Act Of Reception Research Articles

Dante’s New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature. Martin Eisner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 259.

<i>Dante’s New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature</i>. Martin Eisner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 259.

“Arise, Let Us Leave This Place”: John 14:31b and Pseudo-Epiphanius

“Arise, Let Us Leave This Place”: John 14:31b and Pseudo-Epiphanius Michael Heintz John behr, in his recent and magisterial study of John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel,1 numbers, among the compositional aporias that trouble modern readers, John 14:31b: ἐγείρεσθε, ἄγωμεν ἐντεῦθεν (“rise, let us be on our way”; NRSV). Jesus speaks these words at the Last Supper, yet immediately proceeds to continue discoursing for three more chapters (15–17). Despite their apparent oddness to modern readers, the manuscript tradition leaves no indication of early or later editors attempting to correct, omit, transfer, or expand upon these three words; the phrase apparently posed no challenge to their reading or understanding of the text. 2 And yet likely because of its awkwardness (seemingly leading nowhere), it has been omitted in the Roman Catholic Lectionary, where significant portions of John 13–17 make appearance on the Sundays following Easter and form something of a lectio continua during the weekdays (weeks 4–7) of the Easter season.3 A shorter version of the same phrase—ἐγείρεσθε ἄγωμεν—is recorded [End Page 421] by both Mark (14:42) and Matthew (26:46), without variants in either case; in both instances the line is uttered in Gethsemane, as Judas approaches to hand Jesus over to the authorities. In the Synoptics, the line does not pose the same quandary as does its placement in the Johannine narrative. However, in all three instances, the line is spoken in a context in which Judas and his act of betrayal figure prominently. The context of the Johannine narrative is not yet the garden, but Jesus’s supper in the company of his disciples. Having indicated that he is well aware that he will be betrayed, Jesus, signaling to the Beloved Disciple the one who would betray him, hands the morsel (τὸ ψωμίον) to Judas, who takes it (μετὰ τὸ ψωμίον . . . λαβώ;ν). The evangelist indicates that in the very act of reception, Satan entered Judas (John 13:27). Judas’s departure was immediate, and the evangelist adds the detail, “it was night” (ἦν δὲ νύξ; 13:30); this is no mere descriptive aside, but rather a theological commentary (John 1:5; 3:19; Luke 22:53). What amounts to the first sacrilegious communion is substantially an anti-communion: a refusal by Judas of the offer of communion made by the Lord in his gesture of handing Judas the morsel.4 This act is thus effectively a counter-sign: Judas receives the morsel from the Lord and simultaneously intends to hand him over, signaling by this very act his chosen complicity in the satanic rebellion. Judas recapitulates the primal sin of Adam: what was intended as gift is seized and grasped as possession; the communion established, offered, and intended by God is broken only by human choice. The essence of sin is to take as possession what is intended to be received as gift. Adam (here and throughout a synecdoche for the first couple) sought to grasp and to possess what was not and could not be his other than by divine gift. In an Irenaean hermeneutic, Philippians 2 unties the cord knotted in Genesis 3: Christ relinquishes the prerogative of divinity which is properly his, precisely in order to offer it as gift. Both the initiative and the gift are divine. Augustine makes this precise connection with verbal hints at Genesis 3 and Philippians 2 in explaining John 14:31: “Adam had ‘grasped’ the sin when, having been duped, he presumptuously reached out his hand in order unlawfully to seize upon the title of divinity, which was [End Page 422] conferred on the Son of God by nature, not by robbery.”5 Perhaps it is the case that Judas, disheartened that the pomp and promise that attended Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem just a few days earlier seem to have fizzled and petered out into mere idle talk and foot-washing, chose to take matters into his own hands by his collusion with the Jerusalem authorities. In his failure to understand the divine plan, he sought to wrest control of the situation from Jesus, even as he receives, quite disingenuously, the Lord’s offer of communion. There is extant from Christian antiquity a homily attributed to Epiphanius of Salamis...

