Aesthetic Achievement Research Articles

Representing Home: Reading the Aesthetics of Food in Postcolonial Literature

SummaryThis article seeks to establish aesthetic analysis as an integral approach to post-colonial literature, taking attention to form and depictions of beauty to stand for aesthetic qualities. More specifically, this article reads the treatment of food in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000) and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1995) as not only aesthetic achievements that resonate powerfully with many postcolonial concerns, but also as instances where aesthetically sensitive attention to form critically informs postcolonial concerns. Given the rapid development in the inter-sections between food studies and postcolonial criticism, food is no longer merely domestic and therefore apolitical, or in the play of flavours and spices and odours are the threads of colonial enterprises, national histories, independence movements, family legacies and personal narratives entwined around representations of home.

Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel by Stephanie Insley Hershinow

Reviewed by: Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel by Stephanie Insley Hershinow Abigail Zitin Stephanie Insley Hershinow, Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 192. $49.95 cloth. "Nevertheless, she persisted": this timely phrase could serve as an extra epigraph for Stephanie Hershinow's Born Yesterday, reminding us both of the character traits of young heroines of eighteenth-century novels—words like "plucky" and "irrepressible" come to mind—and of the critical condescension with which unwavering ingenuousness has been met. Just as this latter-day feminist motto was reclaimed from its origins in admonishment—will she ever learn?—and appropriated as a rallying cry, Hershinow seeks to show how, rather than representing the generic immaturity of the novel itself, good-girl protagonists from Richardson's Pamela to Austen's Emma are instead the vanguard of aesthetic achievement. She is reclaiming these figures from a tradition that would see them as static, less as paragons of resilience than as avatars of a surprising, even a maddening, consistency. Who's mad about these stubborn women, besides Mitch McConnell? Novel theorists who understand character in terms of "the accretion of experience over the time of the novel's plot" (22), that's who. For them, "characterization is successful to the degree that maturation is achieved" (22). This conception of character seems so intuitively right—or maybe just so familiar—that I found it hard at first, I'll confess, to dislodge it from my own thinking as neatly and radically as Hershinow's argument demands. Narrative fiction would seem to fail if its basic procedure were a depiction of stasis. Plot feeds characters into situations and encounters that affect them, even if they resist being changed by their experiences. Still, it is one thing to affirm that characters change—or don't—in response to the changes with which plot confronts them. It is quite another to say that aesthetic success depends on a specific character arc: what Hershinow calls the plot of development (117), or maturation, or Bildung. There is a critique of Bildung here, as a problematic shorthand for the kind of character development Hershinow scrutinizes. Its generic affiliation with disillusionment and accommodation as the price of worldliness is too narrow for the English novel. But the really radical implication of Born Yesterday is that character change itself is simply the wrong way to think about the category of experience in the novel. [End Page 510] The keyword for Hershinow, as her subtitle announces, is not experience but inexperience, and the character-type whose complexity is obscured when criticism overvalues development is a figure she calls the novice. Often (but not always) youthful, often (but not always) a woman, the novice, Hershinow argues, is "the central figure of the early realist novel, encapsulating its formal, epistemological, and moral aims" (7). The book's four chapters focus, respectively, on Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, the Gothic novel (with examples from Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe), and the career of Frances Burney, who repudiates her own precocity even as she builds her brand on the story of a "young lady's entrance into the world" (5; that young lady is Evelina, though the chapter devotes its most sustained attention to the later Camilla). Female adolescence is Born Yesterday's topic, and yet youth and femininity are only approximate criteria for identifying a novice in Hershinow's sense. Instead, she places the novice "in a line of sentimental protagonists who, in assuming the goodness of others, merely project their own minds onto those they encounter" (110). The subject of that particular formulation is not, say, Evelina Anville but sitcom heroine Kimmy Schmidt. Hershinow does not shy away from pop-culture references, in part to challenge a conception of literary culture that is dismissive of girls and their aesthetic preferences. The payoff is as much stylistic as polemical. Lively and brimming with wit, Born Yesterday conveys through voice the impression of its author as a savvy and companionable guide to a selection of canonical novels she loves without apology. "Assuming the goodness of others": this way of defining the novice highlights the...

