. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, however, a change began to take place. Scholars and critics began to take a closer look at "space." Specifically, how an author constructed a place within literature, and how in turn, a reader reconstructed a place through his or her reading. This change has been termed the "spatial turn" in literary and cultural studies, and this turn is the …

Isolated Spaces, Fragmented Places: Caryl Phillips’S Ghettos In The Nature Of Blood And The European Tribe, İ.Murat Öner, Mustafa Bal

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This study focuses on Caryl Phillips's deviant Othello character in The Nature of Blood and his transformation and perception of and in the ghettoized space of Venice in a geocritical scope. Geocriticism provides us with genuinely unique approaches to explore real-and-fictional space of Venice in The Nature of Blood (a fictional work) and The European Tribe (a non-fictional work), and other literary and non-literary materials. Interdisciplinary methods of geocriticism also help us analyze the cartographies and continuously changing spatial relations and discover unseen power correlations by using various cultural discourses such as architecture, philosophy, sociology, and geography. By applying geocritical …

Geocriticism At A Crossroads: An Overview, Mariya Shymchyshyn

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In the article I will outline some of the methodological and theoretical development in late twentieth-century criticism that led to the spatial turn in the humanities. In particular, I will concentrate my attention on the concepts of space in the works of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, and I will pursue how they influenced literary theory, causing the emergence of "geocriticism" (e.g., in the work of Robert Tally, Bertrand Westphal, Eric Prieto) or, using another term, "literary geography" (e.g., in Franco Moretti). I will argue that the postmodern condition generated an alertness to space …

How To Do Narratives With Maps?: Cartography As A Performative Act In Gulliver’S Travels And Through The Looking Glass, Emmanuelle Peraldo, Yann Calbérac

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The articulation between literary text and space has been significantly redefined thanks to two major theoretical turns. Because of the spatial turn that marked the humanities and social sciences from the 1980s onwards, time - inherited from the Enlightenment's ideal of progress - is not the main category of analysis any longer: space has replaced it (Soja, 1989). The spatial dimension of objects is now at the core of critical and analytical preoccupations: all fields of knowledge (and not only geography) are now invited to reconsider space, places and mapping. Literary studies reflect this paradigmatic shift as can …

Transgression, Boundaries, And Power: Rethinking The Space Of Postcolonial Literature, Dustin Crowley

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Space, Henri Lefebvre tells us, is a tool for thought and action. Space enables and space constrains. Alongside history and metrics like race, class, and gender, space demands our attention as a foundational feature of social production and struggle. In the decades following Lefebvre's provocatively suggestive text The Production of Space, interest in spatial studies has burgeoned across academia, and literary studies are no exception. Though still relatively nascent, spatial literary studies has already been established on firm ground by works like Robert Tally's Spatiality and Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. These and other …

Contributors, Robert T. Tally Jr.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 14, issue 3 of Reconstruction.

Why The Undead Arcade?, Carly A. Kocurek, Samuel Tobin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In 2009, Stride Gum launched a campaign to “Save the Arcades,” offering $25,000 to an arcade on the brink of closure through a convoluted contest. Arcade fans could play a retro reboot game on the campaign’s site, then assign points to one of the four arcades deemed eligible for the competition. In the rhetoric of the campaign, arcades are an endangered species, each arcade an outpost of something precious and threatened. Much of contemporary gaming culture revels in a nostalgic pull for so-called classic arcades, and players’ desire to validate through remembrances of games past helps drive and …

The Midway In The Museum: Arcades, Art, And The Challenge Of Displaying Play, Jennifer Dewinter

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Arcade games are increasingly being presented in museum spaces for both contemplation and play. By placing arcades into the museum, curators are creating narratives about the history of games, about the cultural value of these artifacts, and increasingly, about the artistic merit of computer games. However, when arcades enter the museum space, a tension arises between the critical distance demanded by museums—a distance needed to contemplate the curatorial vision of an object—and the closeness and irreverence demanded by play. To this tension, I argue museum spaces bring together these contemporary objects as part of a discourse concerning a postmodern anxiety …

Innovation, Imitation, And The Continued Importance Of Vintage Video Games, Brendan Gaughen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

“Innovation, Imitation, and the Continued Importance of Video Games” frames the development of the video game industry as one defined by a dialectic of innovation and imitation between arcades and home gaming. These complexities are simplified if not completely overlooked in the numerous game compilations, emulator collections, and plug and play devices, all of which have an effect on the nostalgia of players. The industry experimented with innovations in graphics and immersive gameplay throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, at which point compilations of classic video games (generally speaking, pre-1983) started being released for home consoles and in arcades. The …

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Veteran Gamer: The Canonization And Commodification Of Nostalgia In Anamanaguchi's 8-Bit Video Game Soundtrack, Megan Mckittrick

