Peter D Mcdonald
Biographic Data
| ID | 642245 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter D Mcdonald |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter D |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcdonald |
| SIGNATURE | MCDONALD P D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5371-3539 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader
The Double Life of Books confronts a central challenge for the history of reading: how to investigate and then describe the elusive process of what the leading book historian Robert Darnton calls ‘inner appropriation.’ It does so by bringing two voices together for the first time: the so-called ‘ordinary reader’ who began life as a devotee of Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and the literature professor who writes about the history of media and read…
Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader
Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader
Reclaiming the Future of Book History from an African Perspective
This chapter discusses the evolution of book history, a field that emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the 1980s, notably shaped by Robert Darnton's foundational essay ‘What is the history of books?’ and the Histoire de l’édition Française . Initially focused on the materiality of books, the discipline emphasized the impact of books as agents of social change across diverse societies and the publishing industry's structures. This materia…
Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer
How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players. Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump, Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games…
Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging set of essays exploring the travels of Irish literature and culture over the last century and more. The essays focus on writers and artists whose work has been taken up and re-read overseas; on cultural producers who have engaged with transnational scales in their work; and on critical practices that pay attention to comparative, global, and planetary dimensions of Irish liter…
Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective
This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now…
Solicitar el concepto de literatura mundial
Menos preocupado por el concepto de «literatura mundial» que por la promesa y los riesgos de la conceptualización, este ensayo examina lo que experimentan algunas formas de escritura cuando se las lee, precisamente, como literatura mundial. Utilizando In the Heart of the Country (1977) de John Maxwell Coetzee como ejemplo ilustrativo, aborda cuestiones de circulación, traducción, sistemas de escritura, historia del libro y geografía literaria en …
Literary Space/Creative Practice: Reading Ityala Lamawele in English Today
The new English translation of SEK Mqhayi's Ityala Lamawele (1914), The Lawsuit of the Twins (2018), is a major cultural event. Seen against the background of Ityala Lamawele's long and complex history as a published work, however, the new translation raises several important questions for readers today. Above all, by bringing the tensions between the intermediaries who shape the space of the literary and the creative practice of writers sharply …
The Principle of Division in Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games
Caillois’s classic text Man, Play and Games leaves open a basic question: Why focus on four specific kinds of play? Subsequent authors have offered their own rationalizations and expanded upon his game categories but have not explained Caillois’s approach. This essay performs a close reading of Man, Play and Games in order to evince his methodology. I argue that Caillois holds to the idea that play reproduces uncertainty in a safe and confined wa…
Beyond Translation
Seen in the context of the hopes the ICIC and then UNESCO invested in translation as a way of securing world peace, this chapter traces the career of the leading Afrikaans writer Antjie Krog from her debut as a young avant- garde poet writing exclusively in Afrikaans to her later work as a prose writer who chose creative non-fiction and English as additional literary media. The chapter shows how Krog, like Joyce before her, betrayed the ‘genius’ …
Postscript
The postscript recapitulates some of the main themes of the book via the work of the contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing. On the one hand, it argues that Book from the Sky (1988), which reflects Xu Bing’s debts to the Chan (or Zen) Buddhist tradition, exemplifies an ‘Eastern’ form of linguistic scepticism directed primarily against writing. On the other hand, it argues that Book from the Ground (2007–), which reflects Xu Bing’s engagement with th…
Against State Literacy
Seen in the context of UNESCO’s analysis of apartheid education and its long-running debates about indigenous knowledge, this chapter reflects on J. M. Coetzee’s critical relations with the traditions of the European novel, whether in its ‘realist’ or in its ‘modernist’ modes. It begins by examining the school edition of F. A. Venter’s Swart Pelgrim (1958), arguably the most prescribed novel of the apartheid era, which included a curiously high-m…
Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrel…
On strong opinions: Celebrity Authors in the Contemporary Agora
Given that my host discipline is literary studies, I could ask: what can contemporary literary studies do for celebrity studies? Instead, for reasons that will become apparent, I would rather pose
Quelle littérature ? Quelle démocratie ? Quel espace public: Les leçons de l’année 1988 en Afrique du Sud
Quelle littérature ? Quelle démocratie ? Quel espace public ? Les leçons de l'année 1988 en Afrique du Sud Cet article analyse la confrontation tendue entre Nadine Gordimer et John Maxwell Coetzee sur Les Versets sataniques de Salman Rushdie dans les derniers temps de l'apartheid en Afrique du Sud. Il pointe la pertinence particulière de leurs différences d'opinion, centrées sur les questions de littérature, de démocratie et d'espace public, dans…
Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature
