J Frow
Biographic Data
| ID | 4804 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Frow |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Frow |
| SIGNATURE | FROW J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3326-9623 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 175 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Proust and the Powers of Language
“M. Marcel Proust has just published the third volume of his childhood memories,” wrote an exceptionally obtuse reviewer of Le Côté de Guermantes in 1920 (qtd. 130). That's one of the generic frames within which À la recherche du temps perdu has been read; other descriptions include “a psychological novel, a novel about time and memory, later a novel about art and aesthetic experience, a philosophical novel, a phenomenological one, and perhaps on…
On Intergenerational Justice
Dickens, of Wilkie Collins, of Sheridan Le Fanu, and many others-is the plot device of a will that controls the lives of the heirs, frequently through a codicil that has been kept secret or suppressed and that endangers the life of the one who inherits.In Le Fanu's Uncle Silas a codicil to her father's will requires Mary to live with her wicked uncle as a condition of her inheritance; if she dies before she comes of age the uncle will inherit the…
Mixed Blessings: Narratives of Inheritance in Farming and Writing
The Bildungsroman: Form and Transformations
This special issue explores the past and present condition of the Bildungsroman, with its myriad transformations and diversifications not only in the novel proper but also in memoir, film and long
On Interpretive Conflict
Twentieth Anniversary Colloquium: The Cultural and Communications Studies Section of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
In November 1991, the Australian Academy of the Humanities held a symposium under the title Beyond the Disciplines: the New Humanities. The symposium set out to explore the ‘battering’ that the traditional humanities had received ‘from radical critiques of their methods and politics’ in the context of the ‘Theory Wars’.1 It did so by bringing together representatives of the ‘New Humanities’ to address six topics
Cookie
Questions of Address: For Meaghan Morris
In beginning to prepare this tribute to Meaghan Morris's work I went to the bulging folder that contains the letters and postcards and draft papers she sent me over a period of about twenty years, from the early 1980s to the early 2000s (more recently we've communicated almost entirely by email). One of the things that strikes me, looking through these pages with their typewritten text full of crossings-out and handwritten marginalia, is the enor…
Reading with Guns: Institutions of Interpretation and District of Columbia v. Heller
Described as ‘the most explicitly and self-consciously originalist opinion in the history of the [United States] Supreme Court’, District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008 on a 5/4 split, embodies many of the central problems of a historically oriented legal hermeneutics. Antonin Scalia’s invocation of an unchanging constitutional text and a purity of reconstruction of an original meaning belies the intensity of social and political interest…
On knowing and mattering
Antipodean fields: Working with Bourdieu
The papers collected in this special issue of the Journal of Sociology seek both to develop a sense of the cumulative impact of Bourdieu’s work on Australasian (‘antipodean’) debates, and to get a sense of how these debates might raise questions regarding the portability of Bourdieu’s categories. We discuss the distinctive disciplinary orientations of the uptake of Bourdieu’s work both here and internationally, and propose some explanations of th…
Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn
Material Powers Introduction Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett Part 1: A History of the Categories 1. Matter and Materialism: A Brief Prehistory of the Present John Frow 2. Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History Chris Otter 3. The Matter of Materialism: Literary Mediations Bill Brown Part 2: Assembling the State 4. The Unintended State Chandra Mukerji 5. Filing the Raj: Political Technologies of the Imperial British State Patrick…
The Australian space of lifestyles in comparative perspective
This article (1) examines the social distribution of cultural practices in Australia, and (2) compares this with similar data for the UK in order to identify where and in what respects the social articulations of Australian cultural practices are distinctive. The article draws on the statistical data produced by the Australian Research Council-funded inquiry into Australian Everyday Cultures in the late 1990s and the data produced by the UK's 200…
Settlement
The paper explores the idea of settlement in each of its three major senses: as a place of human habitation; as a fixed and stable order of habitation; and as a political consensus reconciling fractious groups. Arguing that traditional accounts of settlement depend, with a kind of pastoral nostalgia, upon a view of abstraction and social complexity as in themselves harmful, it follows through the implications of the concept for ways of dealing wi…
Persons and Things
Book Review| January 01 2010 Persons and Things Persons and Things.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 266 pp. Paper $35.00.Johnson, Barbara John Frow John Frow University of Melbourne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2010) 47 (2): 221–223. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.47.2.0221 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Ci…
Hybrid disciplinarity: Rey Chow and comparative studies