Response to “Shahrazad’s Enormous Wings: A Parable of Reception” by Ryan Milov-Córdoba

Response to “Shahrazad’s Enormous Wings: A Parable of Reception” by Ryan Milov-Córdoba Lieselot De Taeye, Respondent In “Shahrazad’s Enormous Wings: A Parable of Reception,” Ryan Milov-Córdoba examines the reception of The Arabian Nights by Latin-American magical realist writers from the twentieth century. His article analyzes Jorge Luis Borges’s reflections on the infinity of the Nights, Gabriel García Márquez’s recollections of learning how to read the book, Isabel Allende’s thoughts on Shahrazad as a feminist rebel, and Arturo Uslar Pietri’s framing of the book as a historical predecessor of the Venezuelan short story. Milov-Córdoba mostly points out how these authors integrated The Arabian Nights into their own personal literary projects, and how that made them lean towards reductive readings and stereotypical representations. He thus highlights the missed opportunities of connection; the moments where Arab-American conversations or collaborations could have been established but were not. Milov-Córdoba especially reflects on the absence of non-American interlocutors: leading literary voices from the Arab- and Persian-speaking world were not part of the dialogue that defined the reception of The Arabian Nights in twentieth-century mainstream magical realism. Neither Allende, Borges, Márquez, nor Pietri engaged Arab or Persian authors in their writings about The Arabian Nights (also called The One Thousand and One Nights). In his piece, Milov-Córdoba retroactively establishes this dialogue, this South-South conversation, by juxtaposing the impressions of the Latin American writers with the words of three interpreters of the Nights from Arabic-speaking countries: Hussain Haddawy, Muhsin Mahdi, and Abdelfattah Kilito. Studying Congolese magical realist novels in a Western context can equally lead to stereotypical representations. Centering European literary history, which is always a risk, alienates the text from the West African environment in which it emerged and continues to circulate. Not allowing resonances with Congolese culture and religion to inform the readings of Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie (1979), the novel I discuss in this special issue, would be a continuation of colonialist behaviour. Tansi himself actually pushed against this way of reading his work. Although he debuted as a novelist with the French house Seuil, thus engaging with a global-ist, mostly Western-inspired literary tradition, his poetry was written in his native tongue of Kikongo, and he was also the founder of the popular theatre company Rocado Zulu Théâtre. By staging his plays in Brazzaville, in the Republic of the Congo, he could reach his own people first, before the work could be recuperated and [End Page 226] integrated into a more Western framework. I am aware that my traditional academic article, even if it leans on the insights of Congolese scholars, does not entirely counteract this tendency. Its contribution lies mostly in contextualizing Tansi’s work and letting it challenge extant narrative theory. Milov-Córdoba’s article operates on a different level and in a more expansive way. He, for instance, cites Iraqi translator Husain Haddawy’s memories of reading The Arabian Nights and points out the strong links Haddawy’s text establishes between the Nights and contemporary storytelling traditions in Iran. In contrast to my article, Milov-Córdoba’s aim is not strictly to describe and historicize, but, as Haddawy’s text is not related to magical realism, it is rather to enlarge the framework for future research on magical realism. Milov-Córdoba’s reception history of The Arabian Nights thus becomes an act of reception in and of itself-a “parable”-as it creates an alternative framework that can guide future readers, scholars, and magical realist writers. The comparison between the personal testimonies of the Arab speaking and Latin American writers is presented as a way to bridge macropolitical divides between the Arab and American world. Milov-Córdoba’s text does not only analyze the importance of the personal and the lived experience, but also enacts it. As a scholar himself, he acknowledges the influence of his own background and life; moreover, his personal position is foregrounded as the starting point for knowledge creation. Reflecting on all of this, it seems that the balance Tansi found...

Verwaltetes Leben, erzähltes Leben

Abstract Writing by hand in calendaric diaries is one of the most important cultural techniques of the early modern period. The epistemic framework of the printed calendar, whose premises are by no means unproblematic, enables the writing self to document, narrate, and reflect on its own life against the background of the temporal framework of past, present, and future. Thereby, the latter is always subject to scrutiny by empiricism. The narrating ‘ego’ emerges from the calendaric order: authorship is constituted by an act of reception.

