On the background of a close reading of Ridley Scott’s war film Black Hawk Down (USA 2001; BHD), this paper investigates the formal properties through which a certain strain of war and action movies discursively constitutes the other – the enemy - as less than human. I develop the argument that the emergent relation between friend and foe in these films can be read through the concept of the border as an epistemological barrier that keeps the other incomprehensible, inaccessible, and ultimately ungrievable. Having demonstrated how BHD sets up such epistemological barriers, I widen focus and show that similar formal properties can be found in other audio-visual media, such as video games or news items. I then proceed to investigate how the societal impacts of this audio-visual rhetoric might be conceptualized. Do the mass media constitute a logistics organizing audiences’ perceptions of war, violence, and the other? Does the barring of the face of the enemy from the public sphere of appearance render particular lives ungrievable and therefore unprotectable? The main theoretical frame of the paper consists of an application of the discourse theory by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to an analysis of audio-visual media, and of the approaches by Judith Butler, James Der Derian, and Paul Virilio to conceptualize impacts of media representations on political discourse and practice in times of war.
In: Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund, Andreas Vårheim (eds.) (2007): "A Document (Re)turn". Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,pp. 11-26. Reprinted with permission.
Christa Wolf – one of the most famous East German writers – published a little story called What remains in the summer of 1990. Written in the late seventies under the GDR regime but first published after the opening of the Berlin Wall, What remains caused a great stir in the almost reunified Germany known as the Christa-Wolf-Debate. Especially in big German newspapers like Die Zeit or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but also in the smaller local ones, German intellectuals for years were discussing the moral responsibilities of the writer and the politics of literature and literary criticism.
All the critics refer to one literary text, not taking into consideration that there might be a unit of documents caused by several editions and several versions. In this paper I therefore would like to examine what kind of influence these variants might have on the interpretation of the text. In relation to this, I also want to take a closer look on what Gerald Genette (1987) calls the ”paratext” of a text and its consequences for the public ”epitext”. In this context I will also discuss the fact that an important part of the artistic documentation – the several versions of a text which may be found in private or public archives – are seldom or never considered as relevant by literary critics who only relate to the ”finished” product.
Description:
Paper presented at DOCAM ’03, University of California, Berkeley,
August 13-15, 2003
In: Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund, Andreas Vårheim (eds.) (2007): "A Document (Re)turn". Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,pp. 95-116 Reprinted with permission. This article is part of Bernt Ivar Olsen's doctoral thesis. Available in Munin at http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4774
Dette er en bearbeidet versjon av forfatterens hovedfagsoppgave i nordisk ved Universitetet i Tromsø, under tittelen 'Erindringens vev : en analyse av Cora Sandels Albertetrilogi' (1999).