The question of comparison has been central to all of Rey Chow's work. She understands it not as an exercise performed upon a common ground, but as the drawing together of incommensurable places and objects of knowledge; its point is not to gain prestige within a dominant cultural field and not simply to reverse the hierarchy obtaining between centre and margin, but to generalize the condition of otherness. The analogy she posits between the stak…
On Midlevel Concepts
On Midlevel Concepts John Frow (bio) I There is much to be rejected in the tradition of the sociology of literature: its postulation of dichotomized and homogeneous poles of “literature” and “society” in a relation of mutual exteriority; the expressive relation it posits between social groups and formations of cultural practice; the uncontrolled and invisible perspective of an omniscient disciplinary knowledge; and the failure to link methodologi…
The city at human scale
Thinking the Novel
Australian cultural studies: Theory, Story, History1
Jas review of books
Mary Besemeres, Translating One's Self, Peter Lang, Oxford, 2002, pp 295, pb, ISBN 3906766985. Richard Freadman, Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself, Bystander Press, Northcote, 2004, pp 288, pb $24.95, ISBN 0957797834. Robert Adamson, Inside Out: An Autobiography, Melbourne, Text, 2004, pp 342, hb $45.00, ISBN 1877008958. Philip Ayres, Mawson: A Life, Carlton, MUP, 2003, pp 322, pb $34.95, ISBN 0522850782. Victoria Leatham, Bloodletting: A Mem…
The Uses of Terror and the Limits of Cultural Studies
The plot of the event of September 11 - the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists - might have been written by Hollywood, or by Baudrillard. So fantasmatic, so familiar was the scenario that it fitted seamlessly into the manichaean agenda of the Pentagon hawks planning the next American war, and the next. Indeed, a perfectly plausible paranoid response reads this plot as a plot on the part of those who have most t…
Never Draw to an Inside Straight: On Everyday Knowledge
What would the structure of everyday reason look like if we tried to teach it to an intelligent machine? Something like this: Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 tells the story of a novelist, coincidentally also called "Richard Powers," who returns to the United States after the breakdown of his marriage. He takes a fellowship at a midwestern university where he works as a kind of participant observer in the Center, a massively funded institute for the…
Text, culture, rhetoric: Some futures for English
This is an electronic version of an article published in Critical Quarterly: complete citation information for the final version of the paper, as published in the print edition of Critical Quarterly, is available on the Blackwell Synergy online delivery service, accessible via the journal's website at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0011-1562 or http://www.blackwell-synergy.com. This article is available to University of Melbou…
Metaphor and Metacommunication in Schizophrenic Language
Since the beginning of this century, psychiatrists and linguists, assuming a correlation between disordered talk and disordered cognition, have sought to devise language tests with diagnostic efficiency for mental 'illnesses'. Schizophrenia in particular has been assumed to be characterized by disorders of cohesion, of reference, and of symbolization. Much of this work is flawed by its a priori assumptions about the reality of the category of sch…
Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia
In 1689 a Japanese poet travels to the deep north. Describing a tour of the island, he is nevertheless no tourist. His journey is in part a religious pilgrimage, in part the commemoration of localities celebrated by earlier poets, and in part an allegory of a passage into death. The religious dimension of his journey is clear. Basho speaks of being constrained to silence about certain things he has seen because of the rules he must obey as a pilg…
Is Elvis a God: Cult, Culture, Questions of Method
The fame of major stars, and especially dead ones, has been entangled throughout the 20th century with a religious vocabulary: the figures of apotheosis, ritual, cult, and sacrifice are the staple of the most banal analyses of high celebrity. I ask whether the idea of a religious dimension to stardom can and should be taken literally, and what kind of rethinking both of stardom itself and of the methodological concerns of cultural studies such a …
Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn
Material Powers Introduction Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett Part 1: A History of the Categories 1. Matter and Materialism: A Brief Prehistory of the Present John Frow 2. Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History Chris Otter 3. The Matter of Materialism: Literary Mediations Bill Brown Part 2: Assembling the State 4. The Unintended State Chandra Mukerji 5. Filing the Raj: Political Technologies of the Imperial British State Patrick…
Discourse and Power
The paper argues for the possibility of reworking the concept of ideology in such a way as to depend neither on a problematic of truth and error, nor on a division of the world into two parts one of which is more real than the other, nor on an expressive relation of subjects to meaning. The political force of the concept can be retained if ideology is thought as a provisional state of discourse (a function of its appropriation and use) rather tha…
A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole
The Australian space of lifestyles in comparative perspective
This article (1) examines the social distribution of cultural practices in Australia, and (2) compares this with similar data for the UK in order to identify where and in what respects the social articulations of Australian cultural practices are distinctive. The article draws on the statistical data produced by the Australian Research Council-funded inquiry into Australian Everyday Cultures in the late 1990s and the data produced by the UK's 200…
Cultural Studies and the Neoliberal Imagination
