The Media Flashcards
What are the essential questions raised by the module?
- What is Historical fiction? Is it history?
Why does history have a prominent place in the Media? - How much historical research should novelists, directors ect do?
- How important is historical accuracy?
- What is the relationship between popular history and academic history?
How can we define ‘historical fiction’
Jerome de Groot
- not ‘history’ but ‘modes of knowing the past
- the texts do engage with ‘tropes of pastness’
How important is historical accuracy?
Jerome de Groot
Fictions, Groot argues, can be both ‘unrealistic’ and ‘popular’, but also ‘discursive spaces’ to debate ‘historical authority’
David Pearse on Historical fiction AND historical accuracy
‘Perhaps novels and their fictions are, perversely, the more ‘honest’ way to try to understand and write about the past…a novel will always, already be a work of fiction and thus can never claim to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
Jerome de Groot and the ‘Doctrine of Double Effect’
double effect : ’the recognition of something that once existed and its difference from the artistic rendering.’
Jerome de Groot on Historical accuracy
‘The past is not dead ground…History is always changing behind us, and the past changes every time we retell it. The most scrupulous historian is the unreliable narrator…Once this is understood, the trade of the historical novelist doesn’t seem so reprehensible or dubious; the only requirement is for conjecture to be plausible and grounded in the best facts one can get
Harlan on the popularity of Historical Fiction
On the state of it
On the causes of it
- a ‘golden age of popularisation’
- ‘The historical novelist creates a historical world so fully realised that her readers find themselves actually living in it, usually for days at a time.’
Higson
Why is historical fiction popular
In Thatcher Britain: —> ‘By turning their backs on the industrialised, chaotic present, they nostalgically reconstruct an imperialist and upper-class Britain’
‘‘heritage space, rather than narrative space: that is, a space for the display of heritage properties rather than for the enactment of dramas. ‘
- ‘ more akin to that mode of early filmmaking that Tom Gunning calls the cinema of attractions’
Evidence of historical accuracy in historical dramas
Catherine Fletcher, Adapting Wolf Hall for TV: how I played historical guessing game
1) Evidence of Tudor material culture is scarce. Historical dramas may not fall far behind academic history in depicting ‘the truth’ (so far as we know it). Much religious depiction destroyed in the Reformation
2) Wolf hall used expert researchers (CATHERINE FLETCHER) and went to painstaking efforts to reconstruct Tudor material culture
Robert Rosenstone on historical accuracy on screen
In his seminal work on history on screen, Visions of the Past, Robert Rosenstone argued that by its nature historical film (at least of the mainstream type) is obliged to invent. When we don’t know what an interior looked like, we have to create and imagine. But there is “true invention” – which engages with the historical record – and “false invention” – which does not.
Case study on Historical innacuracy:
SELMA
1) The role of LBJ as discussed by David Kaiser in Why You Should Care That Selma Gets LBJ Wrong:
- LBJ had other priorities. He wanted to pursue more great society legislation, including a ‘war on poverty’, and a Voting Rights Act would jeopardise that
- LBJ and MLK had spoken cordially about voting rights in december and january
- It was only later, when MLK began to oppose the Vietnam war, that the two came to a head
2) The ‘cinematic narrative’ overplays the role of MLK and suggests a linear progression towards racial equality
The dominant narrative tended to make Martin Luther King its central figure…DuVernay’s narrative of the movement may have eliminated the white saviour, but it
tacitly proposes the need for a black one in the person of Martin Luther King. Yet others, often associated with SNCC and CORE, argued that the King tradition diminished the importance of community organizing of a participatory nature…..
- ‘How long? Not long’: Selma, Martin Luther King
and civil rights narratives RICHARD H. KING on the Memphis to Montgomery narrative - Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s influential 2005 article ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of
the Past’.
Practical problems with historical dramas
‘How long? Not long’: Selma, Martin Luther King
and civil rights narratives RICHARD H. KING on the Memphis to Montgomery narrative
Hollywood has always had a problem with films about the Civil Rights Movement.
Obviously, there has been a problem financing them. That is, how can
they be made palatable to white southern audiences, in particular, and to
white Americans, in general?
Benefits of historical drama
‘How long? Not long’: Selma, Martin Luther King
and civil rights narratives RICHARD H. KING on the Memphis to Montgomery narrative
Selma palpably lack the aura of authenticity linked with newsreel footage that in turn contributes to the verisimilitude of the film. On the other hand, a documentary does not take us inside the home, much less into the bedroom. We have no newsreel footage of private moments when the subtleties of intimate exchanges are explored.
D. Harlan, The Future of Academic History
Argument
A ‘map’ of the new territory of history (popular history)
‘The Territory of the Historian’ should identify the provinces it encompasses and the territorial codes that govern them
—> Popular history necessitates new strategies by academic historians
Editorial: History in the graphic novel
Hugo Frey & Benjamin Noys
Key arguments on the Graphic Novel and the significance of MAUS
It was the publication of one work, more than any other, which transformed the status of the graphic novel: Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991)
Graphical novel gives more legitimacy to the work than the term ‘comic’
Hayden White on Maus
a ‘masterpiece of stylization, figuration, and allegorization’ (1992: 41–2) and a ‘critically self-conscious’ (1992: 42)
Art Spiegelman (author of Maus) on comics
2 quotes
‘One of the problems is that the word comics itself brings to mind the notion that they have to be funny. [. . .] I prefer the word co-mix, to mix together, because to talk about comics is to talk about mixing together words and pictures that tell a story’
“[r]eality is too much for comics … so much has to be left out or distorted”
Madness or Modernity?: The Holocaust in Two
Anglo-American Comics - Robert Eaglestone
On Donna Barr’s ‘Desert Peach’, which predates Maus
If, with the genre of representations of the past, there is an axis with, at one end, the detailed research that is taken to be central to the discipline of history…and at the
other end, the sort of representations in some past and current popular culture which amount to little more than people in the present ‘dressing up’ in historical clothes… then Desert Peach….tends toward that end.
….fiction, and is not pretending to offer an account
that can be held to trial by the genre of history.
EVIDENCE
‘Popular’
- The story Barr is telling here about the Holocaust is the ‘good German’ story: that, although the SS and Nazi High Command were perpetrators in the genocide, the ‘Honourable’ German army were bystanders who did not
commit atrocities.
‘Historical’
- However, recent work on the Holocaust and the role of the army by Omer Bartov, Martin Dean and others (empirical historians) tells a different story: while the army was not as ideologically motivated as the SS, they argue that it certainly was involved in massacres and war crimes – part of the Nazi Genocide.
Madness or modernity?: The Holocaust in two
Anglo-American comics
Robert Eaglestone
On Maus
But the power and originality of Spiegelman’s effort derive quite specifically from this shock of obscenity which demands that we confront “the Holocaust” as visual representation
Amy Holdsworth, ‘Who do you think you are? Family history and British Television’
On the significance of ‘reality television’
‘…rather than viewing [emotionalism] as a marker of the ‘dumbing down’ of television, the elicitation of emotion, at least within BBC discourses, became thee key to their value.’
Both celebrity and emotionality are central to the promotion of WDYTYA
