Issue 1 - Origins & Originality

Autumn 2005

Guest Article

The Life and Death of the Avant-garde on the Battlefield of Rhetoric - and Beyond 
Dr Hubert van den Berg, researcher at the Institute for Humanities Research (ICOG) and Department of Dutch Language and Literature of the University of Groningen

Articles

Becoming Origin(al): Deterritorialization and Postcolonial Theory from the Caribbean 
William Christopher Brown, Indiana University

Genesis, the Origin, and Darwin's autobiographies 
Alexis Harley, University of Sydney

Myths of Origin and Myths of the Future in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl 
Elizabeth C. Harmer, McMaster University

Finding the Poem - Modern Gaelic Verse and the Contact Zone 
Corinna Krause, University of Edinburgh

Angelopoulos' Ulysses Gaze: Where the Old meets the New 
Vangelis Makriyannakis, University of Edinburgh

Lord Byron and George Eliot: Embracing National Identity in Daniel Deronda 

Denise Tischler Millstein, Louisiana State University

The Phantom Walking the Text: The Death of the Author Reconsidered 
Sten Moslund, University of Southern Denmark

Timeless and (Un)original : the Role of Gossip in R.K. Narayan's The Man-Eater of Malgudi and The Painter of Signs 
James Peacock, University of Edinburgh

The Kuleshov Effect and the Death of the Auteur 
Michael Russell, The University of Edinburgh

Jean-Luc Godard and Roy Lichtenstein: Originality, Reflexivity, and the Re-Presented Image 
Daniel Yacavone, University of Edinburgh

Reviews

Catherine Labio, Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant 
Joe Hughes, University of Edinburgh

 


 

Guest Article

The Life and Death of the Avant-garde on the Battlefield of Rhetoric - and Beyond
Dr Hubert van den Berg, researcher at the Institute for Humanities Research (ICOG) and Department of Dutch Language and Literature of the University of Groningen

'The avant-garde' has most often been defined by its position at the metaphorical 'cutting edge' or forefront of culture. The concept depends on the value assigned to originality and to art's ability to challenge mainstream culture. This paper examines the military origins and usage of the term in order to shed light upon the much heralded 'death of the avant-garde' which has been repeatedly declared by theorists and critics throughout the last few decades.

 

 

Articles

Becoming Origin(al): Deterritorialization and Postcolonial Theory from the Caribbean 
William Christopher Brown, Indiana University

This essay considers the status of Glissant's Caribbean Discourse and Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant's In Praise of Creoleness as "minor literature." This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical constructs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to analyze Glissant and Bernabé et al's calls for originality in Caribbean literature.

 

 

Genesis, the Origin, and Darwin's autobiographies 
Alexis Harley, University of Sydney

When Darwin refuted the creationist claims of Genesis with the evolutionary ones of the Origin of Species, he became a figurehead for Victorian apostasy. By examining how his autobiographical writing re-enacts this apostasy, this paper discusses less the metaphysical arguments he makes in his chapter on "Religious Belief", than how the accounts of Darwin's own origins engage rhetorically and stylistically with questions both of biblical fallibility or authority and of divine creation.

 

 

Myths of Origin and Myths of the Future in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl 
Elizabeth C. Harmer, McMaster University

Considering both cyborg theory and mythography, this essay compares the treatment of cyborgs and origin myths in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl and Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Lai exploits and plays with myth, showing the ways in which myths offer possibilities instead of constraints.

 

 

Finding the Poem - Modern Gaelic Verse and the Contact Zone 
Corinna Krause, University of Edinburgh

Exploring the relationship between modern Gaelic poetry and the ever facing English self-translations by Gaelic authors, this paper identifies modern Gaelic verse as literary contact zone highlighting dynamics surrounding both the production and the reception of modern Gaelic verse whilst considering the impact of such dynamics on the state of Gaelic as thriving literature and language.

 

 

Angelopoulos' Ulysses Gaze: Where the Old meets the New 
Vangelis Makriyannakis, University of Edinburgh

This paper looks into Angelopoulos' Ulysses Gaze in order to trace the signature of its author in the episodic narrative of a journey, where memory becomes a vessel to reinterpret the present and places the film among a cinematic mode that Deleuze has called 'The Time Image'.

 

 

Lord Byron and George Eliot: Embracing National Identity in Daniel Deronda 
Denise Tischler Millstein, Louisiana State University

This article explores Eliot's novel in the context of national consciousness, memory, the search for origin, culture and roots, and community and belonging. I argue that Eliot uses the Jewish plot of the novel and the cultural understanding of Byron as agents to discuss how Victorian England could reform and unify its national character.

 

 

The Phantom Walking the Text: The Death of the Author Reconsidered 
Sten Moslund, University of Southern Denmark

This paper argues that Barthes in his famous essay replaces the myth of the Author with a myth of the Text as a space of discursive infinitude. The paper proposes a reading of texts that permits a degree of discursive autonomy while at the same time calling attention to their discursive positioning.

 

 

Timeless and (Un)original : the Role of Gossip in R.K. Narayan's The Man-Eater of Malgudi and The Painter of Signs 
James Peacock, University of Edinburgh

Gossip in the novels of R.K. Narayan serves an intersubjective function, binding citizens together in acts of shared storytelling. It is precisely the difficulty of locating the origin of any one rumour which allows gossip to evade the control of malevolent outsiders, that is, potential cultural colonisers.

 

 

The Kuleshov Effect and the Death of the Auteur 
Michael Russell, The University of Edinburgh

The Kuleshov Effect has traditionally been interpreted as the origin of Soviet montage cinema, by establishing the effectiveness of montage techniques on cinema audiences. But I propose a new additional interpretation of the significance of the Kuleshov Effect, as a direct attack on the concept of the film auteur. This article explores the meeting point of Soviet montage cinema, the French Nouvelle Vague and Roland Barthes.

 

 

Jean-Luc Godard and Roy Lichtenstein: Originality, Reflexivity, and the Re-Presented Image 
Daniel Yacavone, University of Edinburgh

A comparative study of Jean-Luc Godard's 1960's "collage" cinema and Roy Lichtenstein's contemporaneous Pop art painting. Godard's and Lichtenstein's innovative use of pre-existing imagery is seen as part of a wider (self-)reflexive challenge to both traditional creative practices, and concepts of "originality" and "expressiveness," in film and the visual arts.

 

 

Reviews

Catherine Labio, Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant 
Joe Hughes, University of Edinburgh

 

 

Editors

Lisa Otty
Matt McGuire