Richard Grusin Research Articles

The Dutch Courtesan Online

The Dutch Courtesan Online Oliver Jones In June 2013, the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York staged John Marston’s Jacobean city comedy, The Dutch Courtesan (1605).1 Directed by Michael Cordner, the production marked the second early modern play staged in the new Department’s Scenic Stage Theatre, and extended an established series of explorations of early modern drama at York, which has seen seldom-performed plays returned to the modern stage. Since moving in to the Department’s new building in autumn 2010, the combination of colleagues’ expertise and well-equipped theaters and TV production facilities has made it possible to capture these performances on film. Following the success of the performances and recording of the Department’s inaugural production of Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters!, staged in June 2011, the Dutch Courtesan project sought to expand the ambitions of the former. The result was the creation of a new project website, www.dutchcourtesan.co.uk (Cordner and Jones). This site was envisaged as a vehicle by which to track the preparation of the play from script to performance and to offer a range of contextualizing information about the play’s history. Ultimately becoming host to the film of the performance, the website extends the duration of the production beyond its short three-day run and offers the user a version of what an audience saw in the theater, “remediated,” in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term (qtd. in Aebischer 144), and presented among an assemblage of supporting materials ranging from scholarly theater-historical and literary essays to rehearsal blogs and films, and interviews with cast, creatives, and visiting industry professionals. The purpose of this essay is to explore the rationale of the project and the website’s creation, and to consider how viewing The Dutch Courtesan through the website lens shifts the way in which we might approach early modern texts in performance and on screen. [End Page 623] Rarely played: The Dutch Courtesan on the modern stage While this may be the most active period of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater-making since Shakespeare and his contemporaries wielded quills (Lopez, “Seeds” 35), one such contemporary, John Marston, has yet to enjoy the modern popularity of some of his peers. Against the works of Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and the inevitably omnipresent Shakespeare, Marston’s plays have rarely made it to the modern professional stage. In Karin Brown’s extensive list of 50 years of professional productions of early modern theater in the UK and USA since 1960, only four out of 341 were of Marston’s plays (200-01). While we can add further productions to the list (see Douglas and Jones; Brown makes no claims to being completely comprehensive), a representation of a little over 1% of fifty years of early modern productions does not immediately suggest a hearty endorsement of Marston’s work. Nevertheless, the first production on Brown’s list might suggest that such circumspection was not always so strongly felt; for in 1964, in its second season, the National Theatre staged Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, directed by William Gaskill and Piers Haggard, at Chichester and the Old Vic. To choose the play for the theater’s first foray into non-Shakespearean drama from before the Restoration, out of the full range and richness of the known repertoire, suggests that the powers at the newly formed company saw Marston’s work as being exemplary classical drama, which drama had long been advocated as being a “vital” component in the remit and duty of a national theater to stage (Elsom and Tomalin qtd. in Cordner, “The Dutch Courtesan, 1964” 1). It was the success of two earlier productions of the play, directed by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1954 and 1959, that led Kenneth Tynan to propose the play for inclusion the National’s second season (Cordner, “The Dutch Courtesan, 1964” 3-4; Tynan 507). However, Littlewood’s success was not replicated by Gaskill and Haggard. Branded “An Inhibited Booby” by the Times’ correspondent (“Inhibited”), and “depressing” and “ponderous” by Bamber Gascoigne, Tynan’s successor at the Observer, both the production...

“Some new dimension devoid of hip and bone”: Remediated Bodies and Digital Posthumanism in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

In its discussion of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story , this essay shows how posthuman fantasies of a bodiless existence come about through processes of digital remediation similar to those described in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s now classic study of new media. For these critics, Western desires for unfiltered encounters with reality paradoxically result in the proliferation of new media forms that substitute “hypermediacy” for “immediacy.” Likewise, in Shteyngart’s novel, characters’ desires for attenuated or completely erased bodies are realized in the act of multiplying their bodies’ relationships with information technologies. In this respect, the novel enables us to explore the ways that a new posthuman realism shapes human bodies, desires, and politics in the digital age.