『붉은 수수밭(紅高粱)』의 영상 미학과 담론

“Red Sorghum” is an adaptation of a novel. After analyzing the process of reconstructing the textual narrative of a novel into a cinema, the narrative content of the original novel, which was actually transferred to the cinema, was only an extremely single-track story. Novels are judged on their aesthetic achievements by the completeness of written narratives. The cinema is written in a different ‘image’ from the novel, and the meaning of the cinema is created by the simultaneous convergence of the epic elements of music, sound, color and caption. If you look at the movie reviews from the level of impression criticism, you can only see what you want to see and evaluate them. However, the criticism of criticism discourse should be a little different. “The Red Sorghum” brings the keyword ‘life’ from the original novel. And director set the direction of the film's formation in a ‘marvel’ expression, one of the national narratives. This adds to the nationalist discourse that originated in China's ‘root search’ and Dionysus culture, which was analyzed in Nietzsche's “Birth of Tragedy”. These various elements of critical discourse are dialectical in cinema, creating aesthetic outcome of creative imaging narratives.

Seeing like the Missionary: An Iconography of Education in Mysore, 1840–1920

Missionaries working in Mysore, as elsewhere in India, took enthusiastically to the new art of photography from the 1840s, to record their ‘views’ of the society they undertook to transform. Evangelising was, however, early on, allied with education as a way for missionaries to make their way into a complex, hierarchical society with learning traditions of its own. How did the missionary ‘see’ the Indian classroom, and invite the viewer of their photographs to participate in its narrative of ‘improvement’? What was the place of the photograph at a time when meticulous written records were kept of victories and reverses in the mission field of education? Revealing the work of the photograph in aiding missionary work must perforce begin with the more instrumentalist uses of this new art, as technologies of recording par excellence, before turning to the possible ways of looking at photographs, whether by those contemporaries of the missionaries who were physically distanced from the location, and were yet linked to their work in India, or when they formed part of the contemporary historian’s archive. Here one may exploit photography’s ‘inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy’ instead of its truth-telling capacity. I am precisely posing a dynamic and perhaps even antagonistic relationship between the copious written and the sparser visual record of educational changes in Mysore in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This investigation of the visual field in the service of education also allows us also to speculate about the specific aesthetic achievements of missionary photography, with its own pedagogic goals.

‘[A]dore my topless villainy’: Metatheatrical Rivalry in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge

Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge is a self-reflexive tragedy with characters who speak and act like characters familiar with the conventions of Elizabethan revenge plays. This article argues that Marston's use of metatheatricality allegorizes the competitive nature of commercial theatres. As Marston's characters seek to emulate and surpass their theatrical models, revenge becomes a medium for aesthetic achievement, a showcase for acting and rhetorical skill. The play expands the theatrum mundi trope, imagining the world not as a single stage but as a marketplace of rival stages wherein playwrights vie for applause and seek recognition for their theatrical brilliance.

A Queer Sequence: Comics as a Disruptive Medium

At first glance, Hillary Chute'sWhy Comics?presents itself as a chronicle of the heroic deeds of a Pantheon of creative gods. Across ten chapters, Chute tracks the aesthetic achievements of more than twelve world-renowned comics artists whose innovations in sequential visual art represent a range of human experiences, from wartime violence to teenage sexuality to queer family history to living with cognitive and physical disability. In Chute's narrative, such luminaries as Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, and Marjane Satrapi rise up from the vast landscape of comics production as artists whose bodies of work testify to comics's aesthetic diversity and sophistication. These typically erudite cartoonists work at a distance from mainstream comics and produce adult-oriented, long-form graphic narratives considered aesthetic masterpieces. “Although comics of all kinds are flourishing in the twenty-first century,” Chute explains early on inWhy Comics?,“there has been a dramatic uptick” in the kind of “auteurist comics” produced by these cartoonists (18), who relish, in Clowes's words, the way the medium allows them to “control absolutely everything and make it … exactly what you're seeing in your own head” (qtd. inWhy? 18). For Chute, it is this “singular intimacy of one person's vision”—best displayed in comics produced by sophisticated adult cartoonists writing and drawing for other adults–that underscores that comics are also for grown-ups (18). By now, we all should know this, but we have not learned the lesson well enough (or perhaps some just refuse to listen).

Owen Barfield’s Riders on Pegasus

This essay offers an introduction to Owen Barfield’s long romance poem, Riders on Pegasus. It argues that the poem is a complex example of “romantic modernism,” self-consciously following in the tradition of Blake and Shelley while responding in an equally self-aware way to the anti-romantic modernism of early Eliot and Auden. It argues for the formal and aesthetic accomplishment and interest of the poem, and suggests that it is an as yet overlooked masterpiece of mid-century English poetry.

