Tony E Jackson

This book explains in detail how the novel is what happens when oral story is fully conformed to the technology of alphabetic writing; and concludes with a consideration of film as the next technological appropriation of story. Includes close-readings of: Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Bleak House, Adam Bede, A Passage to India, The Waves, The Golden Notebook, Atonement, and Citizen Kane.

Here's a review from the Times Literary Supplement:

“According to Tony E. Jackson we mull over the consequences of, as well as profit from, the invention of alphabets. "I am concerned with writing and literature", he declares - above all with the novel's engagement with the tensions between a tradition of oral story and the relatively new technology of writing. The "oralistic" story differs from the "alphabetic" in content, language, affiliation with tradition, and demands on its audience. One, he insists, is not better than the other; however, the oral story is older and is the "default human kind of narrative". Jackson argues for an unease among novelists about the shift to written narratives: he sees George Eliot's deliberations in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede as an attempt to find a substitute for the oral story's sanction of tradition in verisimilitude.
Jackson deals with "issues of writing and orality" in seven canonical novels: Pride and Prejudice, Frankensteiiz, Bleak House. A Passage to India, The Waves, The Golden Notebook and Atonement. He argues that in Chapters 11-13 of Pride and Prejudice Austen presents the strategies and benefits of alphabetic reading (the possibility of close analysis) that are impossible in oral communication. Bleak House presents both negative and positive aspects of written texts: the letters of the law kill; Esther heals herself through writing her story. Briony in Atonement moves from oralistic to alphabetic story-telling; her dilemma is that, as a post-oral voice, she has no constraint but her own will, and cannot be saved by narrative. Jackson concludes his book with a discussion of cinema as a fusion of oral and written story, and points to Citizen Kane as a film that examines tensions of speech and writing (Kane can give a fine speech, but Geddes can destroy him with a headline).
Jackson's book is splendid. Discussions of general issues and specific texts are lucid and complex. He always acknowledges that the novels he deals with have other concerns besides orality and writing. He stresses that critiques of alphabetic narrative are only possible within written texts. He sees canonical texts in a fresh light; one wants to test his arguments against other novels.”
DAVID MALCOLM: Times Literary Supplement, April 2, 2010

This essay brings together George Orwell’s great novel and a theory of writing as humankind’s master-technology. I approach writing through a non-poststructuralist (and so, an uncommon) lens, as it has come down from the works of, for instance, Walter Ong and Jack Goody. On this theoretical foundation I build an argument for writing, in its technological sense, as the true dystopian technology of Oceania. I show how the underlying conflict in Orwell’s novel is a dystopian version of the ancient conflict between orality and the disembodiment of speech in writing. In the end it is only when speech has been entirely replaced by writing that the totalitarian state prevails absolutely. It turns out that, not the most modern, but the most ancient technology presents the ultimate threat to humankind

Recent cognitive scientific and social neuroscientific research into human imitation provide a foundation upon which to base an understanding of the appeal of realistic imitation in general, and realistic visual imitation in particular. This essay uses these ideas in an analysis of Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film, AI: Artificial Intelligence.

Cognitively -oriented literary studies, if they are to appeal to a broad array of literary scholars, will need to link together cognition and culture. This essay brings together cognitive-psychological studies of the metarepresentational mind and of religious belief in order to offer an explanation of the nature and historical emergence of novelistic realism. It shows how novelistic realism, unlike other kinds of story, directly exercises what psychologist Alan Leslie calls the “decoupling mechanism” of the metarepresentational mind. And it argues that this kind of story takes on its specific power in the history of story  because of specific cultural change.

This essay shows how social neuroscience and the arts can be brought together in a fruitfully interdisciplinary way.
I first explain how social-neuroscience—in particular mirror-neuron research—is establishing the ways in which social identity is determined essentially by our embodied pre-disposition to imitate. I also lay out social-neuroscientific explanations of two built-in dangers for an imitative identity: under-imitation and over-imitation.
From this beginning I explain why humans are fascinated by imitative art in general, and imitative performance art in particular. And I explain the paradoxical kinship between imitative performance art and imitative identity.
Then I turn to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010). I show in detail how social-neuroscientific concepts of imitative identity enable an original understanding of the film, and at the same time I show how my analysis of the film helps validate the findings of social neuroscience.