Strukturalistička i poststrukturalistička kritika tradicionalnog pojma umjetničkog djela

This paper illustrates the importance of structuralist and post-structuralist approach to art when facing the traditional concept of a work of art and developing a different approach to the phenomenon of art on the borderline between modernism and postmodernism. The first section of the paper analyses the consequences for art of the structuralist position that reality is the effect of semantic practice and not vice versa – as the traditional discourse dictates. The search for meaning among sign relationships pointed to an interactive nature of meaning, its construction in an act of reception. In the criticism of an inherited approach to art, structuralists were focused on disputing authority which would, beyond and before encountering a work of art, guarantee its meaning, and thus its completeness and self-purpose. Linguistic turning-point in the structuralists' works emphasizes the structuralist at the expense of mimetic issues in the approach to art. Art cannot be reduced to the intention in the author's consciousness, but the meaning of art is conveyed by reconstructing the internal architecture of a work of art, the immanent regularities it rests upon as a part of superstructure – the system. Post-structuralism continuation (and criticism at the same time) of structuralism efforts, insistence on active nature of meaning has opened up new questions about the meaning of art when encountering contextual plurality. The liberation of art from a unique and indisputable meaning which began with structuralism is continued by poststructuralists through their indication to the practice of constructing and deconstructing of an artistic text, where the specific contextual transaction has the authority. The theory of text is represented in this paper as a worldview which marked the process of transfiguration of the discourse about art when art becomes an interpretative activity, with partly diverse discourses and complex processes of exchange and communication of meaning in a culture. Carried by textuality, these changes mark in reality the end of the traditional approach to art and stepping on an uncertain and risky ground of post-academic research, which no longer wish to be considered traditional disciplines but cooperate with the daily lives of people.

The Cultural Dynamics of Reception

The cultural dynamics of reception are best understood as a reiterative process of reshaping and reframing. Reception as an object of critical study embraces first the history of how texts were read, disseminated, and consumed across media, languages, and geographical regions. But if this is the first port of call, such analysis quickly draws in questions about the relationship between reception and production, audience and agency, about contemporary and posthumous reputation. This special issue investigates the ways in which the act of reception is a reiterative process on a continuous spectrum with cultural production. Receivers — of texts, events, reputations — are mediators, creatively reconstituting that which they receive according to their own agendas and contemporary imperatives. The articles in this collection embrace international, comparative, and new material contexts for early modern reception studies as they address poetry, romance, letters, history, hagiography, autobiography, and literary reviews. The transnational perspectives that emerge lead from the Low Countries to Italy, Ireland to France and the Spanish Netherlands, Spain to England, and England to France. The introductory essay for the issue additionally examines recent digital projects concerned with the history of reading and reception, exploring in particular how digital resource design foregrounds questions of representation and our immersion, as critics, in the act of reception.

Poesie und Freundschaft

Abstract At the end of the first century CE, we see a broad reception of Catullus, both members of the nobility and professional writers such as Pliny the Younger, Martial and Statius. Three significant aspects are to be considered: By reading and adapting Catullus, they can establish a connection with the great writers of the past. Given the rise of Latin literary canons in the first century, Catullus is a particularly suitable model to be imitated, and maybe even to surpass. The most important aspect, for amateurs and professionals alike, is the social representation inherent in the act of reception. The Catullan oeuvre mainly appeals to writers because parts of its poetic programme can also be found in the set of rules the nobility abides by and in their sociable institutions. The way Catullus celebrates amicitia in his poems becomes a model of self-representation for an elite which seeks to impress with cultural savoir-faire; likewise, it serves to create consensus and self-assurance. Finally professional writers read and appropriate Catullus in like manner, with regard to social aspects. Catullan poetry serves as a way of displaying friendship, especially when looking at the interchange between poeta and patronus; this is quite similar to amateur poetry in the style of Pliny. It is a means of establishing proximity, familiarity and community between socially unequal parties.

Studying the Texts of the Yakut Epic Olonkho: A Phenomenological Approach

The theoretical and methodological bases of the present research are based on the theory of Wolfgang Iser, which distinguishes between the concepts "text" and "literary work." "Text" is produced by the author and exists in a single variant, representing a symbolic code that is waiting for its implementation, before which it has only virtual meaning. "Literary work" is what arises in the act of reception - as a result of the reader's activity in the realization of the semantic potential of the text - and exists in a multitude of receptive variants. In the process of the reader's communication with the text, “the horizon of expectations" of the text, which contains the requirements for the reader coded in the text, interacts with “the horizon of expectations" of the reader, which is based on the requirements imposed on the text by the reader. The merging of the "horizons" is the key to an adequate understanding. In the present paper, the interaction of “the horizons of expectations" of the text and the reader is represented in the form of "windows", "created" by the text and the reader in the experience of the perceiving consciousness. "The expectations of the text" are considered in the form of "windows" formed by phenomena and horizons. They are attached to three levels of the structural features of the olonkho texts: the active (eventive) level, the level of accenting rhythms and the semiotic level, which are the most illustrative for the conducted research. "The expectations of the reader" are provided by three fundamental limits of dynamic equilibria (identification limit, communication limit and the limit of the rhythms of world harmony), which are attached to the levels of text singled out above.