Cinematic Incorporation: Literature in My Life Without Me

This essay considers the relationship between literature and film through a reading of Isabel Coixet's film My Life Without Me (2003). The first half of the essay explores how two recent theorisations of the term incorporation allow us to read, on the one hand, the film's relationship to Nanci Kincaid's short story 'Pretending the Bed is a Raft' (1997) in particular and to literature in general and, on the other, the narrative consequences of the protagonist Ann's decision to keep her terminal illness a secret. In the first instance, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's definition of incorporation in Remediation (2000) helps explain how the film does not adapt the short story upon which it is supposedly based, but in fact only repurposes it. Literary aspects of the film's mise-en-scene, plot and imagery, however, signal My Life Without Me' s incorporation of literature. In the second instance, the essay explores how Jacques Derrida's theory of incorporation's role in mourning helps the viewer understand the film's plot development out of Ann's secret. In the second half of the paper, Leo Bersani's idea of impersonal intimacy is developed into a theory of literature. The conclusion posits that impersonal intimacy defines the literary in contrast to cinema's tendency to full disclosure.

Low-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in <em>The Dispersion of Seeds</em>

Low-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in The Dispersion of Seeds Jason Gladstone (bio) However diverse recent posthumanist and ecocritical projects have been, those focused on the imbrication of humans and nature have generally been organized as recognitions or disclosures of the integration of the human with the nonhuman as an always, already, abiding condition. Insofar as this is the case, these projects are essentially continuous with the major literary critical accounts of Henry David Thoreau’s canonical works (from R. W. B. Lewis through Sharon Cameron and Laurence Buell) that configure the Thoreauvian problematic of naturalizing the human in terms of recognizing, disclosing, or otherwise actualizing an extant continuity of the human with nature.1 The argument of this essay, however, is that Thoreau’s unfinished manuscript The Dispersion of Seeds (1862) features a naturalization of the human that does not resolve into a realization of such continuity.2 From the outset of the manuscript, it is apparent that the task of “show[ing] how the seed is transported from where it grows to where it is planted” entails an overhauling of the observer: in order to document and display the modes, means, and mechanisms of seed dispersal, the observer needs to be calibrated to the spatial and temporal intervals that separate a seed’s growth from its planting (D, 24). As the manuscript proceeds, it becomes clear that, for Thoreau, this overhauling of the observer does not constitute an actualization of the potential naturalness or inhumanity of the human; nor does it constitute a nonactualization, materialization, or iteration of such a potentiality.3 Rather, what this overhauling of the observer resolves into is a modification of the human that makes it natural: a conversion of the human-writing into nature’s recording function. Accordingly, this essay has two main tasks. The first is to elucidate the specific remediation of writing featured in The Dispersion of Seeds As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define it, remediation is the process by which new and old media constitute and reconstitute themselves by [End Page 349] “appropriat[ing] the techniques, forms, and social significances” of other, competing, media.4 In The Dispersion of Seeds the overhauling of the observer—the conversion of the human-writing into nature’s recording function—entails a remediation of writing whereby writing adapts a central aspect of the emerging media of photography. In so doing, writing reconfigures itself as a medium that is capable of capturing the too-slow-to-be-perceived motions of a nature that works “systematically” (D, 151), at “a geologic pace,” and “over the greatest distances” (D, 36).5 As is explained in the pages that follow, this remediation of writing appears as a refunctioning of photographic automaticity that converts the human-writing into an apparatus that can produce desubjective representations of nature. In the now standard critical optic installed by Jonathan Crary’s and Friedrich Kittler’s poststructuralist accounts of nineteenth-century media culture, such a conjunction of writing and technological media can be understood as an aspect of the general supplantation of agency that coincided with the advent of modernity.6 However, insofar as Thoreau’s remediation of writing derives from an intentional reorganization of action, the particular conjunction of writing and technological media in The Dispersion of Seeds resolves into an instantiation of modern literary agency. The other main task of this essay is to detail how The Dispersion of Seeds presents this remediation of writing as a thoroughly technological mode of naturalizing the human. The Dispersion of Seeds thereby reconfigures a problematic that has recently emerged as an important feature of both ecocriticism and posthumanism and has long been central to Thoreau criticism. At least since R. W. B Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), critics have registered Thoreau’s interest in integrating the human into nature; at least since Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), critics have routinely noted that, for Thoreau, the development of modern technology threatens—and thereby makes more urgent—the possibility of effecting the sort of “total immersion in nature” that would “bring into being the natural man.”7 Contemporary Thoreau criticism most often considers the ways in...