Journal Article Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. Get access Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2014. Pp. 316. $27.95. Peter D. McDonald Peter D. McDonald St Hugh's College, University of Oxford [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 2, April 2…
A World of Letters: Reading Communities and Cultural Debates in Early Apartheid South Africa
This thoroughly absorbing and astutely argued book contributes substantially to our understanding of the world of (English) letters in South Africa from around the middle of the 1930s to the late 1
For Every to There Is a fro: Interpreting Time, Rhythm, and Gesture in Play
This essay looks at the nexus of rhythm, gesture, and time to argue that play has a systematicity of its own, separate from that of games, which rarely comes to our attention. It constructs a genealogy by following the idea of a to-and-fro motion characterizing play through Huizinga's Homo Ludens, to Gadamer's Truth and Method, and finally to Nicolas Abraham's essays on the phenomenology of rhythm. By looking at play as a selection of game acts, …
Thinking Interculturally: Amartya Sen's Lovers Revisited
The future of multiculturalism as a term governing policy and shaping public debate has been in question for some time. This essay argues that a philosophical or conceptual reappraisal is now also overdue. After discussing the history of multiculturalism, as a word and as a concept, and the current debate about its future, it offers a rationale for thinking interculturally, as an alternative not just to multiculturalism but to varieties of cosmop…
The present is another country: A comment on the 2010 media freedom debate
The spectre of apartheid censorship haunted the 2010 debates about media freedom. While acknowledging the force of the historical parallel, this article takes issue with the polemical use of the past in this context, arguing that the more pressing issues raised by the Protection of Information Bill and proposed Media Appeals Tribunal need to be seen against the background of the post-apartheid legislative framework and the African National Congre…
Old Phrases and Great Obscenities: The Strange Afterlife of Two Victorian Anxieties
The full-text of this article is not available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page
Disgrace Effects
Since its publication in July 1999, Disgrace has provoked intense debates, especially within South Africa, the most significant of which centres on the question of race. A number of commentators have found it offensive, while others, most notably the ANC, have interpreted it in more positive but still racialized terms. This essay considers these responses and asks whether or not the award-winning novel can survive the most suspicious of readings
For Every to There Is a fro: Interpreting Time, Rhythm, and Gesture in Play
This essay looks at the nexus of rhythm, gesture, and time to argue that play has a systematicity of its own, separate from that of games, which rarely comes to our attention. It constructs a genealogy by following the idea of a to-and-fro motion characterizing play through Huizinga's Homo Ludens, to Gadamer's Truth and Method, and finally to Nicolas Abraham's essays on the phenomenology of rhythm. By looking at play as a selection of game acts, …
Disgrace Effects
Since its publication in July 1999, Disgrace has provoked intense debates, especially within South Africa, the most significant of which centres on the question of race. A number of commentators have found it offensive, while others, most notably the ANC, have interpreted it in more positive but still racialized terms. This essay considers these responses and asks whether or not the award-winning novel can survive the most suspicious of readings
Disgrace Effects
Since its publication in July 1999, Disgrace has provoked intense debates, especially within South Africa, the most significant of which centres on the question of race. A number of commentators have found it offensive, while others, most notably the ANC, have interpreted it in more positive but still racialized terms. This essay considers these responses and asks whether or not the award-winning novel can survive the most suspicious of readings
Old Phrases and Great Obscenities: The Strange Afterlife of Two Victorian Anxieties
The full-text of this article is not available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page
Thinking Interculturally: Amartya Sen's Lovers Revisited
The future of multiculturalism as a term governing policy and shaping public debate has been in question for some time. This essay argues that a philosophical or conceptual reappraisal is now also overdue. After discussing the history of multiculturalism, as a word and as a concept, and the current debate about its future, it offers a rationale for thinking interculturally, as an alternative not just to multiculturalism but to varieties of cosmop…
The present is another country: A comment on the 2010 media freedom debate
The spectre of apartheid censorship haunted the 2010 debates about media freedom. While acknowledging the force of the historical parallel, this article takes issue with the polemical use of the past in this context, arguing that the more pressing issues raised by the Protection of Information Bill and proposed Media Appeals Tribunal need to be seen against the background of the post-apartheid legislative framework and the African National Congre…
For Every to There Is a fro: Interpreting Time, Rhythm, and Gesture in Play
This essay looks at the nexus of rhythm, gesture, and time to argue that play has a systematicity of its own, separate from that of games, which rarely comes to our attention. It constructs a genealogy by following the idea of a to-and-fro motion characterizing play through Huizinga's Homo Ludens, to Gadamer's Truth and Method, and finally to Nicolas Abraham's essays on the phenomenology of rhythm. By looking at play as a selection of game acts, …
Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature
Journal Article Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. Get access Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2014. Pp. 316. $27.95. Peter D. McDonald Peter D. McDonald St Hugh's College, University of Oxford [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 2, April 2…
