Abstract

Defining the Cinematic: An Understanding of Joyce's "Wandering Rocks" as a Cinematic Text


Media, in all its incarnations throughout the past century, has led many scholars to questions concerning the modes and methods of media production.  However, within this period of study scholars have sought to understand how and when adaptation from one medium to another is not only produced but the intricacies that allow that production to function.  While this is an interesting and relevant line of study for many fields in cultural and humanitarian scholarship, this paper will deal with the function of a written text as film-like.  Many scholars of the Frankfurt school, including Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno, and the mid 20^th century French philosophical movement, Deluze and Guattari, have previously explored the manufacture and fundamental problems of the creation of a media text in this century.  However, they have not delved into how a written text, such as a novel, portrays film-like features and how those features either succeed or fail as a text.  This paper will focus on James Joyce’s the “Wandering Rocks,” a chapter within Ulysses, and will enunciate how and when Joyce adapts cinematic features, such as script, movement, dialogue, and camera focus, to his texts.  Can a text be a remediation  of film and if it is a reader reading into it or not?  This explication will focus on understanding how to correctly read a written text as cinematic and whether a writer can in fact properly manufacture the same features evident in a film within their written texts.  

USU As A Network

                First off two things: one, Spinuzzi has a wicked sense of humor that is hard to ignore at certain junctures in this book; secondly, (putting on my Seinfeld voice) what is the deal with all his references to Christian theology?  He seems to want to canonize the idea of network, or net work, as savior.  Interestingly, he does create an interesting dialogue between the two warring factions; something that religion has striven to do, or not do depending on your perspective, for centuries. 

                As I was reading chapter two a few things got me thinking hard about networks as Spinuzzi describes them at our University.  First, “Texts such as e-mails, technologies such as switches, humans such as technicians, and money in all its form put each other into motion, and mediate each other, and transform each other” (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 40).  This is such an evocative phrasing and vision of what a network is I would like to propose it as the genesis of our network at USU.  Texts obviously play a huge part but what are they doing currently for us?  Well, first off we are constantly bombarded with texts within any university setting, and if you are not then you are doing something wrong.  Whether it is an email to a Dean or to a student, a new text in our field from outside the University, or a new bylaw in the code of conduct text influence us constantly and they change our perceptions of how things create or destroy rhizomes. Secondly, the technologies that pervade the educational world are constantly in flux and challenge the perceptions of our desires within the network.  A new technology such as a PDF book scanner challenges our perceptions of how we desire information and if those desires go against the status quo.  It begs the question: if the technology is there, is it wrong to copy an entire book?  Thirdly, USU would not be a university without people at varying stages of completion of their degrees.  Even though we are constantly hoping for better retention of students, the massive amount of students that come into USU every year and wash out are boons to the monetary value of the school, because even though they do not achieve their goals their money still comes into our coffers.  Therefore the text of the school as a hope-filled and everyman enterprise is favored over the school being written as an exclusive and dominant school.  Finally, as we have seen money is huge player in any network and universities are not immune to this.  So what does this all mean in a networked situation?

                Spinuzzi does a good job examining these factors within his examination of a telecommunication company.  However, how do the same answers affect us in the USU network?  For instance, how does splicing versus weaving affect our network?  How does the difference in purpose between actor-network theory and activity theory portray itself in our network (Remember that Spinuzzi clarifies the difference as “actor-network theory is preoccupied with how power works, activity theory is preoccupied with how people work…” (2008, p.42)?  How does genre play a part in every conversation that we have at the academic level?  How are gaps being bridged between different networks in the university and, more importantly, are they effective?  These are some of the questions that I see in USU as a research site and the connections it has with Spinuzzi’s network but I think that the most important question to us here and now is: How does the network respond to and challenge monetary changes?  Are those responses and challenges appropriate?