Symbolic Interaction of Director of Photography in Film Production Organizing at Camera Department

Film production is a collaborative work process that involves many workers. Proper management is needed to achieve effective and efficient production results. Organizing is the second function of management work. The film production workers are divided into several departments, one of which is the camera department. In this department, all visual matters are accounted for. Director of Photography (DP) is the leader. Data collection in this research was carried out through archive studies, observations, and interviews. This article discusses how DP symbolically interacted in certain pattern with directors, producers, and crew in the camera department. The discussion uses the five concepts of Blumer's symbolic interaction, namely self-concept, the concept of action; object concept; the concept of social interaction; and the concept of joint action. The results of the discussion from this study indicate that the DP interacts with the director through productive self-appearances, has improved visual aesthetic achievements, and masters the latest equipment through works uploaded on social media. The action shown by the DP to the director as the boss is communicated using the concept language and his efforts to the camera department crew as subordinates are communicated using technical language. The DP interacts with the producer through a work contract; The DP interacts socially symbolically with the broader community through language selection that is adapted to the working environment. Finally, the DP interacts through collective action, working together with one department worker and between departments in a production process so that they can work together to produce a film.

“THE ROSE SULTANA OF THE NIGHTINGALE” ORIENTAL IMAGES, CHARACTERS AND SETTING IN BYRON’S THE GIOAUR

It is surprising that Romanticism, a literary movement generally associated with nature, emotions and imagination, had close connection with imperialism, through its most distinguished cultural characteristic - Orientalism. Most of the major Romantic poets found in the Orient not just a noteworthy point of reference for various cultural or political backgrounds, but an important backdrop in the realization of their literary careers. However, most of the writers of this period had never visited the East. Hence, their attitudes towards it differ from Lord Byron’s, who not only embarked on the Grand Tour, among other countries to Albania, Greece and Turkey, early in his career, but also eternalized the theme of escapism in some of his greatest poetry like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The exotic East offered Byron the basis for the aesthetic achievement in his Oriental Tales: The Giaour, Lara, The Corsair, The Siege of Corinth and The Bride of Abydos, but also his play Sardanapalus. The main interest of this paper, however, is the study of Oriental elements in Byron’s first Oriental tale - The Gioaur. I have come to realize that Byron emerges as distinct from and rises above his contemporaries in the treatment of the Orient with regard to the broad range, accurate portrayal and his creative empathy. One of the purposes of this paper would be to acknowledge this uncommon responsiveness to the Orient and to enlighten Byron's use of Oriental allusions. The poem represents an artistic mixture of Eastern and Western elements. This paper will focus on the depiction of the East in images, settings, characters and themes, and explore the way the poet skillfully incorporates a Western hero in an Eastern setting and increases the overall impression by the poem’s various narrators. Byron was the first author who allowed an Oriental character to relay a story from his Islamic point of view. This makes Byron different from his contemporaries; he does not throttle the Oriental voice. The voice of the Muslim narrator emphasizes the Oriental character of the poem as his references and viewpoints bestow a specific Oriental colour. In the depiction of the two main male characters, Byron has skillfully employed the effect of doubling which excludes the position of the Giaour as superior over his Oriental rival. Just as Hassan does not feel any remorse for the death of Leila, so does the Giaour’s regret not stem in the immorality of his deeds or social transgressions. He is endowed with the same weaknesses and vices as Hassan. Artistically threading together, a diversity of Oriental details, such as natural and animal imagery, creatively incorporating picturesque similes and allusions, Byron has managed to fashion a faithful Oriental story.

Green city as approach to Conservatism the Resources and Protection the Environment from the Pollution

The evolution of new concepts for sustainable planning and development of cities in the world and use these concepts and their practical application and success significantly especially in the developed countries and applied in some developing countries leads us to search for new mechanisms that could be used in Iraq and pave the way for sustainable development of the urban environment of cities.
 The urban environment of the city of Karrada need rise include social, economic, urban, environmental, and this only by using new methods of management and planning are different from those that dealt with the city, focusing on the urban side only. And based on the nature and aesthetic achievement of the principles and objectives of the city of Wuxi, which represent the privacy of Baghdad and Iraq at large is not a simple process, but need to share all of the State, individuals and non-governmental organizations and the private sector.

