In: Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund, Andreas Vårheim (eds.) (2007): "A Document (Re)turn". Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, pp. 73-93. Reprinted with permission.
The article identifies the exponent for the longest caves in the Scandinavian Caledonides, UK, part of the Alps, USA and the earth. The exponent is used to calculate the total number of caves longer than 100 m and 10 m in different regions, using equations described by Rane Curl in 1986 and statistical methods like maximum likelihood estimation and Kolmogorov-Smirnov. The article discusses whether the approach is legitimate.
This paper deals with the threats posed by persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to Arctic populations. It does not primarily focus on the negative impacts these substances have on ecosystems and human organisms, but rather directs its attention to the potentially disruptive effects the articulation of these threats might have on Arctic communities and systems of meaning. I employ the theoretical framework developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to conceptualise the articulation of threats as different forms of discursive interaction between politico-scientific and local discourses. In providing a close reading of three sets of scientific texts pertaining to POPs in the Arctic, I show that each of these implies a particular form of discursive interaction - overcoding, semiotisation, and interdiscursive translation – which entail widely different effects on local frameworks of meaning. Finally, I apply some of Foucault’s ideas in order to direct attention to the particular form of politics underlying these forms of interaction between discourses.
The article deals with Arctic explorer and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson's self-presentation in the expedition account The Friendly Arctic: The Story of Five Years in Polar Regions (1921), which tells the story of his travels and trials in the Canadian High Arctic in the years between 1913-1918. The account has been considered a key text to Stefansson's Arctic career, and provides a textbook example of his characteristic theory of living off the country in the so-called Eskimo way. Against the background of Stefansson's debated position as Arctic expert and visionary, I ask if it is possible to read the kind of criticism with which Stefansson frequently was met as rooted in some of the narrative aspects of his account. The narrative persona or implied author is a central element in the literature of exploration, as several literary scholars have pointed out. My reading is centred around the implied author of The Friendly Arctic, which I argue must be read in light of the sometimes conflicting roles given to Stefansson as protagonist and narrator in his own story. Close-readings of passages from the account raise the dilemma of how it is possible to present oneself as a hero in an essentially friendly Arctic.
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