Session 12: New Beginnings and New Lines
Session 12: New Beginnings and New Lines
Chair: Barbra Mckenzie
The Forking Paths of Open Your Eyes and Vanilla Sky
Carolina Ferrer
Literary Studies, University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada
In March 1992, researchers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean inaugurated in Paris the conference Épistémocritique et Cognition, thus giving official birth to epistemocriticism. This new branch of literary criticism incites us to make a re-appropriation of culture as a whole. Essentially, this perspective calls on us to explore the relations between literature and science.
The purpose of my communication is to extend epistemocriticism to film studies. Thus, I propose to analyse how bifurcations theory and Borges’s story «The Garden of Forking Paths» operate as main interdiscoursive artefacts in Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes and in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky.
In «Film Futures», David Bordwell analyses four films that fall in the alternative futures category and compares them with the above mentioned Borges’s story. According to Bordwell, the transfer of Borges’s concept to cinema fails as in films certain traditions of cinematic storytelling would be systematically applied. I would like to suggest that if Bordwell had been aware of the link between the mathematical theory of bifurcations and Borges’s story and hence had included such scientific principles in his viewpoint, his conclusions would have been more stimulating. Therefore, the purpose of my analysis is to use the mathematical theory of bifurcations in order to shed light on Amenábar’s creation and on its American remake and, finally, to show the pertinence of epistemocriticism in film studies. Accordingly, I believe that extending this perspective to film studies, we can achieve a better understanding of what happens in these forking-paths films, a category where Open Your Eyes as well as Vanilla Sky belong.
Download Draft Conference Paper – 
Masculinity and Technology in North American Comics
Oksana Cheypesh
Comparative Literature, University of Alberta, Canada
The paper will analyze North American strip comics The Amazing Spider-Man by Michael Straczynski and Superman by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Initially, the theme of comics represented reaction on Great Depression while introducing an American hero with an alternative ideology: he helped people and insisted on law and order. The protagonists’ characteristics and beliefs unveil that the Americans see power as the alliance between the masculine and technology. This view contributes to and reflects American tradition ought to the continuous popularity of the comic books.
I will argue that the American hero pronounces masculinity and patriarchal ideology: law and order help regulating relationships in urban environments; Superman’s and Spider-Man’s extraordinary strength makes them competitive and helps to win; their double identities (an extraordinary entity and an average person) metaphorically construct two sides of the masculine: a strong savage and a mask of a ‘civilized’ hypocrite.
Marshall McLuhan showed that the invention of print technology “created gigantism… for the author, for the vernaculars, [and] for markets”; the appetite in The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel was a metaphor for European consumerism of printed book. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities calls the book “the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity.” The comics continue the discussion of technology, media, and consumerism: Superman and Spider-Man work in city newspapers (Superman is a reporter, Spider-Man is a photographer) and the stories contain repetitive images of mass production and distribution of newspapers.
Also, I will discuss how the visual structure of strip comics stimulates their consuming. In a comic book, the page outline contains numerous pictures which give a prospect view of all the information to be perceived. This view schematically illustrates McLuhan’s paradigm of uniform commodity culture and a concept that visual presence of numerous copies reinforces consumption.
Child Art and Modernity
Ourania Kouvou
Department of Early Childhood Education, Athens University, Greece
With this paper I would like to focus on the teaching of visual arts at pre and early schooling. In particular I will examine the notion of child art as the theory that has to a great extent determined the practices of young people’s art education over the past and current centuries. The child art theory was based on the belief that children are natural artists whose visual products are subject to universal norms free from academic rules and societal conventions that govern the production of adult artists. The artifacts of children are innate, the product of individual creative energies, independent of cultural influences and indeed their natural flowering would be disrupted by adult intervention and tutoring.
I would like to argue that this naturalist theory of children’s visual products is a modernist notion subject to the assumptions of this cultural phenomenon. In fact child art, the assumed spontaneous capacity of children for creative expression, is a cultural construct itself initiated and interpreted by art educators themselves, modern artists, and pedagogues. Child art then is not something children make themselves, but is the result of the intervention of adults adhering to specific modernist artistic conventions. On the other hand, recent investigations have shown that children from a very young age borrow schemata and forms from their surrounding visual culture as well as from each other. There seems to be a kind of ‘child culture’ of visual forms and stereotypes that children use and manipulate each time adapted to the specific occasion of representation. After all children may not be creative in the way the modernist approach would have them, but they also use Gombrich’s process of schema and correction. The question raised therefore is: if children’s visual products are indeed influenced by pictorial conventions found in the surrounding visual culture, if after all their creations are not so individual and unique, what would be the role of the art educator?
Entries (RSS)