Green city as approach to Conservatism the Resources and Protection the Environment from the Pollution

The evolution of new concepts for sustainable planning and development of cities in the world and use these concepts and their practical application and success significantly especially in the developed countries and applied in some developing countries leads us to search for new mechanisms that could be used in Iraq and pave the way for sustainable development of the urban environment of cities.
 The urban environment of the city of Karrada need rise include social, economic, urban, environmental, and this only by using new methods of management and planning are different from those that dealt with the city, focusing on the urban side only. And based on the nature and aesthetic achievement of the principles and objectives of the city of Wuxi, which represent the privacy of Baghdad and Iraq at large is not a simple process, but need to share all of the State, individuals and non-governmental organizations and the private sector.

Fowler, Mayhill C. Beau Monde on Empire's Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (review)

REVIEWS 557 Russian Book presents the unfortunately truncated painting by Vladimir Dubossarskii and Aleksandr Vinogradov entitled ‘Russia’ (oil on canvas, 2008). The original shows a pair of eyes presumably belonging to a female reader who intently stares at her onlookers whilst the lower part of her face is covered by a book featuring just one word as its title: Russia. In the Palgrave Macmillan partial reproduction, however, any subtlety is gone — the image itself becomes nearly invisible, and the single piercing eye that survives from the original painting is recklessly blotted out by the green square of the series’ logo (‘New Directions in Book History’), as well as Pristed’s book title. Of course, the author is not to blame for the publisher’s lack of taste or, perhaps, for its limited production budget, but it is ironic that in the world of scholarly publications, and especially of those devoted to the intricate art of book history and cover design, aesthetic standards and marketing considerations are still considered to be insignificant. Department of Russian Studies Yuri Leving Dalhousie University Fowler, Mayhill C. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2017. xvi + 282 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $75.00. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge provides a fascinating study of early twentieth-century theatre in Soviet Ukraine. Mayhill Fowler examines conventional questions such as the relationship between artists and the state and the role of art in society. She also illuminates broader concerns about empire, the relationship between periphery and centre, Soviet nationality policy and ‘internal transnationalism’, defined as ‘the exchange of peoples, goods, and ideas across the real — and imagined — borders inside the Soviet Union’ (p. 87). Arguing that the periphery was ‘central to early Soviet cultural production and reception’ (p. 9), Fowler traces the region’s declining significance as the Soviet cultural topography evolved into a hierarchy with Moscow (and to a lesser extent Leningrad) at the top and Ukraine and other regions increasingly identified as a periphery with lower-quality art. She approaches these questions through a collective biography of important Soviet artists and officials from the region of ‘the Russian Imperial Southwest’ (p. 9) and their interactions primarily in the Kharkiv ‘beau monde’, Fowler’s term for the ‘elites, artists, officials, hangers-on, friends, enemies, and the loose circles of milieux crossing the world of the arts and the world of officialdom’ (pp 15–16). Some artists, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Les Kurbas and Solomon SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 558 Mikhoels (not from Ukraine but many of his GOSET artists were) will be familiar to scholars. Other artists, usually those who stayed in Ukraine, will be new (and their ongoing obscurity outside Ukraine speaks to her argument). Fowler highlights the richness of the cultural production among Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Jews, although she focuses less on aesthetic achievements and more on the circumstances that made them possible (p. 20). She does analyse specific productions when they demonstrate the workings of the beau monde. ‘Soviet Ukrainian’ culture emerged from competing struggles within Soviet Ukraine as well as between Soviet Ukraine and Moscow. Although highlighting the unique developments in Ukraine, Fowler also shows that the entire Soviet Union represented a larger beau monde, and other regions throughout the country had their own. By the late 1930s, the Kremlin stood at its apex. Fowler discusses the impact of pre-Revolutionary expectations regarding theatre on post-Revolutionary developments. Most importantly she notes that despite tsarist censorship, local needs trumped central prescriptions, and the centre could not intervene because it lacked staff and these officials did not have the necessary language skills. Artists embraced the growing role of the state in arts affairs and ongoing local control in the 1920s. Government funding provided viable livelihoods after pre-Revolutionary instability. That support facilitated the developments of two key trends: officialization and provincialization. Many pro-Revolutionary artists in Ukraine viewed their role as creating a new Soviet Ukrainian culture, but they discovered that officials did not always agree that it could emerge from Western European as well as domestic traditions. The extensive development of a professional...

