School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    System and history: a critique of Russian formalism
    FROW, JOHN ( 1980)
    The theoretical development of Russian Formalism, and of its structuralist successors in Prague, is the record of an exemplary attempt to fuse an immanent approach to the literary text to the literary system, which would locate significance in the structure of textual relations and not in genetic or mimetic features, with an awareness of the essential historicity of these relations. Implicit in the concept of literary evolution is a theory of the mechanism of change – that is, of the connection between literary history and history between the text and the social formation; but this theory was never adequately elaborated, both because of a refusal to postulate a direct causal connection between historical change and the apparently autonomous development of the literary system, and because of the Formalists’ almost constant separation of aesthetic from extra aesthetic functions (a separation which confirms the hiatus between the literary series and the social system in which it is inserted).
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    Discourse and Power
    Frow, John A. ( 1985)
    The paper argues for the possibility of reworking the concept of ideology in such a way as to depend neither on a problematic of truth and error, nor on a division of the world into two parts one of which is more real than the other, nor on an expressive relation of subjects to meaning. The political force of the concept can be retained if ideology is thought as a provisional state of discourse (a function of its appropriation and use) rather than as a content or an inherent structure. Any discursive system produces a particular configuration of subject-positions which are the conditions of entry of individuals into discourse; but these acquire political significance only through the (historically variable) codification of discourse in terms of a play of relations of power, and the positions available can be refused or undermined. Some implications of this argument for models of the social and for discourse theory are discussed.
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    Discipline and Discipleship
    Frow, John A. ( 1988)
    The transfer of knowledges is almost always mediated by institutions and by authorized persons. I set up some metaphors in this paper to try to examine these mediating processes by which knowledges are both reproduced and transformed. In particular, I take psychoanalytic andreligious training as metaphors for the transmission of a discipline, and then I briefly extend the figure of discipleship to talk about literary pedagogy and the training of graduate students.
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    A pebble, a camera, a man who turns into a telegraph pole
    FROW, JOHN ( 2001)
    Moving house while I was writing this paper, I have been working in an unusually intense way with physical things: sanding back wooden floors, shifting cartons of books, sealing a window frame with putty, tightening the rings on a washing machine hose . . . Callused on my fingers, this is a kind of knowledge different from intellectual knowing (which is, nevertheless, always a matter of paper and ink and electric currents running through machinery). Old skills of understanding the world with my hands come back to me. And I experience the sheer singularity of its things: this nameless, almost indescribable Odradek of a thing, for example, ample, an asymmetrical grooved and slotted bit of fractionally cylindrical metal that ties two planks of bookshelf together around a projecting, greased metal screw. Someone designed it, gave it its mysteriously precise logic, perhaps even has a name for it; but to me it's purely strange.
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    Information technology as cultural capital
    Emmison, Michael ; FROW, JOHN ( 1998)
    In this paper we explore the relevance of the concept of cultural capital - understood here as an alternative to the more traditional measures of socio-economic disadvantage - in the context of a discussion of the significance of information technology in contemporary societies.
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    Accounting for tastes: some problems in Bourdieu's sociology of culture
    Frow, John A. ( 1987)
    Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste completes what is perhaps the strongest case we have about the social functions of cultural artefacts; but it is a case that is deeply flawed. In this article I try to isolate some of the theoretical presuppositions and implications of its central concepts, and to clarify their political limitations.
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    Multiculturalism: the politics of cultural diversity
    FROW, JOHN ( 1998)
    This paper addresses the proposition that multiculturalism in Australia is not primarily a cultural phenomenon but should be understood, rather, as being framed by local demographico-political considerations, by a set of strategies of nation formation, and by the politics of Asian regionalism. By this I don’t mean that it has no cultural effects, both at the level of high culture and of everyday social interactions, but that it cannot be accounted for in terms of the discourse of cultural attitude with which it is officially described.
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    A note on legal semiotics
    Frow, John A. ( 1995)
    It has become a commonplace to think of the law as a textual practice, and analysis of the linguistic specificity of legal discourse would seem a logical way to explore the textual or discursive construction of the juridical real. There are major difficulties, however, with most of the currently employed forms of linguistic analysis of the law.
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    Timeshift: technologies of reproduction and intellectual property
    Frow, John A. ( 1994)
    In recent years two factors have significantly affected the underlying conditions for the public circulation of ideas and information. On the one hand, the development of technologies for the electronic reproduction and dissemination of information has in principle made information limitlessly available; on the other hand, the process of legal regulation has, in all Western countries, constructed or affirmed property rights restricting and channelling the use of information. This paper analyses one of the most important recent American cases in intellectual property law, the 1984 Supreme Court majority and minority decisions in Sony vs Universal City Studios. It argues that, in allowing home video recording of off-air programmes and extending or at least upholding the doctrine of fair use, the Court’s decision nevertheless fails to challenge the philosophical contradictions in intellectual property doctrine which have allowed the progressive encroachment of private property rights on the public domain.
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    Michel de Certeau and the practice of representation
    Frow, John A. ( 1991)
    Michel de Certeau’s work, particularly the ethnography of everyday practices developed Arts de faire I and II, has been extensively appropriated in recent years by English-speaking theorists of popular culture. The appropriation has been rather selective, ignoring much of de Certeau’s output in, for example, sociology, history, and literary criticism. More to my point, it has taken from de Certeau a model of the popular which is at once powerful and simple, and which I therefore propose to treat in this paper both with respect and theoretical caution.