Digitalizing the Global Text: Philosophy, Literature, and Culture | 誠品線上

Digitalizing the Global Text: Philosophy, Literature, and Culture

內容簡介

內容簡介 A few years ago globalism seemed to be both a known and inexorable phenomenon. With the end of the Cold War, the opening of the Chinese economy, and the ascendancy of digital technology, the prospect of a unified flow of goods and services and of people and ideas seemed unstoppable. Yes, there were pockets of resistance and reaction, but these, we were told, would be swept away in a relentless tide of free markets and global integration that would bring Hollywood, digital fi nance, and fast food to all. Nonetheless, we have begun to experience the backlash against a global world founded on digital fungibility, and the perils of appeals to nationalism, identity, and authenticity have become only too apparent. The anxieties and resentments produced by this new world order among those left behind are oft en manifested in assertions of xenophobia and particularity. The “other” is coming to take what is ours, and we must defend ourselves! Digitalizing the Global Text is a collection of essays by an international group of scholars that situate themselves squarely at this nexus of forces. Together they examine how literature, culture, and philosophy in the global and digital age both enable the creation of these simultaneously utopian and dystopian worlds and offer resistance to them. ---------------- “Digitalizing the Global Text is a vibrant volume that explores the paradoxes of the local, the global, and the universal, with particular emphasis on the digital humanities. This wonderful collection of essays from an accomplished global group of contributors will be of wide interest to humanities scholars.” --- Jeffrey R. Di Leo, University of Houston–Victoria “Traversing historical periods and national boun d aries, with topics ranging from Plato to ‘Gang nam Style,’ the essays in Digitalizing the Global Text represent a vast array of perspectives while resisting the tendency to fetishize or hype the global. This collection represents a major contribution to the study of world literatures and cultures.” --- ROBERT T. TALLY JR., Texas State University “Digitalizing the Global Text is a splendid contribution to the ongoing work of challenging globalism. Refusing to settle for its dominant neoliberal form, marked by the digitization of knowledge and homogenization of cultural production, this volume pursues alternative forms of life—recalcitrant ones—that do not sacrifice the singularities of the local in their illustration and enactment of the global.” --- ZAHI ZALLOUA, Whitman College “Digitalizing the Global Text stages a crucial intervention into discussions and debates around globalization and digitalization. How can we begin to imagine anew a globalization and a digital sphere that do not merely translate into capitalist profiteering? This is the crucial question at once asked and answered by this collection.” --- CHRISTOPHER BREU, author of Insistence of the Material “This is a timely and forthright collection on what happens to the cultural within forms of globalization and globality. Essays address not just the impact of popular culture but also attempt to understand how thinking itself is recalibrated between the shifting scales of local and global. A template for global cultural critique.” --- PETER HITCHCOCK, Baruch College, City University of New York

作者介紹

作者介紹 Paul Allen Miller、Alexander Beecroft、Bennett Yu-Hsiang Fu、 Nicolas Vazsonyi、Julie Choi、Mou-Lan Wong、 Meili Steele、Chi-she Li、HisPaul Allen Miller (Editor) is vice provost and Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Texas in 1989. He has held visiting appointments at the University of the Ruhr (Bochum), the University of Paris 13, and Beijing Language and Cultural University. He is the former editor of Transactions of the American Philological Association and the author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (1994), Latin Erotic Elegy (2002), Subjecting Verses (2004), Latin Verse Satire (2005), Postmodern Spiritual Practices (2007), Plato’s Apology of Socrates (2010) with Charles Platter, A Tibullus Reader (2013), Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato (2015), and Horace (2019). He has edited fourteen volumes of essays on literary theory, gender studies, and topics in the classics and published more than seventy-five articles on Latin, Greek, French, and English literature and philosophy. He is currently at work on a book on Foucault’s late lectures on antiquity.

