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…Through which we see (part the first: poststructuralism)

By Cuchlann and Pontifus on 26 August 2010 | Anime, Art and Culture, Literature | 11 Comments

There’s a constant kerfluffle in the otaku-rhombus, and everywhere in nerddom, actually, concerning criticism. Specifically, many nerds want it kept out of their entertainment — despite the fact they engage in it constantly. Academics have similar kerfluffles, honestly; many’s the time I’ve heard a professor complain about “jargon.” Inevitably only the schools of thought they dislike use “jargon;” their preferred schools of thought don’t engage in it. Anyway, this is the first in a series of entries meant to extend an olive branch in the best way a scholar knows how: through teaching and learning together. In this series, we’ll be describing different “schools” of critical thought, how they work, where they came from, what they do, how they’re useful, and so on. We’ll even apply a bit of the theory to familiar texts to illustrate how this is supposed to work from a literary point of view — and remember, literature is just entertainment, so criticism is simply thinking about entertainment. Why? To be further entertained! This post specifically is part of that most dreaded (as most [un]familiar) world, the post-something-or-other. This time, post-structuralism.

Otaku annotated: adventures in moe, porn, and postmodernism

By Pontifus on 10 April 2010 | Anime, Art and Culture, Visual Novels | 25 Comments
Love Hina can be metafictional, too.

Love Hina can be metafictional, too.

I found Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals at the university library — seven or so months ago. And, what do you know, it’s due back. Overdue, probably. So I suppose I should annotate this thing at long last, for your benefit and mine.

It’s a short book, but I won’t be entirely exhaustive here. I’ll omit basic overviews of things many of us would find intuitive anyway, and some of the more extreme postmodern/poststructural business, in the assumption that you’ll read the book yourself if you’re looking for that sort of thing. It must be said, though, that, while Azuma got his start as a Derrida scholar, Otaku is very readable even if you aren’t so familiar with Baudrillard, Lacan, and their ilk — and, that being the case, I suppose I ought to make this post more or less readable, too.

Adventures in Criticism: Taking Root

By Cuchlann on 26 December 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture, Literature | 9 Comments

ffe2d5584890c80430230f0bc6c61745Augh.  Obviously, if you bothered paying attention to my efforts to engage in the now-traditional “12 moments” project, you know I failed.  Mostly I blame my too-busy semester, during which I watched almost no anime.  As my professor (who sometimes reads my blogs — hello, if you’re reading this one!) said, it was indeed true that I had to put my anime blogging aside for the semester.  I’m going to try not to take four full classes like that again…  it’s, uh, a little extreme.

But you’re not here to listen to me whine (or are you?  Maybe we’d get more hits if I just whined about things).  I’m going on an adventure through an essay by Robert Scholes called “The Roots of Science Fiction.”

Multimedia adaptation and the act of consumption: an outline

By Pontifus on 24 November 2009 | Art and Culture, Literature | 5 Comments
Live action Tanyuu is...live action?

Live action Tanyuu is...live action?

Like Cuchlann, I find myself mired in schoolwork and related things. It’s Thanksgiving break, yes, but it’s still difficult to blog when I know I should be writing an essay about Darwinian rhetoric in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or researching transversal poetics and presentism. But fortunately, my research interests being what they are, schoolwork and blog-work overlap from time to time. More often than not, maybe.

What follows is the list of notes (and a few visuals) I used to give a presentation on adaptation and all it entails — or, rather, as much of what it entails as I could fit in twenty minutes or so. My research has centered on the novel-to-film variety, but most of it seems more broadly relevant. These being personal notes more than anything, I make no guarantees as to their cohesiveness, but they should at least be legible — and, with any luck, somewhat interesting.

Five rules of funny molestation

By Pontifus on 10 August 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture, Literature, Manga | 15 Comments

Alright, that's sort of awesome.

In real life, molestation isn’t funny, so don’t think I’m condoning your trip to Japan whereupon you will hit the subways, so to speak. But in anime and manga, sexual molestation is used in service of humor as often as it’s an agent of personal horror, and there seems to exist an unspoken code governing the line between the two.

Don’t think this is all about cultural implications, either. Such narrative machinations as humor can be deliciously structural. Not that the examples I look at here are off the social hook, per se, but we’ll look at that on a case-by-case basis.

(Edit 9/8 — Let this comment serve as a brief addendum in answer to those parts of this post that weren’t thought through as well as perhaps they should’ve been.)

Mari, the righteous mom

By Pontifus on 29 July 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture | 13 Comments

Heroic moms are cool and all, but...This post is a quickie, as it’s more about getting feedback than positing some position and buttressing it with evidence. I don’t have that evidence, see, and you lot may be able to help me more than conventional research. Not to worry, it’s not about something arcane; it’s about Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, which every fan and his/her (righteous) mother seems to be watching right now.

