EVENT DETAILS

Hillis Miller Mini-Seminar - Mixed Media Forever

Mixed Media Forever
This seminar will develop and illustrate a method of interpreting works in mixed media. The seminar’s presupposition is that media, in Western cultures at least, have always tended to be mixed. This is sometimes forgotten, for example in readings of Victorian novels that no longer remember they were almost always illustrated. Special procedures are necessary for interpreting works in mixed media.

The first seminar will develop a theory of mixed media based on work by Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and others. The theory will be exemplified in readings of a New Yorker cover (23 July 2012) and an advertisement for Smartwater® in Wired Magazine (20.08). Copies of these will be made available.

See Debord’s La Société du spectacle (1973) (The Society of the Spectacle) and Jean Budrillard’s Simulacres et Simulation (1981) (Simulacra and Simulation).

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle_(film); http://www.imd.com/title/tt0070712/; http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6113599464218751854
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

The second seminar will turn to Thomas Hardy’s early novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, or: The Mellstock Quire (1872), as another example of mixed media. The four photographs that illustrate the 1920 Anniversary edition will be made available. Some participants may wish to read the novel beforehand, though the seminar will be comprehensible without that. A recent CD reconstructing with period instruments the probable sound of the Mellstock Quire will be sampled, to add a third medium to the mix.
At least half an hour will be reserved at the end of each seminar for discussion.