In his essay “The Art of Fiction” Henry James wrote “What is character but the determinant of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” In defining (in material terms) a character as a determinant of incident, James references the concept of hamartia or tragic flaw, the idea that a character possesses a flaw … Continue reading
Happy Bloomsday! Will you be in NYC anytime between July 16-August 2? If YES you might wanna check out Art of Memory (2009), a (reworked) theater piece from Company SoGoNo w/ video design by James Short. Here’s a description of the production from the company: “In Art of Memory, four librarians create an elaborately braided … Continue reading
How do/does unreliable narrators/narration inform my/our story-telling/recollecting? In The Dialogic Imagination Bakhtin writes of autobiography: “Memory in memoirs and autobiographies is of a special sort: it is a memory of one’s own contemporaneity and of one’s own self” (24). In the Clive Wearing video we see autobiographical memory linked [by Bakhtin] to “one’s own contemporaneity … Continue reading
I am not wherever I am the plaything of my; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.–Lacan Hollywood Chinese, a documentary about the Chinese in American feature films, is pretty good. It’s well-done, caringly done, and has something smart to say, and is maybe, for white-Chinese people, revelatory. A … Continue reading
