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https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1965290 

Producing Historicity: Foucault, Joyce and European

Art Cinema, 1955–1980

by Andrew Gibson (Author)

ABSTRACT

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear how damaging and virulent the obsessively‘presentist’ orientation is that drives neoliberal and managerial ‘culture’. Its proponents abjure discourses of or on historicity, lest they encounter critical perspectives on our present situation. For that very reason we should be sustaining and promoting our historicisms as tenaciously as possible. This article argues that Foucault and Joyce, in their extremely di erent ways, did just that, attuned as they were to the subtleties of speci city and the vagaries of contingency. But there is a certain historicity of the body and a ect that philosophy and literature, by their nature, cannot fully capture or communicate. We might rather turn, then, to European Art Cinema, approximately from 1955 onwards, and a range of cinéastes, from Godard and Melville to Varda and Huillet-Straub. The discussion brings out the highly nuanced ways in which they use cities and landscapes, and temporal and spatial anomalies, to construct both a historicity of a ect and an aesthetic re ection or meditation on that historicity.

KEYWORDS historicity; presentism; the body; managerialism; neoliberal culture; Joyce; Foucault;

Godard; [Jean-Pierre] Melville; Antonioni; Fellini; Varda; Huillet-Straub; materiality; a ect; the image;

European art cinema; nouvelle vague; neo-realism; the European city

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Producing Historicity - Foucault Joyce and European Art Cinema 1955 to 1980


Producing Historicity - Foucault Joyce and European Art Cinema 1955 to 1980
Andrew Gibson
Andrew Gibson is the Emeritus Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK


How to Cite

Producing Historicity: Foucault, Joyce and European Art Cinema, 1955–1980

Crossref DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1965290

Update policy: https://doi.org/10.1080/tandf_crossmark_01

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Published Date

Published Online: 2021-08-19

Published Print: 2021-10-03

Journal Issue

TEXTUAL PRACTICE

2021, VOL. 35, NO. 10, 1565–1585

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Licence

Version of Record valid from 2021-08-19

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