Papers by Emily R. Anderson
Media, Culture & Society, 2019
This article considers political discourse and the role it played in the 2016 US presidential ele... more This article considers political discourse and the role it played in the 2016 US presidential election while paying particular attention to its construction of narrative. Foucault's understanding of discourse and power frames the argument that Donald Trump successfully abandoned political narratives. Instead, he often used idiosyncratic language, instances in which the surface of a statement outshines its content. These normally appear in Trump's tweets and culminate in his invective against the 'fake news' media. In order to respond to Trump, his interlocutors must posit a premise and then refute it; in even granting that there is a premise, one must take Trump on his own terms. Trump thus disrupts the direction of traditional discursive power.
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Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez, Mar 2015
Robert Rodriguez claims that his Sin City “translates” Frank Miller’s graphic narratives, its sou... more Robert Rodriguez claims that his Sin City “translates” Frank Miller’s graphic narratives, its source texts, “directly to the screen.” Surprisingly, however, Ro- driguez’s film includes almost constant references to film noir, to film production, and to cinematic conventions – conventions Rodriguez either adheres to or throws into relief. But this overt remediation of Miller’s narrative actually mirrors Miller’s own remediation of early noir fiction. Noir, in Rodriguez’s hands, becomes more than a style or a story that might appear in various forms. It is a discourse that consists of a particular relationship between a text’s style and its structure. This discourse thus depends upon style, but “style” understood to be the particular way in which the signs will obtain in the context of a medium and its conventions. And if we can define style in this way, we can better understand the relationship between discourse and the material medium in which it presents.
This article demonstrates the importance, when considering style and discourse, of investigating medium-specific methods of signification, as what a sign “means” depends on what the medium is capable of. Particularly at this moment, as investigations of narrative tend toward the cognitive processes and contextual elements involved in its reception, we would do well to bear in mind the relationships – among medium, style, and whatever histories and conventions come with them – that make up discourse, as these relationships constitute the real process of signification.
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Journal of Narrative Theory
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Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2009
From beginning to end, Caleb Williams interrogates the construction of narrative, thereby raising... more From beginning to end, Caleb Williams interrogates the construction of narrative, thereby raising a central problem of empiricism: are the stories we tell about the world true? Evaluating William Godwin’s novel in terms of its complex relationship to genre situates its critique of narrative squarely in the middle of contemporaneous philosophical debates. The novel is in conversation with an empiricist philosophy that would value coherent narratives above all else. These narratives, the novel suggests, are not only artificial but also epistemologically dangerous. Ultimately, they encourage us to accept what is reasonable at the expense of what may be true. According to the novel, it is not merely true that narrative is an ineffective mechanism for explaining the world, but that the very debate over Enlightenment questions is unstable.
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Conference Presentations by Emily R. Anderson
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How can we account for our belief or intuition that narratives contain stories and that narrative... more How can we account for our belief or intuition that narratives contain stories and that narratives in different media can contain the same story? A recent tendency among narratologists is to collapse the story/discourse distinction and refer instead to “narrative,” which allows for a discussion of what might previously have been called story or discourse without drawing an artificial distinction between the two. But this leads to approaches that consider transmedial narration sideways. That is, they begin with narrative, instead of with media itself. I will argue that while we need the concepts of story and discourse to explain our intuitions about narrative, we must redefine them in a way that attends to the radically different material properties of their media.
Rather than simply inverting the logical priority of story over discourse and instantiating discourse as synonomous with its representation in specific media, I will begin from the proposition that we first invoke a schema of what I am calling ‘media recognition’, which enables us to identify discourse as the most meaningful context for interpreting signs. From here, I will propose a model of narrative reception that begins with the material object—the actual thing the audience encounters—and ends with the story—the reader’s interpretation. The advantage of such a model is that it will allow us to attend to the very real differences that exist among material media while explaining our intuitions about texts and stories.
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Papers by Emily R. Anderson
This article demonstrates the importance, when considering style and discourse, of investigating medium-specific methods of signification, as what a sign “means” depends on what the medium is capable of. Particularly at this moment, as investigations of narrative tend toward the cognitive processes and contextual elements involved in its reception, we would do well to bear in mind the relationships – among medium, style, and whatever histories and conventions come with them – that make up discourse, as these relationships constitute the real process of signification.
Conference Presentations by Emily R. Anderson
Rather than simply inverting the logical priority of story over discourse and instantiating discourse as synonomous with its representation in specific media, I will begin from the proposition that we first invoke a schema of what I am calling ‘media recognition’, which enables us to identify discourse as the most meaningful context for interpreting signs. From here, I will propose a model of narrative reception that begins with the material object—the actual thing the audience encounters—and ends with the story—the reader’s interpretation. The advantage of such a model is that it will allow us to attend to the very real differences that exist among material media while explaining our intuitions about texts and stories.
This article demonstrates the importance, when considering style and discourse, of investigating medium-specific methods of signification, as what a sign “means” depends on what the medium is capable of. Particularly at this moment, as investigations of narrative tend toward the cognitive processes and contextual elements involved in its reception, we would do well to bear in mind the relationships – among medium, style, and whatever histories and conventions come with them – that make up discourse, as these relationships constitute the real process of signification.
Rather than simply inverting the logical priority of story over discourse and instantiating discourse as synonomous with its representation in specific media, I will begin from the proposition that we first invoke a schema of what I am calling ‘media recognition’, which enables us to identify discourse as the most meaningful context for interpreting signs. From here, I will propose a model of narrative reception that begins with the material object—the actual thing the audience encounters—and ends with the story—the reader’s interpretation. The advantage of such a model is that it will allow us to attend to the very real differences that exist among material media while explaining our intuitions about texts and stories.