Posts in Literary Theory
Analog Horror and Nostalgia

This is explicitly a function of nostalgia, but it is nostalgia had second-hand, where the original object is eerily absent, decontextualized and beginning to run down like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, where the original recordings were physically destroyed in the process of transferring them over.

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A Spectrum of Haunting

Rereading it in preparation for the class, I was struck by a simple but surprisingly deep question: what does it mean for something to be haunted? Not on the surface, but as part of a deeper cultural question. What does it make sense to think of as being haunted?

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Story, Scene, Setpiece: The Base Units of Narrative

The primary shift, it seems to me, is a kind of rebalancing of literature and storytelling away from exposition and toward scenes. The adjective “cinematic” is noted as a selling-point for stories, more so than “musical” or “architectural” or “sculptural” or “painterly,” because the ideal of storytelling is no longer the epic novel, but instead the film. This shift isn’t just a slow move, though, it’s an ongoing vector of movement: because film and literature – as major narrative art forms – are tied together, a shift in one often has a knock-on-effect on the other.

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Symbolic Order: Logogenesis in the Arts

This isn’t innovative. What might be somewhat new is that, at least to me, it seems that for a work of art to be “successful” it is far more important to use the chosen symbolic language effectively than to say anything terribly innovative. A novel message presented without artifice would not be as effective as a trite message presented skillfully.

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