2011
SIX MONTHS IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS / ISABELLA BIRD
The days dawn in rose colour and die in gold, and through their long hours a sea of delicious blue shimmers beneath the sun, so soft, so blue, so dreamlike, an ocean worthy of its name, the enchanted reqion of perpetual calm, and an endless summer. [11]
2011
Nancy Armstrong / Desire and domestic fiction
Such self-reflexivity always identifies the female as the one with the power to determine the meaning of words and things, a power capable in certain stances of changing the nature of the words and things themselves. [205]
Rooms seem to open into rooms within rooms to suggest a capability for infinite interior expansion. [207]
…the ‘extra’ rooms…resemble an attic whose decontextualized objects wait usage that will miraculously endow them with value. Such space within culture allows change; it allows old information to permeate a self-enclosed text and become new information. Over such space in middle-class cultures the woman is symbolically in charge, since she is the one who supervises the objects of the household. Presumably she is also the one who determines what things have vale. [211]
To identify a gap in the story is to produce a need in the woman for a new language of the self. [231]
She [Woolf] uses the house quite deliberately to suggest that the secrets it contains are one and the same as the depths contained within the woman. [245]
2011
Susan Bernstein / Housing Problems
The Gothic signals the effort to contain the uncanny or, we might say more generally, to contain what cannot be contained. [60]
The uncanny indicates the incursion on the present of something that “ought” to be absent: whether the repressed, the forbidden, the indecorous, or the improper. The uncanny destabilizes the structure of identity as presence precisely bu insinuating what is absent, invisible, or other. [61]
…the external mark is a reliable sign, an index, of a corresponding interior. The outside guarantees the inside: the inside follows the outside. But this same distance–the space of writing itself–opens the possibility of a deviation between mark and sense, between letter and meaning. [62]
The autonomous activity of writing, or the process of signification embedded in material inscriptions, ought to remain hidden, that is, repressed; it ought not show itself as part of the process of meaning, but should remain marginal as a mere vehicle or medium. Its coming forth, or the undoing or overturning of the letter/spirit hierarchy, brings about the impropriety of the uncanny: the transgression between inside and outside, spirit and letter, meaning and writing. [63]
The house holds the possibility of both transcendence and fragmentation; it is both the means and the obstacle to transcendence. [66]
The doubling between text and reality, the mirroring between one narrative level and another, creates an uncanny effect that exceeds the repetitions of the romance being read–of the Gothic novel itself. Gothic is exceeded by its own uncanny dynamic when language becomes a spell, spelled out in letters independent of referents. [67]
…one of the main questions of the Gothic: the relation between its architectural setting and the story that takes place in its shadow. The presence of the architectural causes a confusion between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the fictional. [69]
2011
Ned Schantz / Gossip, Letters, Phones
Telepathy is the telephone is a perfect state of dematerialization–no apparatus, no sound waves, no ear. Thoughts simply move from one mind to another without static, delay, or the need for translation. Death and distance pose no obstacles… Narrative film stimulates telepathic fantasy as part of its usual course of operations, making us long for telepathy whenever we care about a character and urgently wish to communicate with her. [80]
…the locked room represents a crucial intersection of female independance (a room of one’s own) and murder… the problem posed by the locked room is essentially a gothic one; in the ensuing tradeoff between shelter and mobility, women have long been conditioned to prefer the former, banking on the security of the locked room. [97]
Thus while it might seem that the locked room at least socializes and contains murder, I would argue the opposite: that a locked room mystery is essentially a fantasy of impossible penetration, subjecting a recalcitrant female privacy to the double surveillance of stalking and detection. It is about making everywhere outside. [97]
2011
Cormac McCarthy / Outer Dark
And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief. It was was damp and cool and she could hear the roosters beginning. She closed the door and went down the path to the gate and into the road, shivering in the cold starlight, under vega and the waterserpent.
She went west on the road while the sky grew pale and the waking world of shapes accrued around her. [211]
2011
Milly Buonanno / The Age of Television
Television is firmly located within the home and the real worlds and images to which it gives access flow directly within, and blend with, the progress of everyday life… the television set is always there, whether switched on or off or on standby: a fixture, yet not a demanding one. Television is a polysensorial medium, since it engages both sight and hearing, yet it does not necessarily have first claim on our senses. [36]
In the ambiance of the home, interwoven with relationships and duties, it can happen at some times of day and stages of life more than others that a switched-on television set provides a counterpoint or background to our main occupations or, if we are lonely, gives us the company of human voices and pictures that require no more than a glance from time to time, just to confirm that they are there. [39]
In the home environment which by its very nature is imbued with mostly routine practices and experiences, the televisual experience coexists with the various tasks and commitments of domestic life and the continual shifting of our attention span: sometimes focused on the ensemble of pictures and sounds emanating from the screen, sometimes distracted by tasks and demands that relegate the switched-on set to the background.