Reversed remediation: A critical display of the workings of media in art

Abstract This article distinguishes between the theories of remediation and reversed remediation and applies this theoretical foundation to Evelien Lohbeck's artwork noteboek (2008). Reversed remediation is an aesthetic strategy that subverts media critics Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's notion of 'remediation' in their eponymous article, which serves a historical desire for immediacy. Countering media theorist Marshall McLuhan's fear, in Understanding Media ([1964] 2003), of the narcotic state that the user of a medium can enter when becoming a closed system with the medium, reversed remediation creates a state of critical awareness about how media shape one's perception of the world.

인스톨레이션 공간에서 나타나는 하이퍼매개적 특성

In relation to spatial expression, the remediation theory of Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin shows a sufficient possibility of providing extended idea and experience through the space of critical representation. The remediation theory discussed in the scope of new media says about the existence method and the development process of media through immersion into media and awakening, and one attribute of remediation which aims at the extension of another realistic experience and recognition through various media, contains common denominators which display diversity and complexity of installation space, and use the audience as expression elements. Therefore, this study aims to apply the remediation theory in order to interpret space using more diverse and multisensory expression methods. For achieving this purpose, this study found the connection among characteristics of hypermediacy which is an axis of installation and remediation theory, and analyzed diverse cases regarding installation space and characteristics of hypermediacy, depending on external aspects of form and expression and internal aspects of experience and cognition. The method of hypermediation expression in installation space converts the recognition about the basic custom of new experience, space and representation. This means that the logic of remediation could approach space by leading to more extended form and recognition. In conclusion, the characteristics of space and the possibility of extended expression revealed in the relationship between installation space and hypermediacy logic would provide another developmental significance for research on space design.

Mediation in David Milch’s John from Cincinnati

Abstract David Milch’s short-lived HBO series John from Cincinnati (2007) has an unexpected political premise that was largely ignored or misunderstood when the show aired: that the American population has been conditioned by the logic of television serials to expect closure to political events and thus will demand genocidal retribution for the next terror attack after 9/11. This article explores how Milch explains his intent with reference to the concept of mediation and compares Milch’s use of the concept to Richard Grusin’s premediation.

You can visit Hotel Mommy: maternal bodies as browsing/consuming biotourists

The technologically charged public domain of cyber(cultural)space, often constructed in opposition to women, femininity, and maternity, can also be a contested scholarly space with the potential to question dominant discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality, and maternity. The cyber-realm has also interconnections to webs of commercialism and the commodification of female and maternal bodies. In order to investigate this topic's interconnections in this paper, I turn to an examination of cybermaternity in the commercial maternity web pages of the Internet. In summary, I argue that mainstream and commercialized maternity websites are domains of paradox, with the possibility of overturning the previously mentioned dominant discourses even as they are saturated in commerce, desire to render maternal bodies completely knowable and conventional tropes of maternity. To further this investigation, I turn to Kim Sawchuk's theory of biotourism to examine discourses of medico-technology and the desire to observe the inner workings of the pregnant body. I argue that this biotouristic desire is enabled by the immediacy of the websites and delivered in the jocular tone of mainstream maternity magazines. In order to further examine possible manifestations of biotourism, I also make use of Jay David Bolter's and Richard Grusin's concept of remediation: the tendency of particular media to represent and refashion other media in response to general Western cultural desires for immediacy.

