Papers by Rodney Taveira
The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World. Ed. Steven Powell, Bloomsbury, 2018
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The Journal of Popular Culture 50.3, pp.585–603, 2017
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Journal of Popular Culture 50.3, 2017
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Australasian Journal of American Studies 35.1, pp. 3–10, 2016
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This essay examines the loop of contemporary American literary production and reception. Firstly,... more This essay examines the loop of contemporary American literary production and reception. Firstly, I read Nam Le's 'Meeting Elise,' from The Boat (2008), Le's much-awarded collection of short stories set across the globe, alongside Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003), a novel that depicts the daylong journey in a limousine of a billionaire currency trader down New York's 47th St. Secondly, I compare Le's and DeLillo's different cosmopolitanisms against the cosmopolitan scene of New York City book reviews. I argue that a graphic depiction of pain and the male body-a 'patriarchy of pain'-reveals a tension between the local and the transnational in the field of contemporary literature and reception, and that this tension reflects and informs the how the field bestows and withholds value. Le and DeLillo, I argue, as figures of different cosmopolitanisms, further complicate matters. What Donald C. Goellnicht has called Le's 'refugee cosmopolitanism' is regarded differently than DeLillo's New York, older cosmopolitanism. The regard of difference demonstrates a continuation of the older mode as it encounters the newer mode. This creates a hierarchy to the scene of the cosmopolitanism of the New York book reviews, what I call 'hierarchical cosmopolitanism,' one that confers value to those it admits.
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The combination of melodramatic and art cinematic techniques and influences in AMC’s television s... more The combination of melodramatic and art cinematic techniques and influences in AMC’s television series Mad Men (2007--) reveals how a melodramatic televisuality can image novel modes of social and intimate relations and an alternative to the archetypal American narrative of the self-made man. Set in 1960s’ America, the series uses a contemporaneous and cosmopolitan California to triangulate the formal and narrative insistence of the past on the present. This triangulation is played out by Don Draper’s relations with his family, women, and his former identities and by the representation of homosexuality throughout the series. The application of Lee Edelman’s concept of “sinthomosexuality” and Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” reveal a queer, visual rhetoric to the show’s narrative and formal structures, forming a queer irony that allows the show to straddle the aesthetic extremes of “quality TV” (Jane Feuer) and soap opera, which, in turn, queers the exemplary American heterosexuality of Don Draper.
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In the photographic technique of contre-jour, the camera is pointed directly at a source of light... more In the photographic technique of contre-jour, the camera is pointed directly at a source of light. The intervening figure is registered in sharp contrast that elides detail, concentrating the image on a play of borders that focuses on shape and line. In Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon employs contre-jour (and titles the novel as such) to stage an encounter between the visual and the literary. Sean Cubitt’s digital theory of the cinema is used in this essay to investigate the possibility of representation and effects sought by Against the Day’s Futurist painter and anarchist, Tancredi. Working in Venice, Tancredi rages against the “damnable stillness of paint” (AtD 586) in his efforts to create an Infernal Machine of destructive transformation. Three pictures by Luigi Russolo, René Magritte, and Umberto Boccioni currently hang in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and resonate with Pynchon’s representation of visual culture and the work of Tancredi. Moving through these paintings and the Futurist and Cubist movements, the association between “wound culture” (Mark Seltzer) and photography is forged. The pataphysical and cinematic technology of the “Integroscope” then animates photography, (re)producing the Barthesian punctum that comes with the temporal aberrance of what Pynchon thematizes as “bilocation” (that is, being in two places at the same time). Akin to Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” what I call Pynchon’s “graphic impulse” plays out the tension between the moving and the still image. Further, the content and form of Pynchon’s representation of visual culture reveals the historio-graphy of his graphic impulse. His focus on other sensorial modes of apprehending the visual—smell and sound—complicates the encounter between the visual and the literary, coloring the ending of the Against the Day with a darker tone."
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Short Pieces by Rodney Taveira
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Papers by Rodney Taveira
Short Pieces by Rodney Taveira