CAT 1: Media Seductions - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

CAT 1: Media SeductionsGlobal Media and Public Outrage

Elizabeth

Losh

http://

losh.ucsd.eduSlide2

Charting Out WorksSynthesizing Information for the Final Exam

Medium/Media . . . about Medium/

Media

Losh

Thesis/Theses

Level of vividness and interactivity

Genre(s

)

Historical Context (especially with regard to culture, art, and technology)

Scholarly disciplines weighing in on media influence

Moral panics, censorship, or prohibitions on what can be represented

Physical impact of media on the body or on the senses (how do horror, melodrama, etc. work physiologically)

What does this work say about questions of audience? Who is vulnerable to a particular kind of media experience?

Attitudes about nurture vs. nature (including race and gender)

Narrative Features (captivity, conversion, etc.) Slide3

Sample: Northanger Abbey

Book . . . about Books (with some painting, sculpture, and architecture, but almost no music)

Books are conventionally thought of as lacking vividness and interactivity, but Austen highlights the imaginative engagement of readers

Novel of manners that satirizes gothic novels

The Age of Sensibility: new book technologies had arrived but reading was still a social practice regulated by cost, female readers and writers were composing works in greater numbers, and Jane Austen introduced free indirect discourse as an artistic technique rather than epistolary or

diaristic

formats as a way to engage readers.

Literary theories of Burke (sublime and sensibility) and Johnson (suspension of disbelief)

Criticism of the educational value of novels in relationship to history and essays; the danger of confusion of novel plots with real life; defense of novels too

Catherine experiences horror (and some melodrama as she thinks about the dead Mrs.

Tilney

), and John experience pornographic fascinations

Women aren’t always good readers or writers, but not more vulnerable to novels

Education is important, and the equality of the sexes is assumed

Our heroine is held captive – but in a less dramatic way than she imagines – and she converts after her humiliation, but not as much as her father-in-law Slide4

Sample: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

A play that was a multimedia spectacular with songs and tableaux

vivants

and elaborate stagecraft and Jim Crow show elements (some discussion of photography as well)

Adapted in ways to increase the vividness of the experience in 2-D and 3-D space and appropriated for many purposes (including non-abolitionist ones)

Melodrama

The lead up to the Civil War: novels now had to compete with new technologies like sheet music and photography

Political and theological human rights discourses about the abolition of slavery

The literacy narrative of Tom in the original novel is deleted.

“Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of real good.”

Mocks Northerners and their hypocrisy, even though they are the intended audience.

Children are depicted as more pure, not corrupted by society. The naturalness of their being divisions between the races is questioned. Women are expected to manage the domestic sphere.

Very different from autobiographical slave narratives as a captivity narrative in that Uncle Tom wants to go home not leave the plantation; many different conversion narratives in the storySlide5

Why does Uncle Tom’s Cabin keep reappearing in

The Satanic Verses

?

“Brown Uncle Tom” (276)

“

Topsy

and

Legree

” (304)Slide6

A Sample Artifact and a Sample Passage

“then it turned out that the previous lover of his beloved

Renata

was the exiled boss of the SAVAK torture organization of the Shah of Iran.” (213)

“But the true moral of the fable was the need for vigilance. London was a city in which the ex-boss of SAVAK had great connections in the telephone company and the Shah’s ex-chef ran a thriving restaurant in

Houndslow

. Such a welcoming city, such a refuge, they take all types.” (214)

Gilles

Peress

IRAN. Teheran. 1979.

Savak

agents on trial at

Evin

Prison. Magnum Photos.Slide7

How do we understand

The Satanic Verses

as a book about media not just a book about religion?

Why won’t plot summaries help?Slide8

The Structure of the Book

Part I: The

backstory

on

Gibreel

and Saladin

Part II: Muhammad in Mecca before Medina

Part III:

Gibreel

and Saladin among strangers in London

Part IV: The

backstory

on the pilgrimage of Ayesha’s village

Part V: Gibreel and Saladin reconnect with their past in their new identitiesPart VI: Muhammad in Mecca after Medina

Part VII:

Gibreel

and Saladin’s story continues

Part VIII: The disastrous consequences of Ayesha’s pilgrimage

Part IX: The conclusion of

Gibreel

and Saladin’s storySlide9

The Story You Don’t Read

Ayesha: The girl who eats butterflies

What is the Hajj?Slide10

The Beginning of Part III: Gibreel’s

Story

Rosa Diamond, Argentina, and Magical Realism

Rushdie’s homage to Gabriel

García

Márquez

,

Alejo

Carpentier

, Jorge Luis Borges, and Laura Esquivel.

147-161: A story of the

Peronist legacySlide11

The Beginning of Part V: Saladin’s StoryA Bangladeshi family running a rooming house

How do the narrative techniques of Hind’s story differ from Catherine

Morland’s

story

253-259: A story of marital disappointmentSlide12

Other Diasporas in London

Slide13

Part III: Why did the authorities think Chamcha is a “

Packy

”? (162)

Slide14

Part V: Why doesn’t Allie know what a “Packy” is?