Cultural Studies and the Neoliberal Imagination 1 John Frow (bio) I What remains of the liberal vision of a common public culture in a world of asserted differences? What mechanisms of consenting or dissenting identification sustain a democratic public sphere when politics becomes spectacular? And isn't the representation of publicness always the performance of a division, an exclusion, a minoritization? In order to put the issues that I think ar…
Repetition and Limitation: Computer Software and Copyright Law
Journal Article Repetition and Limitation: Computer Software and Copyright Law Get access John Frow John Frow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 29, Issue 1, Winter 1988, Pages 4–21, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/29.1.4 Published: 01 January 1988
Information as Gift and Commodity
‘The current phase of capitalist development’, says Gareth Locksley, ‘is one characterized by the elevation of information and its associated technology into the first division of key resources and commodities. Information is a new form of capital’, and as such it undergoes a change of form: rather than
Knowledge and class
This is an electronic version of an article published in Cultural Studies. © Copyright 1993 Taylor & Francis; Cultural Studies is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09502386.asp
Public Domain and the New World Order in Knowledge
This is an electronic version of an article published in Social Semiotics. © Copyright 2001 Taylor & Francis; Social Semiotics is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10350330.asp
The Bildungsroman: Form and Transformations
This special issue explores the past and present condition of the Bildungsroman, with its myriad transformations and diversifications not only in the novel proper but also in memoir, film and long
On Midlevel Concepts
On Midlevel Concepts John Frow (bio) I There is much to be rejected in the tradition of the sociology of literature: its postulation of dichotomized and homogeneous poles of “literature” and “society” in a relation of mutual exteriority; the expressive relation it posits between social groups and formations of cultural practice; the uncontrolled and invisible perspective of an omniscient disciplinary knowledge; and the failure to link methodologi…
In the penal colony
What are the periodicities of remembrance shared with others? Writing in the final volume of Les Lieux de memoire,Pierre Nora identifies two primary forms of commemorative time: that of the centenary,'voluntary, deliberate, impossible either to avoid or to manage', and that of the generation,'involuntary and even unconscious, uncontrollable'. These are the interwoven times of the nation-state and of living collective memory. In this paper I ask a…
Spectacle Binding: On Character
The concept of character is perhaps the most problematic and the most undertheorized of the basic categories of narrative theory. It is also perhaps the most widely-used of all critical tools, at all levels of analysis; and its sheer obviousness disguises the conceptual difficulties it presents
The Chant of Thomas Keneally
Examines the political consequences inherent in the genre of the â well-made novelâ . Argues that â a reading of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith may tell us, not only what Keneallyâ s novel explicitly states, that there is a limit to understanding white Australians can have of aboriginal culture, but also why Keneally was forced by the limits of the novel form itself to draw this lesson in politically conservative termsâ (291)
Antipodean fields: Working with Bourdieu
The papers collected in this special issue of the Journal of Sociology seek both to develop a sense of the cumulative impact of Bourdieu’s work on Australasian (‘antipodean’) debates, and to get a sense of how these debates might raise questions regarding the portability of Bourdieu’s categories. We discuss the distinctive disciplinary orientations of the uptake of Bourdieu’s work both here and internationally, and propose some explanations of th…
Australian cultural studies: Theory, Story, History1
Never Draw to an Inside Straight: On Everyday Knowledge
What would the structure of everyday reason look like if we tried to teach it to an intelligent machine? Something like this: Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 tells the story of a novelist, coincidentally also called "Richard Powers," who returns to the United States after the breakdown of his marriage. He takes a fellowship at a midwestern university where he works as a kind of participant observer in the Center, a massively funded institute for the…
Metaphor and Metacommunication in Schizophrenic Language
This is an electronic version of an article published in Social Semiotics. © Copyright 2001 Taylor & Francis; Social Semiotics is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10350330.asp
Kitsch Politics
A review of Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University, Durham, 2007
Unaustralia: Strangeness and Value
This essay explores the flawed legal regime governing national security in Australia. It focuses on legislation related to anti-terrorism and discusses the negative effects of the bills, particularly in relation to the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The author reflects on the harsh political and social climate of Australia during the era of the Howard government and One Nation party, noting that democratic and the liberal values can be…
System and History: A Critique of Russian Formalism
The theoretical development of Russian Formalism, and of its structuralist successors in Prague, is the record of an exemplary attempt to fuse an imma nent approach to the literary text and the literary system, which would locate significance in the structure of textual relations and not in genetic or mimetic features, with an awareness of the essential historicity of these relations. Implicit in the concept of literary evolution is a theory of …