Bye Bye Belgium: remediating Flemish nationalism in prime time

This article discusses the special news bulletin on the imminent and unilateral declaration of independence of the Flemish Republic that was aired on the Belgian francophone public broadcasting service (RTBF) in December 2006. Following in the wake of 90+years of Flemish nationalism often tinged with separatism and overshadowed by a history of fascist collaboration during World War II, moreover broadcast in the immediate context of a Belgian state paralysed by petty territorial disputes, the disturbingly plausible docu-fiction Tout ça (ne nous rendra pas la Belgique), which was later titled Bye Bye Belgium, gave the viewing public a bitter taste of the power of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's remediation-concept. Termed an adaptation of sorts ‘designed to erase its own traces’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000), remediation in broad terms implies the repurposing of signifiers and signifying systems into a new, presumably coherent narrative. Philippe Dutilleul, the creator of Bye Bye Belgium, for one, had been accused from various parts in Flanders and Wallonia alike of polarising the political debate and accelerating a psychological acceptance of the country's imminent doom on both sides of its linguistic border. Accordingly, a closer look at the parallel machineries of narrativisation, adaptation and remediation should thereby prove pertinent. After all, remediating a history of nationalist tensions with the willing participation of right-wing Flemish political leaders in prime time on the broadest public platform available in this instance did not fail to make an impact.

Remediation as Pharmikon

As an environmental term, “remediation” converges with “sustainability,” “resilience,” and “greening” to evoke an ethically positive resolution to ecological crisis and suggest the restoration of some nearly lost vitality through the neutralization of its afflictions. Although this primary sense of “remediation” might seem unrelated to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's use of that word to describe certain paradigmatic representational strategies of new media, where the environment is concerned, these two etymologies ultimately converge: to remediate is to re-present the environment that once existed prior to the affliction so as to make that affliction appear curable. In the process, remediation completes a circuit of “afflicting” power. To the extent that the medical conception underlying “environmental remediation” approximates the Greek ϕἀρμακον, or Pharmikon, Derrida's underlying point in “Plato's Pharmacy” also applies: environmental remediation is itself a dissimulating text whose remedial promise both conceals and depends upon its constitutive other, its equal potency as an environmental poison. I investigate these issues by first suggesting that the promise of remediation for environmental sites that receive extensive media coverage (the Gulf, for example) may help ensure the absence of remediation in environments largely invisible to the global “media” (the Niger Delta). I also suggest that a fully self-aware pharm-eco-criticism would take special pains to consider when and how the valorization of nature might have differential yet tightly related geopolitical effects, under certain circumstances even serving as a screen for postcolonial violence and corporate-driven damage. The essay concludes with an analysis of Halon Habil's Oil on Water in order to argue that, if there is to be a mode of ecocriticism whose critical sophistication might lead to a vision of meaningful remediation, it will need to maintain a vigilant wariness about elixirs whose promise to protect us from a brush with death actively serves to distract us from some fresh round of postcolonial toxicity.

The materiality of encyclopedic information: Remediating a loved one – mourning britannica

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a qualitative thematic analysis of reader comments posted in connection to a series of articles published after Encyclopaedia Britannica's announcement to forego its print edition. It shows how ideas of what information is, are entangled with ideas of what a certain medium is and does. Two research questions guide the analysis: 1) How are encyclopedias as information sources imagined in contemporary public discourse? 2) How does the materiality of encyclopedias shape ideas of knowledge, information and memory? A theoretical basis is the distinction between an epistemological discourse and a practice discourse of science as proposed by Bernd Frohmann. Furthermore, the concept of remediation as developed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin is drawn on. The analysis maps out different functions encyclopedias as information sources and external memories are assigned in contemporary society and in the recent past. It shows how these functions go into one another and how they are entangled with certain social practices. Through this it makes visible how understandings of information at a personal level are entwined with ideas of materiality, technologies, and culture that are formed in conjuncture with larger historical and societal shifts.

From remediation to premediation: or how the affective immediacy of late 90’s digital society evolves to an continuous affectivity anticipation of future in the 21th century

Richard Grusin one of the most well known on media studies researchers and a pioneer on this area. His work concerns historical, theoretical, and aesthetic aspects of media technologies. With Jay David Bolter he is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Meda (MIT, 1999), which sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media; Remediation has a remarkable connection with his fourth book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), which argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear. The richness of his analysis is the connection between our daily and real life to the digital ambiances that underlies our society. Richard Grusin had recently visited many Brazilian Universities and research groups for a series of conferences and master classes focusing on the dark side of the digital humanities, and also the discussion on premediation social state-of-life.