‘It’s the last week this week. Twenty-three years I’ve been on this corner and the Pakis have finally driven me out of business.’ She heard the word

p-a-c-h-y

, and had a bizarre vision of elephants lumbering down the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday news vendors. ‘What’s a

pachy

?’ she foolishly asked and the reply was stinging: ‘A brown Jew.’

(310)Slide15

How does Chamcha understand his racial and class identity?

My Beautiful

Laundrette

(1985)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75wusZCurCw&

Slide16

‘Where else would you go to heal your disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us, among your own kind?’ (261)

‘I’m not your kind,’ he said distinctly into the night. ‘You’re not my people. I’ve spent half my life trying to get away from you.’ (262)Slide17

Chamcha’s Quest to Assimilate

Had he not pursued his own idea of

the good

, sought to become that which he most admired, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession to the conquest of Englishness? Had he not worked hard, avoided trouble, striven to become new? Assiduity, fastidiousness, moderation, restraint, self-reliance, probity, family life: what did these add up to if not a moral code? (265)Slide18

Margaret Thatcher (1925-)Prime Minister 1979-1990

Immigration policies in multicultural London were enforced by the conservative government and sometimes even by street vigilantes.Slide19

“Mrs. Torture” (275)

“Maggie the bitch” (278)

“

Maggie-

maggie-maggie

, bays the crowd.

Burn-burn-burn

.” (302)

“his beloved Mrs. Torture” (531)Slide20

The 1982 Falklands War (181, 277)

Slide21

Boney M. Returns (182)

Slide22

Club Hot Wax(198, 293, 300-301)

A culture around “daytime discos”

The underground music scene of

“

bhangra

beat shows” (293)

DJ

RituSlide23

The Popularization of Punjabi Music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qj7Y0qXJZ4&

Slide24

Part V: Ch. 1The Devil as Political Revolutionary

“Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels” from William Blake’s

Paradise LostSlide25

An older kind of “sympathy for the devil”

Blake’s

Marriage of Heaven and Hell

(315)Slide26

The purpose of the Defoe epigraph

Slide27

Very quickly, because nothing takes a long time any more, the image of the dream-devil started catching on, becoming popular, it should be said, only amongst what Hal Valance had described as the

tinted persuasion

. . . The kids in the street started wearing rubber devil horns on their heads (295)Slide28

The romance of outlaws

Thus,

Chamcha

realized, people must once have applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws, Dick Turpin, Ted Kelly,

Phoolan

Devi, and of course that other Billy: William

Bonney

, also a Kid. (272)Slide29

Chamcha’s voice

“a voice so diabolically ghastly and guttural” (294)

“roaring out a song at the top of his voice, which sounded so alien and full of static that she couldn’t make out a word” (295)

“singing in a voice so vilely hoarse that it was impossible to understand the words” (300)Slide30

Gibreel’s film plansIs “fiction fiction” and “facts facts”

“The film was to be – what else – a theological, but of a new type. It would be set in an imaginary and fabulous city made of sand, and would recount the story of the encounter between a prophet and an archangel; also the temptation of the prophet, and his choice of the path of purity and not that of base compromise.” (281)Slide31

Production begins

Gibreel

in

Jahilia

,

Gibreel

Meets the Imam,

Gibreel

with the Butterfly girl . . . ‘Stostorylines

, draft

scenarious

, cacasting options are already well in

haha hand.’ (356) “artificial, fabricated world of the cinema” (357)Slide32

The Audience Responds Negatively

Chamcha

had heard that

Gibreel

Farishta

had hit the comeback trail. His first film,

The Parting of the Arabian Sea

, had bombed badly; the special effects looked home-made, the girl in the central Ayesha’s role, a certain Pimple

Billimoria

, had been woefully inadequate, and

Gibreel’s own portrayal of the archangel had struck many critics as

narcisisstic and megalomaniac. The days when he could do no wrong were gone; his second feature, Mahound, had hit every imaginable religious reef, and had sunk without trace. (528)Slide33

Other Dissatisfied AudiencesHow do media and race intersect?

“the ethnic universe” (273)

“ethnics don’t watch ethnic shows” (273)

“too big an idea to be held back by the racial dimension” (274)Slide34

How do media and gender intersect?Allie’s Model Sister

Allie began to see the scream in her sister’s eyes, the anguish of being trapped forever in those fashion spreads. Elena was being tortured by demons, consumed in fires, and she couldn’t even move (317)Slide35

A suggestion from Kristina Tran

http://vimeo.com/28122207

Slide36

Another meaning for media

The city was her medium, she could swim in it like a fish. She was dead at twenty-one, drowned in a bathtub of cold water, her body full of psychotropic drugs. Can one drown in one’s element, Allie had wondered long ago. (317)Slide37

For Next Time . . .

Why do the word “blasphemy” and “blasphemous” keep appearing in this book?

“‘One,’ he answered in that huge musical voice. Blasphemy, punishable by death.”

“the linkage between the term black and the sin blasphemy”

“blasphemies surfaced once again”

“’Your blasphemy,

Salman

, can not be forgiven.’”

“As though in response to such blasphemy, Ayesha imposed even stricter disciplinary measures.”

“lurid interviews accusing

Gibreel

of ‘blasphemy’, ‘

satanism

’ and other misdemeanors.” Slide38

Assignment TwoDon’t Forget to Turnitin

on TED!