Otzi, a múmia glaciar e as suas sobrevidas: a personagem nas novas narrativas de ciência

Propõe-se, neste artigo, mostrar como a personagem é um elemento estruturante na comunicação narrativa, fundamental para a construção de laços com a instância da receção. Dentro dos modelos teóricos sobre a categoria personagem, Ralph Schneider, adotando o modelo cognitivo e partindo do pressuposto da natureza dupla da personagem – ou seja, ela é simultaneamente baseada em pessoas “reais” e resulta de um processo compósito de construção – concebe a personagem como um modelo mental que o leitor / espectador / ouvinte ativa com base em informações imanentes ao texto, combinando-as com a informação mental e cognição social (Schneider, 2001, p. 608). Este modelo teórico parece, neste contexto, muito pertinente, pois poderá responder à hipótese de trabalho inicial: a saber, a de que a personagem é a categoria indispensável para a construção da sedução pela narrativa. A identificação gerada na instância recetora – a que alguns autores preferem chamar de empatia – passa necessariamente pelas emoções envolvidas no ato de receção. Tomar-se-á como estudo de caso uma narrativa de rádio em podcast (http://www.radiolab.org/story/ice-cold-case/) que constrói uma história à volta de um achado arqueológico – uma múmia glaciar da Idade do Bronze – com vista a transmitir conteúdos científicos a um público não especializado. Situamo-nos, portanto, no âmbito da comunicação de ciência, em que o storytelling (Dahlstrom, 2014) e, dentro dele, a figuração da personagem (Reis, 2015), são expedientes nucleares de sedução do público ouvinte e ‘facilitadores’ da comunicação.

From Phenomenology to Literary Anthropology: Bakhtin’s Grotesque as Poetics of the Production of Meaning

In the context of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with corporality, one of his best known concepts is that of the grotesque body. The ‘open’ and grotesque body coincides with the generation and invention of the new word-body, the word in action, separated from the old word-body. Moreover, the transgression in the grotesque has to be considered as a categorical infringement, as a violation of the bounderies between body and word, subject and object, external and internal. Bakhtin’s paper on Content, Material and Form… contains the first articulation of the concept of ambiguity (double body, double word and ambivalent meaning) in Bakhtin’s theory of discourse. His thoughts on the corporeality [тeлecнocть] of the act of reception, and on the author’s and reader’s direct presence prepares and supports the – non-hermeneutic, non-semiotic – contemporary theories of the literary text.