A World of Letters: Reading Communities and Cultural Debates in Early Apartheid South Africa
This thoroughly absorbing and astutely argued book contributes substantially to our understanding of the world of (English) letters in South Africa from around the middle of the 1930s to the late 1
Quelle littérature ? Quelle démocratie ? Quel espace public: Les leçons de l’année 1988 en Afrique du Sud
Quelle littérature ? Quelle démocratie ? Quel espace public ? Les leçons de l'année 1988 en Afrique du Sud Cet article analyse la confrontation tendue entre Nadine Gordimer et John Maxwell Coetzee sur Les Versets sataniques de Salman Rushdie dans les derniers temps de l'apartheid en Afrique du Sud. Il pointe la pertinence particulière de leurs différences d'opinion, centrées sur les questions de littérature, de démocratie et d'espace public, dans…
Beyond Translation
Seen in the context of the hopes the ICIC and then UNESCO invested in translation as a way of securing world peace, this chapter traces the career of the leading Afrikaans writer Antjie Krog from her debut as a young avant- garde poet writing exclusively in Afrikaans to her later work as a prose writer who chose creative non-fiction and English as additional literary media. The chapter shows how Krog, like Joyce before her, betrayed the ‘genius’ …
Postscript
The postscript recapitulates some of the main themes of the book via the work of the contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing. On the one hand, it argues that Book from the Sky (1988), which reflects Xu Bing’s debts to the Chan (or Zen) Buddhist tradition, exemplifies an ‘Eastern’ form of linguistic scepticism directed primarily against writing. On the other hand, it argues that Book from the Ground (2007–), which reflects Xu Bing’s engagement with th…
Against State Literacy
Seen in the context of UNESCO’s analysis of apartheid education and its long-running debates about indigenous knowledge, this chapter reflects on J. M. Coetzee’s critical relations with the traditions of the European novel, whether in its ‘realist’ or in its ‘modernist’ modes. It begins by examining the school edition of F. A. Venter’s Swart Pelgrim (1958), arguably the most prescribed novel of the apartheid era, which included a curiously high-m…
Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrel…
On strong opinions: Celebrity Authors in the Contemporary Agora
Given that my host discipline is literary studies, I could ask: what can contemporary literary studies do for celebrity studies? Instead, for reasons that will become apparent, I would rather pose
The Principle of Division in Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games
Caillois’s classic text Man, Play and Games leaves open a basic question: Why focus on four specific kinds of play? Subsequent authors have offered their own rationalizations and expanded upon his game categories but have not explained Caillois’s approach. This essay performs a close reading of Man, Play and Games in order to evince his methodology. I argue that Caillois holds to the idea that play reproduces uncertainty in a safe and confined wa…
Solicitar el concepto de literatura mundial
Menos preocupado por el concepto de «literatura mundial» que por la promesa y los riesgos de la conceptualización, este ensayo examina lo que experimentan algunas formas de escritura cuando se las lee, precisamente, como literatura mundial. Utilizando In the Heart of the Country (1977) de John Maxwell Coetzee como ejemplo ilustrativo, aborda cuestiones de circulación, traducción, sistemas de escritura, historia del libro y geografía literaria en …
Literary Space/Creative Practice: Reading Ityala Lamawele in English Today
The new English translation of SEK Mqhayi's Ityala Lamawele (1914), The Lawsuit of the Twins (2018), is a major cultural event. Seen against the background of Ityala Lamawele's long and complex history as a published work, however, the new translation raises several important questions for readers today. Above all, by bringing the tensions between the intermediaries who shape the space of the literary and the creative practice of writers sharply …
Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective
This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now…
The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader
The Double Life of Books confronts a central challenge for the history of reading: how to investigate and then describe the elusive process of what the leading book historian Robert Darnton calls ‘inner appropriation.’ It does so by bringing two voices together for the first time: the so-called ‘ordinary reader’ who began life as a devotee of Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and the literature professor who writes about the history of media and read…
Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader
Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader
Reclaiming the Future of Book History from an African Perspective
This chapter discusses the evolution of book history, a field that emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the 1980s, notably shaped by Robert Darnton's foundational essay ‘What is the history of books?’ and the Histoire de l’édition Française . Initially focused on the materiality of books, the discipline emphasized the impact of books as agents of social change across diverse societies and the publishing industry's structures. This materia…
Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer
How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players. Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump, Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games…
Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging set of essays exploring the travels of Irish literature and culture over the last century and more. The essays focus on writers and artists whose work has been taken up and re-read overseas; on cultural producers who have engaged with transnational scales in their work; and on critical practices that pay attention to comparative, global, and planetary dimensions of Irish liter…
Art (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · History (11 works) · Literature (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Political science (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works)