Browsing by Subject "Futurism"
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Item Faits divers : national culture and modernism in Third World literary magazines(2010-08) Micklethwait, Christopher Dwight; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Rossman, Charles; Ali, Samer; Salgado, Cesar; Wilks, Jennifer; Wolitz, SethCommitments to cosmopolitanism and indigenism complicate the Modernist literature of the Third World. This study investigates the rhetorical and aesthetic responses of Third World "little magazines"--short-running, self-financed cultural magazines--to these two notions. These little magazine evolved with the daily newspaper as a tool favored by avant-garde movements for critiquing the social structures that produced it and for codifying their aesthetic and political principles. Comparing the Stridentist little magazine Horizonte (1926-1927) to D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1925), I argue that the Mexican Revolution created a climate of nationalism that reoriented the Stridentist movement away from a version of cosmopolitanism influenced by European modernist movements and toward a deeper interest in the Mexican folk and indigenous culture. Following form there, I consider the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier's El Reino de este mundo (1949) in comparison to two Haitian magazines: La Revue Indigène (1927-1928) and Les Griots (1938-1940). Here I find that, while Carpentier stages a relatively global critique of primitivism as a false cosmopolitanism, the magazines La Revue Indigène and Les Griots reflect a turn from such a cosmopolitanism that values the primitive for its own sake toward a cultural nationalism invested in the real and imagined recuperation of Haiti's African origins through the study of folklore, Vodou, the Kreyòl language and poetic images of Africa. Finally, I compare Futurist F. T. Marinetti's Mafarka le futuriste: roman africain (1909) to the Egyptian literary magazine Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī (1945-1948) in order to demonstrate the distance between Egyptian modernity in the European imagination and the self-conceived notions of Egyptian modernity. In Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī, I find that these writers value cosmopolitanism, arguing that it is in fact indigenous to Egyptian culture itself and constructing their notion of Egyptian modernity around the maintenance of continuity with this indigenous cosmopolitanism. My examinations of these magazines suggests that, though the European avant-gardes and Third World literary Modernists may wield the little magazine similarly against hegemonic cultures, their purposes are divided over the roles cosmopolitanism and indigeneity play in the formation of national culture.Item Past//forward : retrofuturism, science fiction, and toxic nostalgia(2022-05-10) Rogers, Courtney June; Barreto, RaquelHow we look at the world has changed vastly over the course of the human experience, and how we imagine humans within the context of the world even more so. The ability to center the human narrative in the context of history seems to be the first thing creatives try to do, but even more so they work to center themselves in the context of imagined futures. In this MFA thesis I seek to explore how the relationship between science fiction, popular media, and nostalgia work to preserve a more concise version of the contemporary moment, and how we can use this information to acknowledge what the cultural attitudes were at the time. The goal of this thesis exploration is not to determine what hundreds or even thousands of years to come will look like, it is difficult to imagine what the distant future will embody, but through this process I seek rather to explore what the collective pop culture of the recent past thought was important enough to push forward into the inevitable future. The project working title Past//Forward seeks to explore previous decades' attempts to imagine the future and what those visual media creations can tell us about the societal norms, cultural values, and fears and hopes they collectively deemed important enough to push ad infinitum into the future. This is not a comprehensive overview of the idea of retro futurism as a whole, this iteration of the ideas I am exploring focuses almost entirely on western media and science fiction in the English language through the twentieth century. My primary goal for this reflective practitioner document is to incorporate elements of retro science fiction materials to construct a more modern narrative through the creation of an illustrated book. I will do so by partially condensing my vast catalog of science fiction source material, as well as giving some distance to analyze material in cultural context which is much harder to do as history is being actively written around us. The ability to analyze and engage with the previous decades' forays into the distant future can hopefully give us more insight into what they aspired and fretted over from the future through how they chose to present it in the media.