February Shelfie: Jason Lester
“I am a second-year PhD student in the Comparative Literature department. I am interested in transnational modernism, media studies, aesthetics, critical theory, poetry, and film, among other things, and I am currently preparing a conference paper for the 2017 University of Michigan Comparative Literature Graduate Conference. My paper will be titled, “Chinese Slow Cinema in the Time of the Network.”Jason has found that NMCC courses complement his focus in Comparative Literature quite well due to the fact that both the certificate and the are “committed to interdisciplinarity — not only in terms of focus on national area studies and commitment to critical and theoretical perspectives, which originate from a variety of disciplines, but also in understanding of [media and literature] as an object of critical inquiry”
After reading Andre Bazin’s What Is Cinema (1967) in Professor Michael Allan’s “Transmedial Aesthetics” course in Fall 2015 – both a foundation course in Comparative Literature and an NMCC methods course – Jason became interested in the claim of Bazin “that it is the quality of mise en scene which is most fundamental to cinema — in opposition to Eisenstein’s privileging of montage editing and the cut. [And his prioritization of] long takes and deep focus, believing that technical advances in film production help move us closer to a teleological “myth of total cinema.”
In the NMCC core seminar class, taught by Professor Bish Sen last spring, Jason was introduces to Manuel Castells’ The Rise of the Network Society (1996). “For my seminar paper, I conducted a literature review of the way that time has been engaged and socially conceptualized in the modern and contemporary period, and became interested in how Castells argues that in the network society there has been an emergence of new social formations of space and time, organized into what he calls the space of flows and timeless time. Although Castells is often cited within the social sciences and architecture, he has rarely been employed within the Humanities. I am interested in teasing out how his observations can be meaningfully employed towards a phenomenological investigation of cinema and everyday life on the level of the aesthetic.”
Jason’s Primary Interests:
“Within the last decade, there has been a considerable amount of critical work applied towards what has been labeled contemplative or slow cinema. In particular, I am interested in the films of Sixth Generation director Jia Zhangke and Taiwanese Second New Wave director Tsai Ming-Liang. It is my contention that a formal analysis of the aesthetic qualities of these films reveals how time is socially formed in the network society, being phenomenologically experienced as instantaneousness in the dynamic, nodal space of flows and as interminable slowness or stillness in the static, contiguous space of places.
Beyond my work in contemporary film and the network society, I am currently researching the aesthetics of vitalism in and between the United States and China in the modernist period. I am interested in the incipient role of affective vitalist philosophy in American encounters with Chinese literary texts, beginning with Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry and its employment in the thinking and poetry of Ezra Pound. Moreover, I am also interested in how western vitalist philosophies are presaged and transfigured within Chinese literature and film, as seen in key works such as Wild Grass by the preeminent Chinese modernist writer Lu Xun, as well as The Big Road by 1930s Shanghai director Sun Yu.
I’m also very interested in questions of exploration, immersion and diegesis in video games, particularly in walking simulator games — first person games which prioritize exploration and affective relationships to space instead of merely shooting other people with guns.”
Film Recommendations:
Book Recommendations:
Video Games:
The Beginner’s Guide (2015) — Programmer Davey Wreden
Slave of God (2012) — Programmer Stephen Lavelle
Music Videos:
“Cranes in the Sky” — Perf. Solange Knowles, Dir. Solange Knowles and Alan Ferguson
“Don’t Touch My Hair” — Perf. Solange Knowles, Dir. Solange Knowles and Alan Ferguson
“Both of Solange’s music videos feature long takes, long shots, and slow or or static camera movement — all of which is antithetical to what we expect from a music video.”
Poetry:
Art:
Emily McGinn
The School of Architecture and Allied Arts is excited to announce the next A&AA Interdisciplinary Lecture – 
these subjects, tentatively entitled How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. The project engages with contemporary debates in new media theory and political theory in order to frame an argument around early twentieth-century informatics technologies in such domains as personality psychology, identity documentation, and the racialization of property. See more about Colin on 
