Accident as Form

Author(s):  
Julia Jordan

This chapter argues for the 1960s and 1970s collage novel as perhaps the clearest manifestation of the period’s attraction to indeterminacy, and attempts to chart some of the often artistically inspired cross-currents that inform some of the experimental novels of the period. The chapter examines Alan Burns’s 1969 Babel, also touching on Tom Phillips’s ‘dispersed narrative’ A Humument (begun in 1966), and J. G. Ballard’s 1970 Atrocity Exhibition. These works share as central concerns juxtaposition and formal discontinuity, whereby an idea of errancy is sculptural and generative, allowed its own narrative presence and formal ordering power. As such these texts display an interest in the mechanisms of dispersed attention as an aesthetic value—a certain skittishness assumed in the reader—and so these contingencies of production and consumption become constitutive of the genre, and folded into the distinctive character and affective potency of late modernism itself.

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Farber

In the 1960s and 1970s, self-avowed members of the counterculture, often based on the west coast and in the Rocky Mountain West, eschewed critics’ stereotypical notions of stoned and indolent hippies and struggled to build an alternative economic system. While rejecting corporate capitalism and consumer acquisitiveness, they built new enterprises, new institutions, new organizational forms, and new practices that gave proof of the possibility of creating economically sustainable, alternative lives. Do-it-yourself practices, especially building one’s own home or repairing one’s own vehicle, promised to free practitioners from working for wages in order to afford consumer goods—even as DIY culture often promoted traditional gender roles. While many of the counterculture’s attempts at escaping the employee-consumer nexus failed or were short-lived, it did succeed in outlining an alternative approach to both production and consumption that has had a continuing impact on American capitalist development.


2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 562-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nahuel Ribke

Since the beginning of the millennium, several Brazilian telenovelas have been partially produced abroad, incorporating in their storylines protagonists from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, exotic customs, foreign jargon, and attractive tourist locations in Middle Eastern and south-east Asian countries. This article aims to contribute to the debate regarding the asymmetries in media contents flow from “central” to “developing” countries, through analyzing the production of Brazilian “transnational” telenovelas broadcasted during 2001–2012. Rejecting the media imperialism thesis as formulated in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the more optimistic approaches pointing to the erosion of persistent asymmetries in the production and reception of television contents, this study examines the economic, cultural, and political forces driving the production and consumption of television contents outside the Anglo-Saxon axis, pointing to the cooperation, conflicts, and negotiations between television producers, national audiences, international publics, and private actors.


Socio hu ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
Máté Tamáska

The 1960s and 1970s represent a period of housing estate construction in Europe, and this urban architectural model greatly affected the former socialist countries, including Hungary. It seems logical therefore that monument and townscape protection could not find its place in that period of building boom. Nevertheless, Hungarian monument protection flowered in those decades. The reason for this was that the search for “contrast” was one of the leading paradigms in modern urban aesthetics, and this contrast also highlighted development: the remaining architectural monuments and urban zones as relics emphasized the different characteristics of the modern town as opposed to the old one. Thus, while urban architects were working on creating the “new townscape”, experts of monument protection had a wide range of license in their field to preserve the historical milieu as a contrast to the modern one. Naturally, this historical milieu had the stamp of the aesthetical paradigms of modern architecture as well. Therefore the old houses were interpreted as the antitype of modern design, the static and rationality were stressed, instead of the decoration and social representation of old structures. This paper attempts to verify empirically the above thesis by analyzing three Hungarian sites: the completely reconstructed Budapest-Óbuda, Komárom as municipal center and semi-new town in the 1960s and 1970s, and Esztergom as a historical town.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Flanagan

This article traces Ken Russell's explorations of war and wartime experience over the course of his career. In particular, it argues that Russell's scattered attempts at coming to terms with war, the rise of fascism and memorialisation are best understood in terms of a combination of Russell's own tastes and personal style, wider stylistic and thematic trends in Euro-American cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, and discourses of collective national experience. In addition to identifying Russell's recurrent techniques, this article focuses on how the residual impacts of the First and Second World Wars appear in his favoured genres: literary adaptations and composer biopics. Although the article looks for patterns and similarities in Russell's war output, it differentiates between his First and Second World War films by indicating how he engages with, and temporarily inhabits, the stylistic regime of the enemy within the latter group.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chik Collins ◽  
Ian Levitt

This article reports findings of research into the far-reaching plan to ‘modernise’ the Scottish economy, which emerged from the mid-late 1950s and was formally adopted by government in the early 1960s. It shows the growing awareness amongst policy-makers from the mid-1960s as to the profoundly deleterious effects the implementation of the plan was having on Glasgow. By 1971 these effects were understood to be substantial with likely severe consequences for the future. Nonetheless, there was no proportionate adjustment to the regional policy which was creating these understood ‘unwanted’ outcomes, even when such was proposed by the Secretary of State for Scotland. After presenting these findings, the paper offers some consideration as to their relevance to the task of accounting for Glasgow's ‘excess mortality’. It is suggested that regional policy can be seen to have contributed to the accumulation of ‘vulnerabilities’, particularly in Glasgow but also more widely in Scotland, during the 1960s and 1970s, and that the impact of the post-1979 UK government policy agenda on these vulnerabilities is likely to have been salient in the increase in ‘excess mortality’ evident in subsequent years.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.


2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 88-107
Author(s):  
Louise K. Davidson-Schmich ◽  
Jennifer A. Yoder ◽  
Friederike Eigler ◽  
Joyce M. Mushaben ◽  
Alexandra Schwell ◽  
...  

Konrad H. Jarausch, United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects Reviewed by Louise K. Davidson-Schmich Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce, ed. The GDR Remembered:Representations of the East German State since 1989 Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 Reviewed by Friederike Eigler Peter H. Merkl, Small Town & Village in Bavaria: The Passing of a Way of Life Reviewed by Joyce M. Mushaben Barbara Thériault, The Cop and the Sociologist. Investigating Diversity in German Police Forces Reviewed by Alexandra Schwell Clare Bielby, Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s Reviewed by Katharina Karcher Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, ed., Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945 Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder


Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa N. Terranova

This essay focuses on a body of photoconceptual works from the 1960s and 1970s in which the automobile functions as a prosthetic-like aperture through which to view the world in motion. I argue that the logic of the “automotive prosthetic“ in works by Paul McCarthy, Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Ed Kienholz, Julian Opie, and Cory Arcangel reveals a techno-genetic understanding of conceptual art, functioning in addition and alternatively to semiotics and various philosophies of language usually associated with conceptual art. These artworks show how the automobile, movement on roads and highways, and the automotive landscape of urban sprawl have transformed the human sensorium. I surmise that the car has become a prosthetic of the human body and is a technological force in the maieusis of the posthuman subject. I offer a reading of specific works of photoconceptual art based on experience, perception, and a posthumanist subjectivity in contrast to solely understanding them according to semiotics and linguistics.


2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Connah ◽  
S.G.H. Daniels

New archaeological research in Borno by the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has included the analysis of pottery excavated from several sites during the 1990s. This important investigation made us search through our old files for a statistical analysis of pottery from the same region, which although completed in 1981 was never published. The material came from approximately one hundred surface collections and seven excavated sites, spread over a wide area, and resulted from fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s. Although old, the analysis remains relevant because it provides a broad geographical context for the more recent work, as well as a large body of independent data with which the new findings can be compared. It also indicates variations in both time and space that have implications for the human history of the area, hinting at the ongoing potential of broadscale pottery analysis in this part of West Africa and having wider implications of relevance to the study of archaeological pottery elsewhere.


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