Device Consciousness and Collective Volition

Device Consciousness and Collective Volition

The Never-ending Disaster: 9/11 Conspiracy Theory and the Integration of Activist Documentary on Video Websites

Abstract The article examines how documentary film is transformed when distributed through video sharing web sites. The conspiracy-theoretical production Loose Change (2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009) is used as a case study of how the mediation process connected with net-based distribution affects the materiality of film and alters our conception of both visual evidence and genre. With a point of departure in the media theory of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin and their twin concepts of immediacy and hypermediacy it is discussed how the film culture on the internet develops new media institutions and establishes what could be described as “live” archives. A concluding reflection illustrates how this type of film is part of an ongoing media-determined and cultural transformation of the documentary genre, a process that places its historical and political content halfway between fact and fiction

Interview with Armand Mattelart

Interview with Armand Mattelart, June 7, 2012 Interview conducted by James Hay, Jayson Harsin, & Jim Cohen Interview translated by Jayson Harsin Interview edited by James Hay, Jayson Harsin, Jim Co...

Beyond remediation: Comic book captions and silent film intertitles as the same genre

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin claim in Remediation that 'media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other', suggesting that no medium is so individualistic that it does not somehow draw on other older - or equally new - forms of media. However, they choose to discuss media primarily in terms of style, image and layout; in short, they emphasize the visual aspects of media while not thoroughly discussing other key rhetorical aspects such as the purpose of and response to a text. These latter components (purpose and response) are key tenets to rhetorical genre theory of the last 25 years. Because rhetorical genre theory seems analogous to remediation in many ways - both theories argue that texts or mediums draw on other texts/mediums - it appears that these two theories can serve as complements to one another. This article synthesizes remediation and rhetorical genre theory to discuss the relationship of silent film intertitles to comic book captions. Using ideas from rhetorical genre theorists Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi and Carolyn Miller (among others), in addition to Bolter and Grusin, I argue that not only are early forms of comic book captions remediated silent film intertitles (boasting a similar style/layout/image), but that they are also the same genre (sharing a similar purpose and invoking comparable responses). To that end, I examine silent films such as The Flirt (1917), The Mark of Zorro (1920), Nosferatu (1924) and Sherlock Jr. (1924) and comic books published in the 1940s, including Batman, Archie and The Spirit.

A Study on the Interface in Horror Game 'Dead Space2' - Focusing on the theory of Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin -

A Study on the Interface in Horror Game 'Dead Space2' - Focusing on the theory of Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin -

The Game's Remediation

As the era of change that has developed a variety of media. But no matter how hi-tech media it, even though several of the previous circular forms of media have evolved from. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin them academically for old media remediation will use, he explains. The middle of media, especially games remediation nature of the game, the game plan, game content, game machines, etc. in various parts of the outward form, there is remediation characteristics. The use of these remediation allows users to facilitate access to the media, and more importantly are able to adapt quickly to the game controls. And Increase the fun of the game, given the immersion for the game that enhance the role is. Remediation of the game against a variety of elements in the game if they utilize in-depth research on the development of the game has been suggested that the role is a lot.

Book Review: Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 Richard Grusin Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 Iisbn 978-0-23-024252-4

Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 is primarily an account of the American media experience of the 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Richard Grusin situates his analysis in the United States sociopolitical context during the Bush administration years. The book begins by precisely analyzing the different ways in which the significance of this media event has been elaborated, taking on arguments from Baudrillard, Zizek, and David Simpson. The main criticism Grusin raises against these accounts is that by focusing on the event's spectacular dimension and its derealization effects they exclude 'the materiality or agency of mediation' (19), as well as its historic specificity

Telepresence and its transparent infrastructures

This article critically examines Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's concept of remediation, specifically as it pertains to their conceptualisation of transparency, through a detailed analysis of a series of telematic artworks. Their problematic definition of remediation leads to an understanding of telepresence as a medium that denies transparency and aggressively insists for the social and physical reality of media, yet such a definition does not provide the analytical tools required to determine how these conditions are produced in the first place. Remediation, it will be argued, falls short for studying the relations of power that enable and constrain representation, particularly in the case of media such as telepresence. A solution is found in Leah Lievrouw's ‘reconfiguration’ as a complement to remediation. Based on findings from a recent case study, the article will show how this dual approach can be employed to study how artists appropriate information infrastructure.