產品目錄

產品目錄 Introduction Part One The Local and the Global in the Digital Age On Being Old and Queer: Plato’s Seventh Letter in the Digital Age, or Resisting Neoliberalism╱Paul Allen Miller Local Cultures, Global Audiences: The Dream (and Nightmare) of the World Novel╱Alexander Beecroft Global Public, Digital Public: Neo-epistolarity and Tactical Consumption in À toi╱Bennett Yu-Hsiang Fu Wagner in China: Negotiating the National, the Universal, and the Global╱Nicholas Vazsonyi Part Two Going Global: Digital Popular Culture Right to the City: The Metropolis and “Gangnam Style”╱Julie Choi The Garden of Living Paths: Interactive Narratives in Global Geek Culture╱Mou-Lan Wong Part Three The Global Object World: Literature and Ontology in Late Capitalism The Ontological Turn: A New Problematic for Literature and Globalization╱Meili Steele Altered Realism in Ontological Fiction: Never Let Me Go and Point Omega╱Chi-she Li Ghost in the Machine: Fetishism and the Laboring Body in Marx, Dickens, and Mayhew╱Hisup Shin Contributors Index

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導讀 : Introduction (excerpt)

by Paul Allen Miller

The essays are divided into three categories. The first group, “The Local and the Global in the Digital Age,” is the most general. It looks at the intersection between the possibilities opened by digital technologies for a wide dissemination of cultural artifacts and the ways in which those very technologies undermine the local characteristics that give those artifacts the power to resist a relentlessly homogenizing capitalist order. The second group, “Going Global: Digital Popular Culture,” offers a more in-depth look at two digital pop culture phenomena, K-pop and interactive narrative structures in video games and beyond. Thus where the first section offers an overview of global culture in the digital age, examining the concepts of the digital and its resistance, international literary trends, the global phenomenon that was the two-hundredth anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth, and the international epistolary novel in the age of email, the second focuses much more on two specific digital phenomena of global significance: music vid- eos and gaming systems. The final section, “The Global Object World: Literature and Ontology in Late Capitalism,” looks from three separate perspectives at what Foucault would label the ontology of the present. It asks how we got here and what is the nature of our being in the commodified world of global capital.

I lead off the collection with an essay on strategies of resistance. My essay, “On Being Old and Queer: Plato’s Seventh Letter in the Digital Age, or Resisting Neoliberalism,” argues that the forces that push toward digitalization are the same as those that push for global commodification. After a more general introduction to the topic, the essay begins with a brief reading of chapter 1 of volume 1 of Marx’s Capital on the origins of the commodity and the money form and then moves on to the work of Foucault and Plato’s Seventh Letter. The essay’s title alludes to Foucault’s late lectures and to the status of the ancient world and its artifacts as objects whose value stubbornly resists being consumed by the reign- ing neoliberal calculus. In the last years of his life, Foucault focused intensely on Plato’s Seventh Letter. There, Plato argues that no serious philosopher commits his thoughts to writing but rather relies on direct interpersonal dialogue and the insight those intense, emotionally charged conversations produce. Many today view Plato’s argument as ironic or reactionary. How could writing’s power to reproduce itself identically, regardless of context, be opposed by the advocate of universal ideality? Foucault contends that Plato’s point is not to oppose writing per se—the ancient world’s incipient digitality—so much as it is to favor tribe, the labor of the self on the self, literally the “rubbing” or “friction” between teacher and student that produces the spark of enlightenment, a moment of unrepeatable intelligibility. In the end what is most authentic is not the normative and the infi- nitely reproducible, which functions like the money form of exchange value, but the moment of irreducible insight, of queer intelligibility, which makes possible a form of self-relation and of relation to others that is based on curiosity and care. This insight must be informed by data and may be cosmopolitan in its scope but is never reducible to information or mere exchange, nor is it able to be globalized in its imperial reach.

This dialectic of the irreducibly local and the truly global in turn features centrally in Alexander Beecroft’s “Local Cultures, Global Audiences: The Dream (and Nightmare) of the World Novel.” Beecroft argues that global literary culture in the early twenty-first century seems caught in a dilemma analogous to that of early twenty-first-century politics. We are poised between two understandings of globalization. While vast impersonal forces propel us toward a globalized economy and culture, in culture as well as in politics, he notes, we argue bitterly over the desirability of a planetary culture. Global trade and social media can knit together widely scattered groups, expanding the reach of even the most restrictedliterary languages. Nonetheless, there seems to be a real danger that the power of a globalized market, will transform the cultural world from a series of interconnected national and regional cultural dialects and idiolects into a vast planetary lingua franca, in which active readers morph into cultural consumers, passively absorbing nearly-identical products, produced wherever costs are lowest. Books and blue jeans a like flow from producer to consumer through the global supply chain. In recent years, we have seen the rise of both a right and left populist resistance to globalization: a movement to fight back against the homogenization of global culture.

