At this week's research seminar, Kathryn Napier Gray (University of Plymouth) will be talking about: “From First Fruits to Dying Speeches: John Eliot, praying Indians and performances of faith in 17th- century New England.”
Tomorrow marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. The event is being marked in a variety of ways and has given rise to a new interest in Lincoln, man and myth. Here's a selection of links - feel free to share your own in the comments.
‘Ravishing hyperrealism’? A ‘waltz of simulacra’? The ‘only remaining primitive society’? This latest installment of American Psyche discusses one of the most intriguing examples of travel writing ever penned about the American continent.It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe.
Baudrillard was captivated by what he perceived as America’s chutzpah – its commitment to achieving Utopia – , and his remains (remarkably for a French Marxist) a largely uncondescending depiction of the nation. So while Los Angeles emerges as a neon-lit, palimpsest-like space reminiscent of “Hieronymus Bosch’s hell,” and Manhattan is a bewildering city in which “the mad have been set free,” Baudrillard is just as likely to celebrate the “magic of the freeways and the distance and the ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed”; even the nation’s kitsch ephemerality is indulged at times (51; 19; 1).
America is presented as the apotheosis of postmodern culture, a “marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts,” beguiling Baudrillard’s Old World sensibility (5). The country as it is depicted here perfectly embodies a depthlessness which, according to Frederic Jameson, characterized the late twentieth-century western world: it is a surface culture, in which the screen has become the privileged site of human interaction. Society has become marked by a profusion of simulacra in the absence of genuine origins, blurring previously held distinctions between reality and fiction, subject and object. Baudrillard defines this state as hyperreality, and uses the example of Disneyland as a fitting parallel.
America abounds with such esoteric language and confusing analogies, and it is wilfully abstruse on occasions: Las Vegas, for example, is derided as “that great whore on the other side of the desert” (3). Baudrillard’s tongue is held firmly in cheek at such moments, however, and a liberal dose of humour underpins his intellectual road-trip.
If, at times, Baudrillard’s prose appears guilty of the same sense of excess that he identifies within America, noting “the orgy of goods and services” that facilitates an increasingly cybernetic society, America contains enough flashes of perceptive observation to sustain the reader: in this state of simulacra, for instance, Baudrillard wonders “whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world” (96; 32). Baudrillard’s writing is, moreover, beautifully poetic at times. He discusses Minneapolis, “with its sweet-sounding name, its gossamer string of vowels, half-Greek, half-Cheyenne,” for instance, and the text celebrates the diverse quality of America’s landscape, which combines “the earth’s undamaged geological grandeur with a sophisticated, nuclear, orbital, computer technology” (13; 4). Such lyricism is perhaps only appropriate, an aesthetic response to a profoundly artificial age.
Following the likes of de Tocqueville, Paine, Dickens and Nabakov, Baudrillard continues a transatlantic analytic tradition, capturting the essence of the nation that native intellectuals, “shut away on their campuses, dramatically cut off from the fabulous concrete mythology developing all around them,” simply cannot (23). After all, ‘America’ as a concept is arguably as compelling to a Frenchman, Russian or Brit as it is to a Californian; the only prerequisite for Baudrillard is that, in order to do so, one must disregard presuppositions and “en
ter the fiction of America”, a country that remains, as the recent presidential inaugeration attests, reliably aspirational (29).
This Christmas, rather than go back to Blighty, I decided to spend it in New York. I arrived fairly late on a Friday night, and was met by my good friend from Goucher College, Rachel, at Penn. Station. Rachel is a native of Brooklyn, but we spent the best part of that first night in New York being dragged around Irish bars in Chelsea by some of our Goucher friends. The moment I stepped out into the streets of New York I was completely blown away. I am from London myself and assumed that once you have seen one big city you have seen them all- false. New York is like no other place, it is literally the most amount of hustle and bustle you can ever imagine and I personally loved it!
Today's research seminar has been cancelled because of the adverse weather conditions. Fear not: it will be rescheduled.
It's time for Super Bowl 43: the Arizona Cardinals face off against the Pittsburgh Steelers at about 11.30pm UK time. USA Today outlines "Why the Steelers Will Win," whilst the Hartford-Courant lets the Cardinals know how they can bring home the Vince Lombardi Trophy. But the Super Bowl is not immune from its context: the economic climate means that the Super Bowl party circuit has been hit hard, and advertising revenues are down. Bruce Springsteen is providing the half-time entertainment, a choice that also feels in keeping with the spirit of the times. And President Obama? He's hosting a non-partisan Super Bowl party, but he's already declared his allegiance to the Steelers: "I am a longtime Steeler's fan. Mr. Rooney, the owner, was just an extraordinary supporter during the campaign. I wish the best to the Cardinals. They've been long-suffering. It's a great Cinderella story, but other than the Bears, the Steelers are probably the team that's closest to my heart." Left, you can see him waving one of the Steelers' iconic Terrible Towels.