Seongho Yi Ik's Poetry Criticism

본고는 주로 실학의 측면에서 연구되어 온 『성호사설』을 시 비평의 측면에서 살펴보고자 한다. 이를 위해서 『성호사설』 <시문문>의 비평문들 중 시부를 대상으로 한 작품들에 초점을 맞추고자 한다. 우선 성호 이익은 동아시아 고전시의 다양한 목록을 검토하면서, ‘어떤 것이 진정한 시적 고전인가’하는 문제에 대해서 진지하게 성찰하였다. 그는 시가 진리를 향한 인간의 정신적 지향을 표상한다는 관점에서, 시에 드러난 뜻(志)을 중요하게 여겼다. 이러한 관점에서 진리에 대한 담박한 추구로 충만한 『시경』, 비극적인 상황 속에서도 충절과 기개를 추구한 굴원의 작품들, 역사에 대한 근심과 고민으로 인해 깊이가 더해진 <고시십구수>와 같은 작품들이 동아시아 고전시의 진정한 고전으로 평가되었다. 성호 이익은 동아시아 고전시의 역사를 자신의 기준으로 다시금 객관화, 논리화 한 것과 마찬가지로 자국시의 역사도 객관화 한다. 그는 조선 후기에 많은 영향을 미친 명의 고문사파의 담론 등에 함몰되지 않고, 자국시의 한계와 성취를 비평적으로 세밀하게 평가하였다. 그 과정에서 중국과 조선의 문학사적 관계에 대한 객관적인 인식이 드러난다. 또, 성호는 현실 정치의 사건들이 시에 대한 비평적 평가에 외삽적으로 영향을 미치게끔 하지 않았다. 오히려 그는 현실 정치에서 물의를 일으키거나 혹은 억울하게 배척된 이들의 다양한 상황을 사실적으로 기술하면서, 시의 미학적 성취란 타자의 삶과 죽음, 고통에 대한 윤리학적인 관심과 결부됨을 밝혀내었다. 윤리학과 미학을 결합시킨 성호 이익의 비평은 현대에 들어와서 상실된 비평의 이상이라 할 수 있겠다.This essay investigates The Miscellanies of Seongho(星湖僿說) in terms of poetry criticism, which has been mostly studied in the field of Silhak(實學). I focus on its chapter of poetry and prose. Seongho explores thoroughly which works can be appreciated as classical poetry, analyzing different texts of East-Asian poetry created in the previous eras. He emphasizes the inclination of the poet revealed in poetry because he regards poetry as the intellectual inclination(志) towards truth. From his perspective, these classical works are reconfirmed as the true classics of East-Asian classical poetry: The Classic of Poetry (試經), The Songs of the South (楚辭), and The Nineteen Old Poems(古詩十九首). It is not because they are automatically assumed as classical poetry but because they share the timeless, heart-wrenching agony for man and history. As he objectifies the history of East-Asian classical poetry, he also objectifies the history of Chosun Sino-Korean poetry. Instead of being immersed in the pre-existent literary discourses of the Ming Dynasty on classicism, which were highly influential in late Chosun, he evaluates the limits and achievements of Chosun poetry per se on the basis of his close reading and objective attitude. Meanwhile, he establishes an objective understanding of East-Asian literary history concerning China and Chosun. Also, he never lets real politics influence excessively the field of literary criticism. He rather represents the lives and works of the wretched and abandoned subjects in real politics and demonstrates that the aesthetic achievement of poetry is actually related with the ethical attitude towards the life, death, and sufferings of the other. In sum, Seongho s poetry criticism is the literary ideal that combines ethics and aesthetics, which has been lost in modernity.

РЕЦЕПЦИЯ РУССКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЙ КЛАССИКИ НА РУБЕЖЕ XIX-XX ВЕКОВ: К ПОСТАНОВКЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ

The article examines the features of literary reception of the classics in the Russian literature at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. As it is shown in the paper, the temporal distance between the classics and modernity in the Russian literature, which is essential in the main European traditions, was compressed and turned into a sharply drawn and acutely problematized line. The act of self-consciousness of new culture was relevant not only to the “long-past” time of great aesthetic achievements, but also to the heritage and reputation of “living” classics, with whom modernists were in the state of intense dialogue.