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

While there are many contemporary 8-bit-inspired video game scores, the article points to the original soundtrack for the 2010 Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World: The Game (Ubisoft, 2010) as an example of game music canon formation, arguing that Anamanaguchi designs their music to hail gamers who share their sense of nostalgia, referred to as veteran, aging, or mature gamers. Anamanaguchi not only canonizes 8-bit music by hailing veteran gamers; they commodify it, as well. Recognizing the market for this style of music, they employ what Christina Baade and Paul Aitken have described as the nostalgia aesthetic to sell their music …

After Life History: An Interview With Raiford Guins On His "Game After: A Cultural Study Of Video Game Afterlife", Samuel Tobin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Raiford Guins is a professor of culture and technology in the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University, he is also a curator of the William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection there. In his new book Game After, Guins draws on both of his professional roles, bringing a curator’s concerns to game and design history and a historian’s and critic’s attention to bear on game collections and collectors. Game After arrives at critical moment in the study of games, one in which the status of games themselves, as well as the means and methods best …

Contributors, Carly A. Kocurek, Samuel Tobin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 14, issue 1 of Reconstruction.

Imaginenative 2012: Ecocinema And The Indigenous Film Festival, Salma Monani, Miranda Brady

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Much scholarship points to how ecological concerns are never far from Indigenous struggles for political sovereignty and public participation. In this paper we turn to the Indigenous film festival as a relatively understudied yet rich site to explore such ecological concerns. Specifically, we consider, the Toronto-based ImagineNATIVE, a prominent hub in the Indigenous film festival circuit. Through examining the festival’s 2012 film selections, we highlight films with explicit and less overt eco-activist messages. While the films themselves speak to eco-imaginations, we also draw from the festival experience to consider how the event itself participates in eco-sensibilities through its …

Review Of The Warcraft Civilization, By William Sims Bainbridge, Anthony T. Sansone

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The evolving complexity of video games in narrative, gameplay and technology has steadily pulled researchers from game studies and other disciplines into examinations of games and what they say about our culture. Some examine what games say about players and what their activity says about them as part of society. Others explore what the game itself reflects about our culture; how a specific game can, could or does affect our society.

In Defense Of Narcissism: Blogging As Foucauldian Technology Of The Self, Evgeniya Boklage

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The application of the idea of narcissism stretches from a description of a narrowly conceived mental illness to a more general characterization of contemporary social condition. It has been used pejoratively to describe self-absorbed, egoistic, and uncivic attitudes and behavior. Returning to the Foucauldian technologies of the self – a philosophical account which tries to rehabilitate the love of the self and the idea of self-care as a positive social force – the present article utilizes this perspective to analyze the narcissistic, yet not uncivic, nature of blogging. It addresses a long-standing conflict between individualist and collectivist values in which …

Contributors, Kane Faucher

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 13, issue 3/4 of Reconstruction.

Veblen Does The Ipad: Ipadification And The Technologies Of Conspicuous Consumption, Tara Brabazon

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Thorstein Veblen was one of the great scholars of the twentieth century. Indeed, his most famous concept has entered the realm of cliché: conspicuous consumption. Yet the density of his prose has meant that his wider arguments about waste, class and capitalism have not travelled well into the 21st century. Therefore, this article combines the great scholar of the 20th century with one of the oddest products of the 21st century: the iPad. Exploring why the iPad emerged – in multiple versions – through the global economic crisis, Veblen’s theories of waste gain both renewed effectiveness and application.

On Agewise: Fighting The New Ageism In America, By Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Not since an eager, combat-booted pair of massive biceps attached to a deconstructionist waterbug with a PhD buttonholed me and shoved a Cultural Studies reader into my trembling matchstick arms has a single text caused me to enact as many multiple readings and to apply as many simultaneous readings as Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Agewise: Fight the New Ageism in America. Honestly, I cannot offer a review of this text. It does not need one. I am only able to respond to it, and even then with the timidity, awe and respect imbued in the above-cited recollection. To …

Redacting 'M. C. Escher And The Magen David', W. C. Bamberger

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Late in 2006 I received a query from Rob Reginald at Borgo Press asking if I would be interested in gathering my scattered essays and publishing them as a collection. My relationship with Rob had begun nearly twenty years earlier: in 1993 he had published my second book, William Eastlake: High Desert Interlocutor. Rob had left the publishing business for a few years, but now he was back. Borgo had become an imprint of Wildside Press (specialists in Fantasy and SF titles), and Rob was quickly adapting to the new protocols of publish-on-demand, e-books, et al. He …

My Own Private Ontology For A Poetics Of Sound: I Thought You Said It Was Sound / How Does That Sound, Stephanie Gray

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

As a poet obsessed with sound, as well as one with a hearing loss, in the past couple years I wrote two series of works that invoke sound, though one could say that I didn’t dive into them per se thinking about sound. How does that sound? Or just because I have a hearing loss, as some people sometimes infer. (Though it is partly so.) When asked to think about the origins of these works, or how they exist in the world, or how they exist at all, I started to ruminate on it and it truly felt …

Amplification, Rusty Morrison

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

I didn‘t hear what I would call the voice of his death before my father died, or the voice of her death before my mother died. Neither did I hear it in the months after their deaths. I did begin to hear silence differently, but it wasn‘t a difference that I associated with death; it seemed instead that I was hearing more of every silence that was life.