The Chant of Thomas Keneally
Examines the political consequences inherent in the genre of the â well-made novelâ . Argues that â a reading of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith may tell us, not only what Keneallyâ s novel explicitly states, that there is a limit to understanding white Australians can have of aboriginal culture, but also why Keneally was forced by the limits of the novel form itself to draw this lesson in politically conservative termsâ (291)
Discourse and Power
The paper argues for the possibility of reworking the concept of ideology in such a way as to depend neither on a problematic of truth and error, nor on a division of the world into two parts one of which is more real than the other, nor on an expressive relation of subjects to meaning. The political force of the concept can be retained if ideology is thought as a provisional state of discourse (a function of its appropriation and use) rather tha…
Marxism and Literary History
John Frow's book is a novel contribution to Marxist literary theory, proposing a reconciliation of formalism and historicism in order to establish the basis for a new literary history. Through a critique of his forerunners in Marxist theory (the historicist Marxism of Lukács, the work of Macherey, Eagleton, and Jameson), Frow seeks to define the strengths and the limitations of this tradition and then to extend its possibilities in a radical rewo…
Spectacle Binding: On Character
The concept of character is perhaps the most problematic and the most undertheorized of the basic categories of narrative theory. It is also perhaps the most widely-used of all critical tools, at all levels of analysis; and its sheer obviousness disguises the conceptual difficulties it presents
Accounting for tastes: Some problems in Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture
Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed
Discipline and discipleship
This is an electronic version of an article published in Textual Practice. © Copyright 1988 Taylor & Francis; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0950236X.asp.
Repetition and Limitation: Computer Software and Copyright Law
Journal Article Repetition and Limitation: Computer Software and Copyright Law Get access John Frow John Frow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 29, Issue 1, Winter 1988, Pages 4–21, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/29.1.4 Published: 01 January 1988
Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism
This book sets out to clarify the nature of the aesthetic as a category within the theory of historical materialism. It opens with an analysis of Marx's brief discussion of Greek art in the Grundrisse, moves through a series of readings of specifically bourgeois texts, including those of Ruskin, G.M. Hopkins, Nietzsche and Henry James, and then to the terrain of Marxism in the concepts of history underwriting the work of Fredric Jameson and Jean-…
Formal method in discourse analysis
Marxism, Modernism, History
Marxism and Literary History
The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise
Research Article| April 01 1990 The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise John Frow John Frow Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1990) 89 (2): 413–429. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-89-2-413 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Frow; The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 Apr…
The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise
Michel de Certeau and the practice of representation
This is an electronic version of an article published in Cultural Studies. © Copyright 1991 Taylor & Francis; Cultural Studies is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09502386.asp
Face value
Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia
In 1689 a Japanese poet travels to the deep north. Describing a tour of the island, he is nevertheless no tourist. His journey is in part a religious pilgrimage, in part the commemoration of localities celebrated by earlier poets, and in part an allegory of a passage into death. The religious dimension of his journey is clear. Basho speaks of being constrained to silence about certain things he has seen because of the rules he must obey as a pilg…
Knowledge and class
This is an electronic version of an article published in Cultural Studies. © Copyright 1993 Taylor & Francis; Cultural Studies is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09502386.asp
Australian Cultural Studies: Contexts and Genealogies
A note on legal semiotics
This is an electronic version of an article published in Social Semiotics. © Copyright 1995 Taylor & Francis; Social Semiotics is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10350330.asp
Information as Gift and Commodity
‘The current phase of capitalist development’, says Gareth Locksley, ‘is one characterized by the elevation of information and its associated technology into the first division of key resources and commodities. Information is a new form of capital’, and as such it undergoes a change of form: rather than
Time and commodity culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity
Gift and Commodity
For much of this century one of the most powerful and most illuminating ways of thinking about the pattern of relations between persons has been through the opposition of the gift to the commodity. The apparent clarity of the contrast between two very different forms of the social life of things has made it integral to the more general logic that opposes traditional or archaic societies to industrial modernity. But just as that opposition, rather…
Sociology (31 works) · Political science (25 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Law (21 works) · Art (20 works) · History (19 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Literature (14 works)