School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    Carpaccio, Saint Stephen, and the topography of Jerusalem
    Marshall, David R. ( 1984)
    Those buildings and topographical motifs in Jerusalem represented by Carpaccio in his Saint Stephen cycle are discussed, as are the ways in which they were represented by artists before Carpaccio. It can be deduced that Carpaccio's sole source for his renderings was in the woodcuts by Reuwich in the 1486 book by Breydenbach on the Holy Land. Suggestions of other sources and of a visit by Carpaccio may be discarded. Conclusions can be drawn about Carpaccio's approach to the representation of real landscape.
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    Television: presenting the memory machine
    MCQUIRE, S. ( 1987)
    This essay situates developments in contemporary television in relation to the dominant social relations of time. It argues that time is a perpetual ‘problem’ for television, extending beyond the terms of configuring narrative formats and strategies of visual reflexivity, and instead indicating deeper epistemological and existential issues. While contemporary television programming often seems driven by a desire to give viewers the immediacy of a perpetual ‘now’, this creates a series of increasingly intense contradictions concerning the social experience of time and the functioning of memory.
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    Pornography and pleasure: the female spectator
    CREED, BARBARA ( 1982)
    In this paper, I wish to make some comments on the pornographic film text and the question of pleasure for the female viewer. My starting point is The Story of O, a film which is ‘about’ sado-masochistic relationships but I shall also refer to Emmanuelle, The Anti-Virgin, which is part II of the Emmanuelle trilogy, a group of films which have been more widely viewed that any other recent soft-porn products.
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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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    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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    The margins of the law
    Frow, John A. ( 1988-02)
    Text reviewed Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. 128pp. One of the most powerful current readings of the law is that developed, as an “expansion of doctrine” by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. This reading begins with an acceptance of “the mimimal characteristics of doctrine - the willingness to take the extant authoritative materials as starting points and the claim to normative authority” (15). It accepts the historical givenness of doctrine, that is to say; but then pushes on from there to the point where doctrine crosses over into ideological conflict. This is the reading, in other words, of a “double inscription” it explores the “internal development” (2) of legal categories (for example, the causal categories embedded in notions such as imputed purpose), but it then tries to open this development out into a recognition and a deepening of the clash between contradictory principles. Legal categories are so closely tied in with the structure of the world that to contest them, or to elaborate them to the point of contradiction, is to challenge the naturalness and the necessity of that structure. Such a method of reading derives its political force from its belief that “the focussed disputes of legal doctrine repeatedly threaten to escalate into struggles over the basic imaginative structure of social existence”
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    The politics of experience: women in the Western Australian clothing trade, 1950-1970
    OWEN, CHRISTINE ( 1983)
    This article is concerned with the nature of the experience of women working in the Western Australian clothing trade between 1950 and 1970. The period is significant in that the clothing trades workforce was affected during this time by the arrival of a migrant workforce and by economic downturn in an industry traditionally characterised by low profit margins. Both of these factors together with a male-dominated Union contributed to the workers' extreme expendability throughout this time.
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    Formal Method in Discourse Analysis
    FROW, JOHN ( 1989)
    Developing a workable method of discourse analysis matters, presumably, and if it does, because it would allow us to demonstrate the play of power in language, the play of ideology. To demonstrate means being able to substantiate arguments in the public arena – to politicians, in courts of law, in hospitals or prisons or museums. What we envisage is something like the possibility of proof. We envisage, not a political process of judgement, but procedures of demonstration which could be mechanically repeated to produce identical results, and so bear witness to the underlying structure which causes them. Discourse analysis, like other uncertain knowledges, aspires to a state of hardness. My tone of irony covers a real ambivalence about this project, these projects, and certainly I intend no easy dismissal of them. Here I want to raise a series of questions about some of the work being done in and around the Dutch Konteksten series, especially by Tony Hak and Brian Torode;1 and to see whether it might be possible to define some of the limits touched by this raw, exploratory, interesting work. This is not, even in the case of individual writers, a unified body of research, but it has certain common points of reference. One of them is the ethnomethodological conversation analysis of Sacks and Schegloff; the other, more properly linguistic, is the work of Michel Pêcheux, and to a certain extent the analytic methods of Zellig Harris. The attraction of Pêcheux’s work is, I think, that it promises a rigorous and quasigrammatical account of presupposition: that is, the concept of the preconstructed promises direct access to ideology insofar as it appears to be equivalent to the Gramscian categories of 'common sense' – the obvious, the unthought, the taken-for-granted; and insofar as it both embodies these in a particular grammatical construction and relates them to a particular process of subject formation.