Penn Faculty Mellon Fellows
2005-2006, Word & Image
Project
Crash: Nations, Bodies, Mediums
Karen
Beckman
Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Assistant
Professor of Film Studies, History of Art
Like cinema, the car has always
functioned as a key symbol of modernity. The car has
frequently acted as cinema's doppelganger, as its
figure of self-reflexivity within narrative and experimental
films alike. But if the road movie fuels fantasies
of global cine-mobility, of timeless, endless, and
uninhibited motion, the car-crash film metaphorically
"blasts open" the continuum of film, brings it
to the limits of its self. This forces film and its
viewers to contemplate the history and future of the
medium, revealing something of how to imagine the
medium, and perhaps ourselves, beyond the limits of
what we know.
In this project, Prof. Beckman examines how the representation
of crashed cars in a variety of media critically engage
the question of how mobility and stasis shape our
understanding of identity, nationhood, history, and
aesthetics. Working from tension between Benjamin's
notion of a "present in which times stands still"
and technology's utopic race forwards, this project
takes the figure of the crashed car in 20th- and 21st-century
visual culture as the starting point for theoretical
reflection on stillness in a world of moving images,
engaging what she perceives as a productive, event
ethical moment of stasis or pause, encountered by
visual theorists in the wake of postmodernism.
Project
How the U.S. Supreme Court
Invented Film
Peter
Decherney
Assistant Professor, English and
Cinema Studies
Throughout the history
of film copyright, the law has done much to establish
and protect film as a distinct medium. It has controlled
the status of film authorship, and it has set limits
on the kinds of films that can be made. Expanding
upon the research in his first book, Hollywood
and the Cultural Elite: How the Movies Became American,
Prof. Decherney is now investigating the history of
film copyright.
Dr. Decherney is examining a series of court decisions,
stretching from 1903 to 2005, that have defined (or
will define) film as a distinct medium in law, and
as a result, in American culture. For example, in
responding to the murky relation between film, literature,
and theater in the silent film adaptation of Ben
Hur, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. made film liable
for copyright infringement, inadvertently transforming
both the kinds of stories Hollywood told and the style
filmmakers used to tell them. Court definitions of
media have always driven those media in unpredictable
directions, but Dr. Decherney argues that the history
of the Court's theorization of word and image helps
to explain later decisions that accompanied the advent
of video and the Internet.
Project
"Building Castles
in the Air": Computers, Codes, and the Art of Programming
Nathan
Ensmenger
Assistant Professor, History and
Sociology of Science
Frederick P. Brooks, the famous computer scientist who
served as the project manager for the single largest
and most expensive software development effort ever
undertaken in the history of the IBM Corporation, portrayed
his occupation in surprisingly literary terms: "The
programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed
from pure-thought stuff. He builds his castles in the
air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination."
Using such loftly language to describe such a stereotypically
mundane occupation is striking but not unusual, notes
Ensmenger. Indeed, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, computer
programming was generally considered to be a uniquely
creative activity. His investigation of the history
of software development explores some of the ways in
which computer programmers constructed for themselves
a literary identity that gave them status, authority,
and freedom from managerial oversight. The similarities
between computer coding and other forms of inscription
penetrate the culture and practice of computing. Dr
Ensmenger?s current research looks at the larger significance
of computer code as art, literature, and incantation.
Project
Multimedia Collaborative Production in the Arts in
an Age of Globalization
Reinaldo Laddaga
Assistant Professor, Romance Languages
Prof. Laddaga's current research expands upon his most
recent book, El giro hacia la practica. Transformaciones
en las artes en una epoca de globalizacion, which
looks at collaborative multimedia projects by Dutch,
Argentinean, British, and Italian artists whose work
defies easy categorization as film, art, or literature.
Turning to collaborative on-line production, he investigates
three initiatives: the recent projects of Jodi, two
Dutch media artists who appropriate the rhetoric of
video games for the production of on-line interactive
art pieces that integrate texts, image and sound; "Projeto
Metafora," a project developed in Brazil that links
art production and software programming; and the work
of the Internet artists known as 0100101110101101.org.
Dr Laddaga intends to incorporate the results of this
research into the English version of his book.
Project
Word and Image in the Medieval Latin Bible
E. Ann Matter
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Religious Studies
In contrast to the modern understanding of the Christian
Bible as a textually set book bound into one large codex,
the Bible of medieval Europe was seldom transmitted
in a pandect. Despite Jerome's famous Vulgate translation,
a proliferation of versions—often divided into
smaller textual units (such as Gospel Books and Psalters)
copied and bound separately—were available to
medieval exegetes and theologians. This division of
the Bible continued into the High Middle Ages when these
small units of text facilitated the dissemination of
the standard glossed Bible, the Glossa ordinaria.
In the later Middle Ages, two large collections of biblical
material with specifically visual interpretations were
produced. The Bible moralisée, found
in wealthy circles of European courts, particularly
13th-century Paris, and the Biblia pauperum dating from
the 14th and 15th centuries, reflect the history of
the material Bible.
As the co-editor of the medieval
volume of The New Cambridge History of the Bible,
Prof. Matter will write essays on the standardization
of the biblical text and how it is represented in manuscripts
from the 11th–14th centuries, as well as the particular
representation of text and image in the Bible moralisée and the Biblia pauperum.
Project
Apparitions of Asia: Modernism's American Orient
Josephine Park
Assistant Professor, English
The visibility of the Orient in the first part of the
20th century was a crucial force in the emergence of
high modernist poetry. The uniquely visual register
of Chinese writing dramatically influenced the way in
which English could be broken and refashioned within
a new poetry whose aim was a revolutionary visibility.
The willingness of modernists to break the rules of
the line in poetry in English indicates a new structure
of intimacy between America and the Far East. In this
way, American poetry responded to a tranquil vision
that imagined America and Asia together.
Asserting that American modernity is inseparable from
an appreciation of East Asia, Prof. Park considers the
legacy of Ernest Fenollosa's American Orient in American
poetry at three key historical moments in the twentieth
century: Ezra Pound's famous obsession with Tang Dynasty
poetry in the 1910s, his later interest in Confucian
historiography in the late 1930s, and following Pound,
Gary Snyder's mid-century turn to Buddhism. Dr Park
expects that the fabled harmony between word and image
in the ideogram, formulated in Fenollosa's singular
study of Chinese writing, will provide a useful model
for considering this transpacific intimacy that spanned
the 20th century.
Project
History as Spectacle: The Crimean War in
Word and Image
Maurice Samuels
Assistant Professor, Romance Languages (French)
Expanding his research from his recent book, The
Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century
France, Prof. Samuels examines a crucial moment
in the genealogy of modernity's spectacular historical
imagination: the Crimean War of 1854-56. While Baudelaire
and others celebrated the battle sketches of Constantin
Guys as harbingers of modernity, less is known about
the much larger scale panoramas of the Crimea, which
appeared in both London and Paris, and were visited
by upwards of 75,000 people.
Although these panoramas were destroyed shortly after
their exhibition, many written records of this visual
experience have survived in reviews from the time. Prof.
Samuels investigates these reviews for clues to understanding
how the visual shapes the historical imagination of
modernity. In these descriptions, the panorama figures
as a locus of ideological manipulation, and perhaps
more surprisingly, as a space of resistance in which
the official view of war coexists alongside a more subjective,
subversive version. The written accounts emphasize the
visual?s tendency to coerce, delude, and lie, but also
point to the power of the image to make us think and
feel—a power which many recent critics of the
spectacle have tended to overlook.
|
|
|