The Enemy Was Waste, Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

"My Father’s Thrift." When I was a child, the unnamed enemy was “waste.” My father went around the house turning off lights when we left a room, or sometimes urged us out of a room where a light could be extinguished. He saved the soap ends and crushed them together for continued use. We children got new clothes rarely, and made old shoes last. You can bet we cleaned our plates—nobody had to remind us about the starving Armenians. My parents were “thrifty”—that was the positive word they used. What they were avoiding—“waste”—that word was heard only, very …

Contributors, Marc Oullette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 12, issue 4 of Reconstruction.

Toward A Concept Of Post-Postmodernism Or Lady Gaga’S Reconfigurations Of Madonna, Danuta Fjellestad, Maria Engberg

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

How can we describe the landscape of what is increasingly referred to as post-postmodernism? Is post-postmodernism but a revision (however significant) of postmodernism or is it a new, perhaps even original, episteme? As must be clear from the title, the article takes Ihab Hassan’s much discussed essay “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” as its point of departure, but proposes a double revision of his chart. First, it supplements the chart with a set of concepts used to designate post-postmodernism. Second, it provides a re-vision of the very layout of the chart, arguing with Johanna Drucker that form is constitutive …

Of Zombies, Aids, And 'Africa': Non‐Western Disease And The 'Raciocultural' Imagination, Richard Brock

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay investigates the “raciocultural”—a term designating the slippage between, and mutual construction of, “race” and “culture” within discourses of quasi‐biological determinism—as a means of exploring Western representations of non‐Western disease as “foreign” threats to Europe and North America. It suggests that the raciocultural is at once a colonial‐era construction and a reflection of contemporary trends that have seen racist discourse become increasingly displaced onto the notion of the “cultural.” Investigating a range of texts including news media, literary texts, and interactive entertainment, the essay focuses on representations of “African” space as biologically and culturally “infected” in order to examine …

Reading Duhamel, Kocot, And Lease With Altieri's The Particulars Of Rapture, Thomas Fink

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Since at least the early eighties, Charles Altieri has been a major scholar-critic of contemporary poetry, and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (1989) extended the scope of his reputation to Modernism and its intersection with visual art. Throughout his career, he has been engaged with literary theory; perhaps because he has articulated alternatives to prevailing trends in Poststructuralism, New Historicism, and Cultural Studies, the critical mainstream has not always granted Altieri’s subtle, dialogically complex work in this area a substantial hearing.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Is This Where It All Began?, Jacinta Maria Matos

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is arguably the most influential political novel of the twentieth century, providing us with a set of concepts and a vocabulary to discuss the state’s totalitarian control of the individual. As such, Orwell can be seen as one of the founding fathers of literary representations of a threatening urban space which functions as the microcosm of a global, totalizing and dystopian reality. His seminal contribution to the discourse of (in)security and surveillance has been widely recognized. David Lyon is one among the many theorists who place Orwell at the top of the list of early …

Contributors, Susana S. Martins, Susana Araújo

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 12, issue 3 of Reconstruction.

Beautiful, Unethical, Dangerous': Screening Surveillance And Maintaining Insecurities, Adam Brown, Tony Chalkley

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster hit, The Dark Knight (2008), the roguish caped crusader builds a massive computer system to locate his arch-nemesis, the Joker, using sonar technology. After being called on by Batman to use the system and assist with the pursuit, the deeply moral CEO of Wayne Enterprises, Lucius Fox, reluctantly agrees to help just one time, but threatens to quit immediately afterwards. The film’s subsequent climactic scenes are thus played out in a cityscape under surveillance, both thematically and aesthetically, with Batman’s (anti)heroic exploits only possible through his (temporary) establishment of a virtual “surveillancescape.” Yet there …

Modes Of Resistance: A Critical Discussion Of Hey Baby, Derrais Carter, Holly Kearl, Jerrod Koon

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In recent years, street harassment has garnered a significant amount of public and scholarly attention. Activist campaigns to spread awareness on this issue and promote women’s public safety have shaped laws along with cultural understandings of gender and power. In 2010, integrated media artist Suyin Looui offered her contribution to this discourse through a game titled Hey Baby. Designed as a first person shooter, Hey Baby allows the player to experience street harassment.

This roundtable places Hey Baby in conversation with two activist-scholars concerned with street harassment. Holly Kearl is the founder of StopStreetHarassment.org and author of Stop Street …