The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari

Reviewed by: The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari Ian Fielding The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. Aaron Pelttari Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 190. ISBN 978–0-8014–5276–5. These are exciting times to be reading late Latin poetry. Although it is a field that—in Anglophone scholarship, at least—has not always attracted the same level of attention as other areas of late antique studies, the last ten years have seen the publication of a number of important monographs on individual poets such as Prudentius, Claudian, and Venantius Fortunatus. In scope and methodology, however, Aaron Pelttari’s book is perhaps the most ambitious study of late antique Latin poetry since Roberts’s The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 1989). Pelttari continues Roberts’s project of outlining the aesthetic trends that are characteristic of poetry in this period, and The Space That Remains offers an indication of how approaches to late antique poetics have developed in the generation after Roberts’s seminal work. Roberts was influenced by the Rezeptionästhetik of Jauss, and his attempts to explain late Latin poetry in terms of its own historical “horizon of expectations” can be seen as an early exercise in the hermeneutics of reception, which were to become increasingly prominent in the interpretation of Latin literature during the 1990s. Drawing on these ideas, Pelttari shows that late antique authors had their own theories of reception, and that the realization of meaning by the reader is a key theme of many late Latin texts. The Space That Remains has four chapters, any one of which might have [End Page 292] been expanded into a monograph—or even, into several monographs—by a less inquisitive scholar than Pelttari. Although he takes his main examples from the poems of Ausonius, Prudentius, and Claudian, it is worth pointing out that his survey includes a range of other prose and verse authors from the fourth and early fifth centuries. In the first chapter, for instance, he provides an introduction to late antique interpretive practices by comparing the comments of Jerome and Augustine on the exegesis of Scripture to those of Macrobius on the exegesis of Virgil and Cicero. These are different spheres of activity, as Pelttari is careful to observe (43), and the comparison could have been reinforced with more detailed examination of the attitudes of Jerome and Augustine to the reading of Latin poetry. It is made clear nonetheless that these Christian writers held similar ideals to the pagan Macrobius of the “author-as-reader” (17) and of “writing as an act of reception” (32)—ideals that, Pelttari suggests, attest to a widespread view of reading as a “strong and influential act” (43) in Late Antiquity. Pelttari’s interest in exegesis extends beyond late antiquity to the critical theory of the twentieth century. In his third chapter, he applies Umberto Eco’s category of opera aperta, works of art open to multiple interpretations, to late antique poems that display distinct “layers” of meaning: Optatianus Porfyrius’ figural poetry; Prudentius’ allegorical Psychomachia; and the Virgilian centos composed by Proba and Ausonius, among others. The second chapter treats the prefaces of Claudian, Prudentius, and Ausonius as “paratexts,” adopting Genette’s designation for the peripheral features that present a text to its reader (titles, indices, etc.). This willingness to take new approaches to late Latin poetry is refreshing, although the tendency to theoretical abstraction need not exclude consideration of the “social and material realities of reading,” which Pelttari leaves to one side after p. 8. The concept of the “paratext,” in particular, draws attention to the materiality of poetic texts. Pelttari stresses in his discussion that Augustan poets like Virgil, Horace, and Propertius avoided prefaces (49, 72), but without observing that their works do include sphragides, which as Peirano has now demonstrated (in L. Jansen [ed.], The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers [Cambridge, 2014], 224–42), can also be seen as “paratexts” by ‘sealing’ a roll of papyrus and which perform similar functions to Pelttari’s late antique prefaces. In this case, it would be worthwhile to reflect on the...

A Future for Hashima

This article sets out to investigate the relationship between ruins, futurity, and ‘ruin porn’ - a visual mode of representation that all too often seeks to fix post-industrial ruins as mere aesthetic objects, devoid of history and/or temporality. It does so by focusing on performance, which, in this context, is understood as a processual mode of art-making that provides spectators with an experience of time. In this expanded definition of performance, as one may perhaps expect, the performativity of the object is not limited to the theatrical event alone; rather, it now inheres in sometimes uncanny durational aspects of both still and moving images. The essay proceeds in three stages. Part one provides a historical and theoretical overview of the type of performance inherent in ‘ruin porn’; part two critiques two images from Yves Marchand's and Romain Meffre's Gunkanjima (2013), a photo album that attempted to document the ruins of Hashima, an island situated 15 kilometres from Nagasaki City in the East China Sea; and part three investigates the very different aesthetic at work in Lee Hassall's film Return to Battleship Island (2013) which was made in response to AHRC- funded project, ‘The Future of Ruins: Reclaiming Abandonment and Toxicity on Hashima Island’ (2013). In this reading of Return to Battleship Island , the onus is on showing how Hassall's film, in its representation of Hashima's crumbling apartment blocks and industrial buildings, intentionally sought to contest the atemporal logic of ‘ruin porn’ by attempting to endow the viewing experience with a sense of futurity. Crucially, this does not mean that film represented the future as an object, but, on the contrary, tried to make it palpable, as something one undergoes physically in the very act of reception.

