Prosthetic America: Ideas of Embodiment Amidst Crises of Representation from the Civil War to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
22-9-2016 2:00 PM
Description
Around fifteen or twenty years ago, a few cultural theorists noticed something called “prosthetic memory,” where viewers experienced trauma in the aftermath of violent events despite never having witnessed those events “first-hand,” so to speak, without the mediating influence of photographs or film. The surfeit of widely reproduced images during and in the aftermath of war, for example, meant that Americans might have collective experiences of violence, death and dismemberment without ever having been on the field of battle. A prosthetic culture developed along with prosthetic memory, where many experiences became products of a culture industry that mechanically reproduced images for widespread public consumption. What happened though, when images of prosthetic limbs appeared in a prosthetic culture? Beginning with the Civil War and ending with the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, Dr. Kuryla suggests that that images of prosthetic limbs in photography, film, and fiction created crises of representation that troubled how different Americans understood the phenomenon of embodiment at different times in U.S. history.
Recommended Citation
Kuryla, Peter, "Prosthetic America: Ideas of Embodiment Amidst Crises of Representation from the Civil War to Iraq and Afghanistan." (2016). Humanities Symposium. 11.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2016/2016/11
Prosthetic America: Ideas of Embodiment Amidst Crises of Representation from the Civil War to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Around fifteen or twenty years ago, a few cultural theorists noticed something called “prosthetic memory,” where viewers experienced trauma in the aftermath of violent events despite never having witnessed those events “first-hand,” so to speak, without the mediating influence of photographs or film. The surfeit of widely reproduced images during and in the aftermath of war, for example, meant that Americans might have collective experiences of violence, death and dismemberment without ever having been on the field of battle. A prosthetic culture developed along with prosthetic memory, where many experiences became products of a culture industry that mechanically reproduced images for widespread public consumption. What happened though, when images of prosthetic limbs appeared in a prosthetic culture? Beginning with the Civil War and ending with the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, Dr. Kuryla suggests that that images of prosthetic limbs in photography, film, and fiction created crises of representation that troubled how different Americans understood the phenomenon of embodiment at different times in U.S. history.
Comments
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts and Sciences