E-mail address: hodosy.annamaria@gmail.com
Home institution: University of Szeged,
Department of Visual Culture and Literary Theory
Academic position: Senior Assistant Professor
Areas of research: metafiction, gender and queer studies,
cultural studies, postcolonialism
Title of the presentation: Misprecognitions: Minority Report on the Postmodern Condition
Most important Publications
- Remix (co. author Kiss Attila). Ictus és Jate, Szeged, 1996.
- Irodalmi árvaság. Dickens és a metafikció. In Kötelez?k. Tanulmányok világirodalmi klasszikusokról. Szerk. Bényei Tamás, JAK-Kijárat Kiadó, 1999.
- Az írás novuma. A ?nő? mint az irodalom egy önreflexív metaforája Poe-nál és Hawthorne-nál. Fosszília 2003/3-4. 105-120.
- Shakespeare metaszonettjei. Osiris-Pompeji, Budapest-Szeged, 2004.
- Palimpszexus, avagy a ?no? mint az irodalom egy önreflexív metaforája I. In Elmélet, irodalom, történet. A komparatív megértés lehetőségei. Tiszatáj könyvek, Szeged, 2004. 7-27.
- Piroska és az Anyafarkas. In Új Symosion 2005. augusztus 47-56.
- Shelley Medúzája és a ?jövendők szeme.? Literatura 2006/3. 307-320.
- Alien a Predator, avagy Emancipáció vs. Reprodukció sci-fi horror keretben. Apertúra 2010. tél VII/1.
- Platón és a fiúk. A meleg hang jelenléte Wilde, James és Zweig szövegeiben. In TNTeF (Társadalmi Nemek Tudománya Interdiszciplináris eFolyóirat) 1. évf. 2. szám 2011 november
- Egy szoknya, két nadrág. Homoszociális alternatívák filmen. In Apertúra 2011. tél
Title of the presentation
Misprecognitions: Minority Report on the Postmodern Condition
Abstract
Spielberg?s Minority Report in which persons with paranormal precognitive abilities help to prevent crime is likely to be understood as a political allegory of the post 9/11 condition. But through certain mythical allusions and structural oddities, the film suggests an epistemological problem instead of the political one. At first sight the three precoqs who foresee the future offer a deeper, overall knowledge of the world just like other kinds of optical technology the film?s world is jammed with. The crisis of the plot, however, reveals that the knowledge conveyed this way cannot be processed as usual, since the causal logic on which the method of crime detection depends is turned upside down when the precoqs signal a crime the protagonist would commit explicitly because he was shown it.
For many critics and viewers, the message is the victory of free will over fate or determinism, repeatedly emphasized as such by the main characters. But the ambivalent logic of the story, where the outcome precedes and generates its forecoming, while is said to be the ready consequence of a vicious plot organized against the protagonist, is not so easy to come to terms with. The apparent contradiction is not necessarily a narrative fault (as is often heard) but rather a metaphor of the/a film’s narrative structure itself, including the simultaneous existence of beginning and end in the physical texture of the strip which is seen and interpreted as a temporal process with causal logic by the viewer who is hoped to jump over major plot holes and inconsistencies in their haste to force coherence on the material just seen.
This way the improbable adventure of the protagonist with the three ?media? who project moving images on a screen represents not only our watching Minority Report. It also interprets the everyday phenomenon of cinema and TV-watching and internet-surfing when the mediality of perception, instead of deepening the desired transparency of understanding, lures the viewer into the experience of a postmodernist universe of fragmentation, heterogeneity, self-referentiality, decentring, intertextuality, and bricolage where there are only misunderstanding and differences ? evoked by allusions to the story of Oedipus, Narcissus and Echo.