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Expanding Paradigms of Reading After the Affective and the Objective Turn— The Place of the Non-human in J.G. Ballard’s Novel The Atrocity Exhibition
Irena Javorski
; Fakultet za medije i komunikacije u Beogradu
Sažetak
Thinking about the problem of reading contemporary literary production opens up a question of theoretical paradigms which would move beyond the concept of form (if we take as a given the assumption that any definition of a literary, as well as any other artefact by means of form is nowadays superfluous). In the context of the recent considerable change in the status and meaning of the concept of art, this problem is doubly complex. By moving away from the work to the text, and then from the text to the context in new materialist, as well as speculative realist tendencies which are tied to the affective and the objective turn, there arises a new relationship towards the concept of the context.
Thus in the aesthetic and literary theories of new materialism in the place of context one finds the affective encounter (reading is thus revealed as an embodied activity), while in speculative realism (also of materialist provenance), the context will take the place of the object, which is an absolute value (reading is thus shown to be a materialist practice). In this article taking up the idea of the overlap between the destruction of illusion about the natural relationship between the narrative content and the narrative discourse (in poststructuralist narratology) and the unravelling of the hierarchical order between the signifier and the signified (in poststructuralist theory of the sign), it is pointed to the inadequacy of such an approach when applied to the analysis of the novel The Atrocity Exhibition by James Graham Ballard thus posing the question of the modernist and postmodernist legacy; i.e., contributing to the study of modernity.
The Atrocity Exhibition is considered as a neo-avant-garde, situationist text and by applying the method of incomplete induction, the conclusion will be drawn about its anticipatory nature—a type of modernist practice which heralds new, contemporary (expanded) paradigms of reading offering a possible solution for contemporary aesthetic antinomies related to the impossibility to discern the quality of the contemporary within the regime of its coexistence with the remains of the past (tendencies of modernity and postmodernity). Our thesis is that both theoretical-philosophical platforms, new materialism and speculative realism, offer diverse extra-discursive models of thought. Thematizing the place of the non-human in The Atrocity Exhibition and using the method of critical analysis of a comparative, interdisciplinary kind, it will be demonstrated that Ballard’s novel in the regime of aesthetics after aesthetics ceases to work as a concept in literature (accessible via poststructuralism) and becomes a materialist text-context.
Ključne riječi
new materialism; speculative realism; aesthetics after aesthetics; modernity; text-concept; text-context
Hrčak ID:
212314
URI
Datum izdavanja:
11.12.2018.
Posjeta: 754 *