The Social Role of Art and the Artist in the Ballads of Günter Grass and Wolf Biermann

The aim of this paper is to show how the German artistic ballad reflects the question of the social role of art and the artist in the second half of the 20th century, when – parallel with the affirmation of the concept of socially engaged and conscious art – the question of the status of an intellectual in society becomes very important. Within this study of German ballad, this literary and musical genre is understood as a short discursive form that deals with existential questions and stoned truths and values by means of apparently naive and simple presented events, offering in that way an opportunity for critical reflection in the act of reception. Two representative ballads are interpreted within this paper: Adorno's tongue (Adornos Zunge, 1965) from Gunter Grass and Ballad to the Poet Francois Villon (Ballade auf den Dichter Francois Villon, 1968) from Wolf Biermann. The immanent text interpretation of the two selected ballads shows the way in which literature, as an aesthetic response to reality, can offer the relevant critical perception of society, considering the historical moment of origin of the text as well as the philosophical and existential views of the author. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n13p257

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity, by Simon Goldhill

Simon Goldhill’s book represents a very welcome contribution to the study of nineteenth-century Britain’s interaction with the ancient (primarily Greek and Roman) past. Although an important subject for both historians and classicists, in recent years it has most frequently been investigated by those working within an emerging sub-discipline of classics known as reception studies. While viewing his study as a contribution to cultural history more broadly, Goldhill is especially keen to make an intervention in reception studies, which he correctly criticises for being somewhat reductive in its treatment of classical reception, tending to focus unduly on the individual writer, scholar or artist’s response to a particular text or artwork of antiquity. Instead, he argues that in order to appreciate more fully and accurately the complex and often contradictory ways in which Victorians engaged with Greek and Roman antiquity, multiple frames of reference are needed. The genre of the particular work focused on has to be taken into account, and the particular act of reception placed in the context of previous readings, performances and exhibitions. In addition, Goldhill stresses the need to locate reception within the particular social and intellectual networks of the individuals involved as well as the broader political and cultural context of the time. He chooses, moreover, an impressive array of case-studies with which to demonstrate his approach, some of which have received considerable previous scholarly attention, such as Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii and the operas of Wagner, while others, such as the neoclassical paintings of John William Waterhouse, have been virtually ignored.

‘To be number one in someone’s eyes …’: Children’s introspections about close relationships in reading Harry Potter

Audience aesthetics and responses to popular culture genres which were once considered low brow have now long occupied the interests of the academy. This is a point to be taken seriously especially within children’s literature circles, where reading and reception is often generalised about under the theoretical umbrella of ‘the reader’ and ‘the spectator’ who is ‘drawn’ into a range of largely unproven pathways by the text. This article explores youthful perceptions of real-life, close relationships, the projection of these relationships onto those seen in the media text and the resulting mediation of relationship ideals, desires and wishes. Analysing data from fieldwork with teen audiences of the Harry Potter series, this article argues that there is more to the mediation of relationships than the undoubtedly rich discussions of the media bringing people together at the moment of reception/use, whether online or offline. The findings presented in the article reveal the intricate and often perplexing ways in which children continue to introspect long after the act of reception, drawing parallels between relationships in their own lives and those they read about or view. The article draws attention to the introspective depth with which children use screen/text relationships as raw material to ponder emotional questions, ones, for instance, on love, hate, detachment, attachment and friendship, and the many ways the media mediate real-life relationships not by setting unreachable ideals to emulate but by offering interpretive pathways.

Intention in the act of creation and reception

&#x0D; The paper investigates the creative process and the act of reception by an artist. As the creative artist as a receiver of his/her own art has a preliminary understanding of his own work of art, his/her process of reception differs from that of a non-artist. Expression plays a vital role both in the process of creation and reception, therefore I study the intention of expression on the part of the artist, the receiver, and the artist as receiver, respectively. The paper claims that the receiver artist has to fight against his previous self and work.&#x0D;

„Книга художника” как интермедиальный дискурс

The article is devoted to an analysis of various representations of the “Artist’s book” genre in modern Russian and world art. These representationsfunction within the framework of the paradigm of art that refers to issues such as inter- and multimedia, the model of a broadly talented artist, the concept of a multi-material work of art and the interactive act of perception. The analysis of the issues connected with verbal and visual representations of the “Artist’s book” has been based on the superordinate ‘word and picture’ formula and the interpretative indicators determined by generic diversification and the dialogue with other kinds of art: the relationship with painting and sculpture, the book as an object, ready made, mail-art, an artistic project (audiovisual book, photo- and body-art book, book-performance), as well as by the act of reception. In intermedia discourse, the “Artist’s book” functions within the cultural, artistic and aesthetic perspective, between art and communication.