But it is precisely because television allows us to switch between looking and listening, between involvement and detachment, and because it offers us both demanding and relaxing forms of cultural entertainment and social participation, that it can claim to possess the true and authentically distinctive qualities of an open medium. It is flexible; and it is resistant both to theoretical imposition and to the empirical experience of fixed, essential and unchanging characteristics. [41]
2011
Baudrillard / Simulations
The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze, and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency. The latter still presupposes an objective space (that of the Rennaisance) and the omnipotence of a despotic gaze…in a position of exteriority, playing on the opposition between seeing and being seen… It is entirely different [with TV] where the distinction between active and passive is abolished. Such is the slope of hypperrealist society, where the real is confused with the model…A turnabout of affairs by which it becomes impossible to locate an instance of the model of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, since you are always already on the other side…and hence, the very abolition of the spectacular.
2011
Lynne Joyrich / Re-Viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture
Far from being trivial diversions, such texts [as displayed on daytime TV] compose the cultural language that surrounds us, articulating the reality of American life. [23]
In the classical narrative film, the actual means of film production (camera, lights, microphones) are hidden from the spectator’s view, yielding a sense of the world unfolding seamlessly before our eyes. The spectator, identifying with the camera’s power of the gaze, is thus positioned as an ideal subject, freed from material constraints and offered a flattering illusion of power. Yet this effect is based on an opposition established between subject and object of the look even as critical awareness of this position is impeded by the denial of the intervening presence of the apparatus. [36]
Television, however, involves a different set of codes and signifying strategies [from film], thereby constructing a different viewer-text relation. Indeed, the very status and parameters of the text with which viewers engage may be questioned…. [T]elevision can be (and has been) seen as a threat to the linear logic of both film and other classical narrative forms. In disrupting accepted categories of authenticity, knowledge, and mastery as well as confounding the bases of history and origins (which in turn form the bases of traditional notions of the individual), television weakens the oppositions that maintain the stability of the sexed gaze. [38]
Penetrating reality to the point of abolishing a stable referent, television also collapses the distance between subject and object–a distance that is crucial to the construction of spectacle and the mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism that uphold a sexual opposition in looking. [38]
2011
Carole Maso / Break Every Rule
Always trying to attain the unattainable. Container of the uncontainable. Weird, gorgeous vessel. Voluptuous vessel. Room for the random, the senseless, the heartbreaking to be played out. A form both compressed, distilled, and expansive enough to accommodate the most difficult and the most subtle states of being. [24]
2011
Rolvaag / Giants in the Earth
… Was this the place? …Here!… Could it be possible?… She stole a glance at the others, at the half-completed hut, then turned to look more closely at the group standing around her; and suddenly it struck her that here something was about to go wrong… For several days she had sensed this same feeling; she could not seem to tear herself loose from the grip of it… A great lump kept coming up in her throat; she swallowed hard to keep it back, and forced herself to look calm. Surely, surely, she mustn’t give way to her tears now, in the midst of all this joy… [28-29]
How long will human beings be able to endure this place? she thought. Why, there isn’t even a thing one can hide behind! [29]
Here no warbling of birds rose in the air, no buzzing of insects sounded; even the wind had died away; the waving blades of grass that trembled to the faintest breath now stood erect and quiet, as if listening, in the great hush of the evening… All along the way, coming out, she had noticed this strange thing: the stillness had grown deeper, the silence more depressing, the father west they journeyed; it must have been over two weeks now since she had heard a bird sing! Had they traveled into some nameless, abandoned region? Could no living thing exist out here, in the empty, desolate, endless wastes of green and blue?… How could existence go on, she though, desperately? If life is to thrive and endure, it must at least have something to hide behind!… [38]
It seemed to her that she had lived many lives already, in each one of which she had done nothing but wander and wander, always straying farther from the home that was dear to here. [40]
…In the window looking toward the east a woman’s face, tear stained and swollen with weeping, watched his figure grow less and less in the dim grey light of the breaking day, until at last it had disappeared altogether… To her it seemed as though he were sinking deeper and deeper into an unknown, lifeless sea; the sombre greyness rose and covered him. [105]
To Beret the visit had seemed nothing but a brief interruption to the endless solitude. The facts were unchangeable–it was useless to juggle with them, or delude oneself; nothing but an eternal, unbroken wilderness encompassed them round about, extending boundlessly in every direction; that these vast plains, so like infinity, should ever be peopled and settled, would be a greater miracle than for dead men to rise up and walk!… [131]
