Rachel Adibe Zein. “Narrating ‘Off the Reel’: Mechanical Narration and Temporal Distortion in Joyce’s Ulysses”
When a reader approaches a literary text, they often carry with them a consequential but seldom interrogated assumption: that the passage of time in the narrative will mirror the supposedly continuous and linear passage of time in our own “reality.” Although works categorized under the field of literary modernism are distinguished for their rejection of a realistic rendering of the world, there is still more to be said about how modernists writers distort diegetic temporality as a means to expose the inherently subjective nature of readers’ own perception of time. My paper addresses the issue of diegetic time in modernist fiction with special attention to two episodes in James Joyce’s Ulysses, namely, the “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” episodes. Specifically, in my project, I will be looking at how the “Eumaeus” narrator’s use of discordant verb tenses and ellipses throughout episode produces an unsettling, mechanical portrayal of diegetic time. I will juxtapose this analysis against the rigid, extradiegetic narrative framework of “Ithaca” to show how Joyce calls attention to the reader’s own subjective experience of temporal continuity. I argue that the uncanny approach to narration in “Eumaeus” and the imagistic, discontinuous narration of “Ithaca” furthers one of Joyce’s larger projects with Ulysses, to reimagine the possibilities and techniques of narration with respect to time. In conclusion, this project, by closely analyzing the experimental, nonlinear construction of diegetic temporality, examines the way in which one of literary modernism’s most paradigmatic works incites a fresh perspective on readers’ own understanding of time.
Inbal Strauss. “Re-Embodying Disembodied Spectatorship: Rethinking Visual Art’s Prohibition on Touch Through an Interactive Theory of Reception Aesthetics”
Standardly, in the fine arts, reception aesthetics considers the ways in which the work of art, which stands in the modernist tradition of the autonomous object, solicits the aesthetic and intellectual agency of viewers through visual perception. However, contemporary practices are engaging so called “viewers” in increasingly interactive and corporeal ways that warrant a reconsideration of the traditional hierarchy between the distal sense of sight, associated with reason and rationality, and the proximal sense of touch, associated with bodily pleasures. Accordingly, arguing towards an interactive, or multisensory theory of reception aesthetics, the paper explores how the notion of disembodied spectatorship has been constructed within the ‘white cube’ space, and how interaction design may illuminate the ways in which art solicits the aesthetic and intellectual agency of its audience through physical interaction.
The ways in which works of art solicit the agency of viewers in completing their meaning, have been outlined by the art historian Wolfgang Kemp in “The Work of Art and its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception” (1998). Comparably, the ways in which everyday objects solicit the agency of users in executing their functions have been outlined by usability engineer Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday things (1988). Drawing on Kemp’s theory of reception aesthetics on the one hand, and Norman’s theory of interaction design on the other, the paper offers a lens comparison of an everyday thing and a work of art, whereby the functional analysis of the former enables the aesthetic analysis of the latter.
Approximating ‘artist’ with ‘designer,’ and correspondingly ‘viewer’ with ‘user,’ the comparison, in turn, challenges the still-pervasive notion of disembodied spectatorship, and demonstrates that a contemporary theory of reception aesthetics has much to benefit from theories of interaction design.
Andrea Avidad Archila. “Animal Specter: Acousmatic Sound in Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza (2008)”
The thump strikes with heaviness, and yet, as sonic effect, the thump envelops itself in dullness and muteness. Causal event and its sonic effect correlate in a disparate manner in the sonic form of the thump; a thump suggests but does not tell. In this paper I give close attention to Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008), a film whose narrative development is swiftly suspended by sudden, loud thumps: a woman, cocooned in her car, runs over a body (somebody?) (something?) – a body that is never clearly seen. But what isn’t seen is heard: we are confronted with thumping sounds that inscribe the anonymous body within the diegesis. If the cinematic image refuses to visualize the body, the thumps testify to its materiality, albeit ambiguously (Human body? Animal body? Inanimate body?). I argue that the specter of the unseen crashed body haunts the diegesis by destabilizing epistemic certainty: without the impossibility to determine the status of the body (either human or animal; either subject or object), the specter alters the dualistic theoretical machines of Western thought. It is the specter of what cannot be known, that is, of what is never fully present in itself, the agent that provokes an anxiety hovering at the limits of representation and communication, both for diegetic subjects and spectators. It is the specter of an in-betweenness (human-animal-object) what alters affective states. I draw upon Jacques Derrida notion of the animot posited in The Animal that Therefore I Am (2002) in order to scrutinize the excess marked by animality. Significantly, I also suggest that the cinematic apparatus is itself haunted by the specter of opacity, invisibility, by the out-of-frame, for it is only sound –the thump– what serves as evidence of an event that cannot be fully identified, known, understood, and felt; an event that alters what one knows and how one feels. The invisibility of sound puts pressure on ocularcentric epistemologies. I engage in a discussion of acousmatic sound –sound whose material cause is outside the visual field of the listener– drawing upon Brian Kane’s and Rey Chow’s theories of acousmaticity, in which acousmaticity stands for non-identity. Finally, I bring opposite theories of affect into dialogue (Gilles Deleuze’s affect as non-representable versus Eugenie Brinkema’s affect as form, among others), considering the ways in which the specter of the unseen body alters the hierarchy of image over sound in the cinematic body while altering the flows of narrative grammar and the affectivity of the spectator.
