contemporary

An outstanding review and analysis of major thinkers! Thorough in scope and highly accessible, this volume introduces readers to the thinkers who have exerted a profound influence on contemporary rhetorical theory. The brief biographical sketches locate the theorists in time and place, showing how life experiences influenced perspectives on rhetorical thought. The concise explanations of complex concepts are clear and provide readers with a solid foundation for reading the major works of these scholars. The critical commentary is carefully chosen to place the theories within a broader rhetorical context. Each chapter ends with a complete bibliography of works by the theorists. Previous editions have been praised as indispensable; the Third Edition is equally essential.

Titles of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Foss et al., Readings in Contemporary Rhetoric (ISBN 9781577662068); Hauser, Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577662211); and Smith, Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History, Third Edition (ISBN 9781577665878).

This paper analyses the use of ‘the coast’, particularly the coast of England’s South-West Peninsular, as a site for deconstruction in the works of a number of intermedia poet-artists. It is based primarily on selected readings of digital literature works which specifically engage with the South-West coast, covering works by Mark Goodwin, Andrew Fentham, Penny Florence and JR Carpenter (including the latest work by JR Carpenter ‘This is a Picture of Wind’, shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018). The reading considers the texts’ representations of ‘coasts’ and ‘peninsulars’ and their relationship to the de-stabilisation and frustration of positions of authority and authoritative structures (especially positions and structures of nationalism and sexism). The South-West peninsular can itself be considered de-centred and eccentric, remote from England’s administrative and financial centres and with a rich history of translocal interactions and migrations (c.f. Natalie Pollard) between other peripheral artistic and cultural regions and nations (especially those with Celtic heritage). Moreover the peninsular has attracted major canonical artists and writers since at least the 18th century, including (among many other) JM Turner, William Wordsworth, Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost and Patrick Heron. In 20th century poetry Cornwall has been resident to translocal migrants WS Graham and Peter Redrove, in addition to many of the Radical Landscape Poets (considering especially those anthologized in Harriet Tarlo’s The Ground Aslant) and a wide range of British avant-garde poets, all of whom draw on the coast metaphor. This paper draws on this rich tradition of modernist and post-modern poetics and fine art practices, and relates it to the work of contemporary intermedia digital poetry and art practitioners who engage with the same landscape. Coasts can be considered as liminal and transient spaces, unstable, ever-changing and fluxatious, cycling through daily, lunar-monthly and yearly patterns. Beaches and sand-dunes shift, cliffs open into caves and collapse, solid seemingly changes into liquid and vice-versa, and the landscape provides a gestural sign of the ancient cumulative attrition of water and wind. Coastlines, may seemingly de-limit like borders and boundaries, but the reality is far from binary. Coastal and Peninsular communities can act as refuges for de-centred artistic practices. Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro points to bohemian coastal Brighton, to where eventually ‘all the freaks wash down.’ Perhaps the South-West peninsular has a similar magnetism for eccentric practices. This paper interrogates this metaphor and its related structures. What are the implications of peninsularity, how is eccentricity utilised for deconstruction, why is the SouthWest coast a particularly appealing symbolic field? More specifically, how are these structures used in intermedia digital poetry practices to de-stabilise and frustrate positions and structures of authority (especially positions of sexism and nationalism). Pointing to established critical work by (among others) Johanna Drucker, JR Carpenter and Scott Rettberg, the paper will also provoke questions about the production and distribution networks of digital literature, which analogously and sometimes self-consciously de-centre and de-stablise authority.

Abstract in the picture below.

(Source - books.google.com)

The paradigm of the contemporary has become a vertebral concept to understand what is happening with the relationships between sound/image/text in space/time of emerging contemporary artistic practices like Electronic Literature. It is important to ask the question; why within these practices such concepts can coexist without any problem; and because when they are theorized, they have to be fragmented? This is the origin of a whole series of transformations in the ways of production and how the knowledge given to explain contemporaneity is questioned. Questioning what has been given us includes a complex, non-linear, chaotic, uncertain and, above all, speculative web. The objective of this paper is to find arguments that allow us to understand why artistic practices like Electronic Literature accepts coexistence of concepts like sound/image/text; while theorization is a battlefield that defends the interests of its object of study as a paranoid legitimizing state that decides what we should think as contemporary and what is not. We start with Barthes' statement: "the contemporary is the untimely" (Barthes in Agamben, 2011. p. 17) as a definition of the simultaneous, which is reproduced in the linear discourse of the everyday. It is cited without rhyme or reason, but above all without questioning it. The point is how Barthes arrives at such a definition to achieve an appropriation of it through a breakdown and how it is linked to the proposal of the limits and horizons of what is currently thought, and if what is thought as contemporary there is a simultaneity. The contemporary from its quality: "untimely", contains the tempus (time) and the prefix in (inside), the contemporary happens within time. The question is, what time? Especially since the history corresponds to the linearity of the historical method. This is worse, in everyday life, in a chaotic, fractal, catastrophic, diffuse way that leads us to think about it beyond its qualitative aspects. Time and event are not distinguished from each other because they do not run linearly and, much less, coherently. Hence, the contemporary is something sudden that happens without warning, within the chaos and the uncertainty. Barthes places the contemporary within the storm. Within the catastrophic time/space where doing and thinking are an undifferentiated act. This perspective not only highlights the transformations that dislocate the productive processes that happens with a continuous movement that we cannot stop. They also alter the concepts of those relational processes by deactivating and activating the language. For example, platforms on the Internet where the contemporary piece of Electronic Literature no longer has an autonomous meaning.

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/459/Rethi…)

Salvatore Proietti straddles science and fiction to offer an interpretation of a McElroy Cyborg.

Paul Gleason on Joseph McElroy’s mid-career epic, Women and Men, as contrasted with Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

Andrew Walser introduces a gathering of essays on and by the novelist Joseph McElroy.

Chris Messenger reviews Tom LeClair’s first novel, Passing Off (1996).

Of the three major American team sports (Basketball, Baseball, Football), basketball is the only one that is wordless. Baseball is interpreted by language through an umpire’s balls and strikes, football sent into violent collision of bodies by a quarterback’s arcane jargon. Basketball, however, is the sport that at present remains a mystic’s communion, somewhere between a violent ballet and a transcendent praxis. Because of its silence, basketball has attracted only a fraction of the novelists (Updike in his Rabbit series the most prominent) who have memorialized baseball and football in the past few decades. That team roster is large and cuts across a popular and elite sampling of contemporary American fiction (Malamud, Roth, Coover, Charyn, Kinsella, DeLillo, Whitehead, Gent, Jenkins). Furthermore, basketball’s symbology and social relations have been almost totally appropriated by an African American standard of play, excellence, and cultural relevance, stipulating that white American authors must work out their own meaning now in a residual and somewhat tangential sense.