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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

The Turns

We have the cultural turn, the pictorial (visual) turn, the linguistic turn, the spatial turn, the temporal turn, the historical turn, what else?

I am not the first to use the term "literary turn," I see, though I use it differently than others have.  

This is apparently an attractive notion, an attractive "snow clone." :"the x turn in y," where x is an adjective and y is the name of a field or set of fields. The idea that a field or discipline or a huge cross section of disciplines [all the social sciences or humanities] experiences a shift by turning in a particular direction. Hey, everything is language now!  We should historicize everything. Let's look at things culturally, or spatially, or visually, now. In some sense, all the turns cancel one another out, or somewhat duplicate one another at times. We could argue that a lot of them have been hugely productive. Without turns, we would be stuck in the the same paradigms.  

There could be a poetic turn, and I just found something on jstor with that title. There hasn't been a musical turn yet, as far as I can tell. In other words, music is never the paradigm that we can apply to other disciplines.  What about an "aural turn" or "sonic turn"?