In the event : reading journalism, reading theory
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
In the event : reading journalism, reading theory
（Meridian : crossing aesthetics / Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery, editors, Crossing aesthetics）
Stanford University Press, 1999
- : pbk
Available at / 4 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-170) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Assuming the burden of reading imposed by the correlation of the order of language and the order of events, this book argues that the possibility of reading and writing history is tied to the endurance of traces of the past and their coming to legibility, allegorically, at a given time. Through attentive readings of a range of texts-including theoretical writings, diaries, newspaper reports, and "live" television broadcasts-In the Event elaborates the ways in which allegory disrupts our presumptions of continuity and simultaneity between the image (whatever its medium) and what we take it to represent.
The author demonstrates that a theoretical corpus must be understood not merely as a discrete set of arguments, but as work that takes place in time and on which time itself is at work. Against the temptation to regard a text (including a text of philosophical aesthetics or critical linguistics) as explained or defined by a fixed temporal context, this book emphasizes the textual operation of time. This attention to temporality opens the possibility of reading the notoriously difficult and resistant text of television.
The book's central chapters analyze the seductions of "live" broadcasting: an incisive account of news coverage of the Gulf War, for example, reveals how the unproblematic articulation of "live" television with the real has its impulse in a broader realist ideology that finds its opportunity in the failure to reflect on the distances of space and time that characterize the medium. The author also explores the very different punctuality of the journal in evocative readings of the diaries of Alice James and Derek Jarman, both "journals of survival" written at the uncertain boundary of life and death. Here, and throughout the book, the readings argue that what we take to be historical events are actually produced, even constituted, by an array of discursive technologies, including language itself.
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Introduction
- Part I. Journals, Theories: 1. The invasion of the corpus snatchers
- 2. The work to come
- Part II. In The Wake Of Television: 3. No time like the present
- 4. Mission in action
- 5. Fast-forward
- 6. The test of time
- Part III. Journals Of Survival: 7. 'Only a question of time, etc'
- 8. 'The only news was then'
- Notes
- Index.
by "Nielsen BookData"