Nonetheless, Beecroft contends, the globalization of literary culture need not produce blandness and uniformity. New technology in principle makes publication easier and cheaper, making it possible for less commonly spoken languages to acquire written literatures and for nascent and threatened literary languages to thrive. The lower costs of digital publication make literatures in languages such as Slovak, Albanian, and Kurdish, financially viable. As it becomes possible to package texts as commodities for global consumers, it should also become easier to find and reach niche markets, whether linguistic minorities or countercultural and counterhegemonic groups, and this very market segmentation could present fresh opportunities for more sophisticated cultural engagements with globalization.

Beecroft’s essay begins by examining recent arguments about a possible global literary culture. Reading the works of two recent writers, both Italian, he suggests that there is reason for optimism: while the pressures toward uniformity are real, globalization may yet leave room for a complex, multivoiced cultural dialogue. In fact the authors discussed offer signs of the emergence of a new grammar of the global novel, of the gradual emergence of a series of tropes that are adapted to the needs of global narration in our era, and play much the same role as epistolary fiction did in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the nation-state.

It is precisely the emergence of a new global and electronic epistolary fiction that forms the basis for our third essay, Bennett Fu’s “Global Public, Digital Public: Neo-epistolarity and Tactical Consumption in À toi.” Picking up where Beecroft leaves off, Fu’s essay analyzes Vietnamese Franco-Canadian writer Kim Thúy and Slovak Swiss novelist Pascal Janovjak’s coauthored epistolary text À toi (To You, 2011), which is structured as a series of emails written between October and December 2010. These often-short messages exchanged between a wide range of geographical locations—Montreal, Hanoi, Ramallah, and Dhaka—discuss their multilingual, multicultural writers’ often ambivalent relationships with language, identity, and writing. Through a series of emails exchanged about quotidian trivia, the writers share the story of their various cultural exclusions and their experiences of displacement. She is a French-speaking Canadian novelist of Vietnamese heritage, and he is a son of mixed French and Slovak parentage who, though born in Switzerland, grew up and worked in Lebanon, Jordan, and Bangladesh. The resulting work can only be termed global literature, but it is also irreducibly local in its evocation of a series of discrete cultural and geographical locations.

À toi exemplifies what Fu terms “neo-epistolarity.” In the world of letters, as in the world of goods, neo-epistolarity creates a virtual space of community and solidarity across boundaries. Fu argues that these “virtual” epistles serve to create a new digital instantiation of the Habermassian public sphere, a space where individuals can come together freely and discuss individual and social problems.These writers’ collaborative work, Fu contends, also cements certain correlations between epistolarity and Certeauean consumption/production as a tactic of resistance. Writing becomes a form of agency that liberates Thúy from the constraints of life as an Asian woman and as a foreigner, while the shifting global perspective allows her and her coauthor to create new cultural vistas that become public through this virtual epistolary form.

We end this first section on a relatively more hopeful note with Nicholas Vazsonyi’s examination of the worldwide celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth. In “Wagner in China: Negotiating the National, the Universal and the Global,” Vazsonyi investigates what the relationship is between music and our concept of home, particularly our spiritual home. He asks, if our home is displaced or lost or we are exiled from it, can music return it to us, bring it back through powers of recollection, or at least provoke in us that most Odyssean of emotions, nostalgia, the pain that comes from longing for nostos (return)? It is the case that music is often the most evocative of the arts in terms of memories. Certain songs are associated with certain experiences; a given melody or even but a few notes can conjure up an entire emotional world. But Vazsonyi demonstrates that this return can take many forms and can happen in many different places. There is something unheimlich about our musical home, which allows us to experience it even when we are far away—listening to Wagner in Shanghai, Peking opera in Berlin, or Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in Taipei, New York, or Johannesburg.

最佳賣點

最佳賣點 : A few years ago globalism seemed to be both a known and inexorable phenomenon.

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