Mechademia 7: Lines of Sight (Mechamedia)
Marc Steinberg
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0816680493
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Lines of Sight—the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga—explores the various ways in which anime, manga, digital media, fan culture, and Japanese art—from scroll paintings to superflat—challenge, undermine, or disregard the concept of Cartesian (or one-point) perspective, the dominant mode of visual culture in the West since the seventeenth century. More than just a visual mode or geometric system, Cartesianism has shaped nearly every aspect of modern rational thought, from mathematics and science to philosophy and history.
Framed by Thomas Lamarre’s introduction, “Radical Perspectivalism,” the essays here approach Japanese popular culture as a visual mode that employs non-Cartesian formations, which by extension make possible new configurations of perception and knowledge. Whether by shattering the illusion of visual or narrative seamlessness through the use of multiple layers or irregular layouts, blurring the divide between viewer and creator, providing diverse perspectives within a single work of art, or rejecting dualism, causality, and other hallmarks of Cartesianism, anime and manga offer in their radicalization of perspective the potential for aesthetic and even political transformation.
Contributors: David Beynon, Deakin U; Fujimoto Yukari, Meiji U; Yuriko Furuhata, McGill U; Craig Jackson, Ohio Wesleyan U; Reginald Jackson, U of Chicago; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Jinying Li; Waiyee Loh; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Stefan Riekeles; Atsuko Sakaki, U of Toronto; Miryam Sas, U of California, Berkeley; Timon Screech, U of London; Emily Somers; Marc Steinberg, Concordia U.
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East-West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured
International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800-2000
Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us
Essays advances the critique of Cartesianism as it has entered film and media studies. One current of film theory, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, argued that the monocular properties of the lens had encouraged cinema to adopt a mode of Cartesianism: the viewer assumed a position of subjective mastery over a world that had been objectified by the application of Cartesian ordering implicit in the camera lens. The argument inspired a series of responses, and while an exclusive emphasis on the lens.
Cinematically inspired novelist who liberally alludes to films by Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, Naruse Mikio, and Eric Rohmer, among many others. Her sister Kumiko is a famed visual artist who frequently contributes to her publications as designer. A lesser-known yet equally formative exposure to photography is manifest in Kanai’s reviews of photographic exhibitions and in a substantial essay on photography entitled “Han imeeji-ron” (1992–93, On anti-image),4 and also in.
And ethic), déjà-vu: a photographic quarterly 14 (Autumn 1993): 139. The exhibition took place at Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, July 17–September 5, 1993. For an English-language review, see Dana Friis-Hansen, “Kineo Kuwabara and Nobuyoshi Araki at the Setagaya Art Museum–Photography–Tokyo, Japan– Review of Exhibitions,” in Art in America 82, no. 1 (January 1994): 114. 14. Atsuko Sakaki, “Materializing Narratology: Kanai Mieko’s Corporeal Narrative,” Proceedings of the Association for Japanese.
Compendium) (Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama, 1978), n.p.. 30. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10–11. 31. Kuwabara Kineo, “Torarekata no rekishi” (The history of how to be photographed), in Watakushi no shashinshi (My history of photography) (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1976), 149 (emphasis added). 32. Tamura Shigeru [Akihide], “Shiroi fensu no mukō: Beigun kichi,” no. 9 of “Shashin kiroku 1970” (Photo documentaries 1970), Asahi kamera 55, no. 9 (September 1970): 119–20. 33. Tamura, “Shiroi fensu no mukō,”.
Hallmarks of Cartesianism is the fixing of the position of the observer. An image constructed in accordance with one-point perspective, for instance, implies an ideal viewing position, looking directly at the image from a frontal position toward the vanishing point; from this position, everything appears duly ordered, scaled, and proportioned. In addition, coordinate geometry implies that a position can be established and located upon a grid, either two- or three-dimensional, by an observer.