Mari Kusakabe has a few levels in awesome; she makes that much clear to us early on. She’s also a single mom, which is fine by me, as I think single mom heroines can have depth that your average action lady tends to lack. She has a daughter at home, and the titular earthquake happens to coincide with said daughter’s birthday, and she grapples the ordeal with a magnificent poker face, adding to the dramatic tension in a nice way. We know that her daughter could be dead, or that Mari could (hell, probably will…if she doesn’t, she’ll trump Kamina threefold as far as I’m concerned) suffer a breakdown at some point, and neither is an especially pleasant prospect.

We also learn, in episode three, that Mari is a widow. Now, it’s not certain that her husband was the father of her child; we can only assume as much from the dialogue. Nor is it certain that Mari didn’t do her fair share of gallivanting before her marriage. The point is that Mari presumably didn’t come across her child accidentally, and she isn’t a single mom due to divorce. Her situation seems to be the outcome of the most “correct” sequence of events, according to a conservative/traditional morality. I wonder, then, if she’d be such a heroine if it were otherwise — how many single mom heroines in anime and manga entered into single momhood in “questionable” ways?

The adoption/de facto adoption/non-literal parent-child relationship route seems to come into play with some frequency. I haven’t seen Seirei no Moribito, but isn’t that the case there? The protagonist of 20th Century Boys (which I just started, so go easy on the spoilers plzkthx) is, as of chapter four, a kind of righteous dad insofar as he acquired the child under his care without even the use of sex (it’s his niece). Then we’ve got widows like Mari; a recent example that comes to mind is Soyon from Kemono no Souja Erin (though I didn’t get far in that, either), and there’s…er, [classified information] from Clannad, of course. But are less “respectable” single parents often relegated to Minor Character Land? My main problem is that I can’t think of many at all. And is my perception somehow off-target to begin with?

Help me out here, O wise internets. Share your experience so that the gaps in my experience might be rendered irrelevant.

Adventures in Criticism: too many for a number!

By Cuchlann on 14 June 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture, Literature | 11 Comments

real_drive_reading

Actually, it’s the seventh, but I figure now’s as good a time as any to stop numbering them and just admit they’re a (semi-)regular feature.  Woo!

Anyhow, this time I’m doing an essay called “Coming to Terms” by Gary K. Wolfe.  It’s short, so hopefully I can get this entry done before the scourging weather wipes my house out of the valley in which it nestles.

“By silverfish imperatrix whose incorrupted eye…”

By Cuchlann on 6 June 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture | 13 Comments

aria_kamina

If you’re following at home, you’ll already know that I started Aria: the Animation.  And I just finished it.  I know there’s a bunch more of it, but I dunno when I’ll finish it — if I learned one thing (and I’d like to think I learned several, but still), it’s that I can’t really shotgun Aria.  You ever eat so much candy that, while still hungry, the thought of sugar makes you ill?  It doesn’t mean the candy is any worse, you just really need a steak.  That’s sorta what happened to me, though luckily each day found me ready for more.  Sleeping off the sugar crash works, it turns out.  Anyway, this post might ramble all around a bunch of different topics, but if you’re okay with that, let’s get started.

…and that’s SF?

By Cuchlann on 22 May 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture, Literature | 22 Comments

 

rocket1

I’ve recently been badgering nearly everyone I know with this quandary I’ve landed myself in:  how does science fiction work, and what does that mean for my study of anime?  (go all the way to the end, it has a happy conclusion)

An End to Theory

By Cuchlann on 2 May 2009 | Art and Culture | 18 Comments

First, let me attempt to reconstruct a twitter conversation for you.

Cuchlann  The writer of a work may be dead, but as the work implies a reader, so, too, must it imply an author.

lelangir@cuchlann not always. what about “the word”? street anecdotes ‘n such.

lelangir@cuchlann well then I guess it doesn’t count as “a work” in the institutionalized sense.

Cuchlann @lelangir no, it still implies an author. It had to come from somewhere.

lelangir@cuchlann can’t you just fabricate something? “he said that”, where “he” isn’t really anybody. who’s the author there?

Cuchlann @lelangir what is said still implies an author different from another. Also, it’s theoretically better: it’s either that or a null.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to literary studies lately.  I finished my MFA thesis (and thus, if no surprises are waiting for me in the wings, I am finished and have an MFA); with the thesis out of the way, I was free to start worrying about my dissertation years before anyone would expect me to.  So I’m reading for it now.  Woo.  

Anyway.  The reading, the conversations, the free time, they’ve all come together to lead me to a new perspective on this thing we do.  The preceding conversation is simply an outgrowth of that.  I was once described by Daniel as someone who gets the “dead author thing,” and I believe I still do.  I just have a new perspective on it, and some other things.  

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