James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism, and: Ulysses in Critical Perspective, and: Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings (review)

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism, and: Ulysses in Critical Perspective, and: Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings Katherine Mullin James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism. John Nash . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 220. $85.00 (cloth). Ulysses in Critical Perspective. Michael Patrick Gillespie and A. Nicholas Fargnoli , eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Pp. x + 225. $59.95 (cloth). Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings. Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Geert Lernout, and John McCourt , eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Pp. xiv + 254. $59.95 (cloth). John Nash's James Joyce and the Act of Reception is a thoughtful, astute, and invaluable contribution to two affiliated and increasingly debated questions. For this book not only offers [End Page 403] a meticulous and persuasive account of Joyce's career-long engagement with his audiences—in Ireland and in Europe, in his lifetime and beyond—it, perhaps more importantly, also makes a significant contribution to ongoing critical conversations about modernism's relationship to various imagined audiences, its supposed resistance to the "common reader," and its often-cited dependence upon patrons and coteries. Nash begins by reminding us of Joyce's status as the central protagonist of a well-known modernist myth; that of the aloof, elite artist championed because of his supposed indifference to his audience. What follows provides a sustained interrogation of that myth, as the book reveals a writer not only absorbed by the difficult circumstances of his own reception, but also concerned to transform those circumstances into the material of his art. Finnegans Wake's numerous, often playful, invocations of its bored, baffled, perplexed, or "ideal insomniac" audience is revealed as the fruition of a sustained Joycean preoccupation with "writing . . . the act of reception" (3). Moving chronologically through the Joyce oeuvre, Nash begins with a lively account of Dubliners as a submerged assault upon the Irish Literary Revival's conception of an ideal, communal audience. While such an audience was in the process of being created through the Abbey Theatre by W. B. Yeats and others, Joyce, brooding in exile, offers a rival vision of "the specific audiences whom the Revival ignored or misjudged," bringing "a bored audience to life" (41). His analysis reaches its apotheosis in "The Dead," a story preoccupied with theatricality and blocked communications, and significantly composed while Joyce was simultaneously frustrated by his own failure to secure an Irish publisher, and by the Dublin riots over the first night of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. In Nash's compelling reading, "The Dead" and, in particular, Michael Furey's silenced haunting of its closing pages from Ireland's west, becomes, amongst other things, a resonant assault upon "the revivalist social and ideological form of a national audience" (60). For Joyce, Nash conclusively demonstrates, audiences are never so homogenous. Chapter 2 turns to one of Joyce's most famous "scenes of reception" (97), the "Scylla and Charybdis" library episode in Ulysses. Stephen's delivery of his Shakespeare theory to an alternately intrigued, exasperated, and even bored audience of Dublin literati passing the afternoon in its National Library is embedded in rich historical contexts. Nash shrewdly excavates the contemporary cultural politics of the National Library of Ireland and the affiliated Irish "university question" which preoccupied students and scholars at both Trinity and University Colleges. Those complex, fissured politics determine the splintered, uneasy reception of Stephen's Shakespeare theory by those gathered in the library to hear him. Stephen's declaration that he does not believe his own theory only underlines the instability of his audience. Chapters 3 and 4 are, perhaps, the most significant and ambitious chapters of this study, since they logically turn to Finnegans Wake, surely the most notoriously "difficult" of all modernist fictions. "We have become used to thinking of modernism as a collective movement distinguished in part by its expulsion of mass culture and so-called ordinary readers" (98), Nash reminds us, and Finnegans Wake is frequently seen as exemplary, and, less frequently, offered as a curiously democratic text, in that, since there is no model for competence, then there can be...

Is Aesthetic Illusion ›illusion référentielle‹? ›Immersion‹ in (Narrative) Representations and its Relationship to Fictionality and Factuality

Is Aesthetic Illusion ›illusion référentielle‹? ›Immersion‹ in (Narrative) Representations and its Relationship to Fictionality and Factuality

“Minding the Gap” in Architectural Speculation

Design as scholarship or scholarship of design? “No” to a forced choice of ideology but “yes” to a new model of architectural critical theory. These twinned aspirations of scholarship are frozen by ideological mandates that control signification and visualization. First, we must understand how ideology creates metaphors in teaching and research; then, we must spatialize this same logic to see the inner workings of our synesthetic experience of architectural space as an act of reception.