Literary Classics Reading and College Students’ Aesthetic Quality Education in the Context of Visual Culture

Visual culture in the postmodern context has posed a great impact on college students’ aesthetic value, resulting in vulgar taste, judgment deficiency and aesthetic concept dislocation. Literary classics is the reflection of culture, history, and aesthetic ideals of a nation, whose aesthetic characteristics provide the possibility to develop aesthetic quality education among college students. Carrying out aesthetic quality education among college students based on classical literature reading can cultivate their noble aesthetic ideal, build up firm aesthetic belief and correct aesthetic concept so that they can grow up to be high-quality talents with knowledge, skills and good aesthetic accomplishment, ready to make contributions to national development and social progress.

The Lasting Lure of the Asian Mystery

Among the numerous accolades and awards garnered by viet thanh nguyen's debut novel,the sympathizer(2015), the one receiving the least attention from academic critics will probably be the Edgar Award, bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. After all,The Sympathizerboasts aesthetic achievements that far exceed the generic confines of a conventional mystery novel. Also, even in the age of cultural studies, when the divide between the popular and the elite is supposed to have all but disappeared, literary scholars, if they are honest with themselves, still hang on to the notion that there is a qualitative difference, or a hierarchy, separating literary fiction from crime fiction, the highbrow from the lowbrow. It may be true that we no longer live at a time when an eminent critic like Edmund Wilson would attack mystery novels by asserting, as he did in 1945, partly in response to Agatha Christie's popular mystery novel TheMurder of Roger Ackroyd, that “with so many fine books to read …; there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish” (qtd. in Bradford 117). And there is more than half a century separating us from the era when Ross Macdonald, one of the most accomplished practitioners of the mystery genre as well as a trained literary scholar, lamented in his 1954 lecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he had received a doctoral degree in English, that “[t]hough it is one of the dominant literary forms of our age, the mystery has received very little study” (11). Even after Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida enshrined Edgar Allan Poe's detective short story “The Purloined Letter” as a darling of poststructuralist analysis, most literary scholars worth their salt would continue to regard crime fiction as a subpar genre, something that, as Macdonald said, is reserved for their leisure hours, akin to crossword puzzles in a newspaper (11). Or, as Wilson put it, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” (qtd. in Bradford 117).

ОСНОВНЫЕ АСПЕКТЫ МЕТАФИЗИКИ ВЛАДИМИРА НАБОКОВА

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is a distinctive representative of Russian literature in the 20th century. His works are studied by many famous artists in many countries. The conciseness and beauty of his language are unique characteristics of Nabokov’s creation. His works show great philosophical depth, high moral values, and aesthetic accomplishments. His erudition has also attracted the attention of the world. This paper mainly expounds his metaphysical ideas: Nabokov’s metaphysics is mainly expressed in his great understanding of the world and his ability to understand and his longing for something grand and incomparable. His philosophical, ethical and moral ideas have incorporated the views of various literary schools, formalism, and structuralism at home and abroad. In addition, this article analyzes the relationship between philosophy, ethics, linguistics, reality and non-reality, reality and lies through the study of many works of the author; it clearly defines the distinction between “game” and “acting”; explained a series of problems of the author’s creation techniques; summed up the themes such as “time and permanence”, “memory and memories” in Nabokov’s works. These are all reflected frequently in Nabokov’s works. It is precisely because of this that his works have also been studied as metaphysical works for the public.

Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney

Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney Elizabeth Petrino Nineteenth-century American women’s poetry has recently come of age. With the arrival of new anthologies and critical volumes, critics have built on Paula Bennett’s pioneering archival work.1 In fact, her landmark Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (1998) both predates the newly-reconstructed standard American literature anthologies and underscores the aesthetic achievement of many once popular writers, among them a key nineteenth-century woman poet: Lydia Sigourney. Responding to the views of early critics, such as Fred Lewis Pattee in The Feminine Fifties (1940), who disparaged women writers as hack sentimentalists, Bennett’s scholarship also establishes a new way of reading their poetry that emphasizes their legacy within a broad cultural framework. This essay will explore the many ways that Bennett’s anthology and her monograph Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003) advanced the critical conversation. Based on her extensive archival research, Bennett’s essays on Sigourney’s poetic achievement and generic experimentation have inaugurated a full reassessment of her influence. [End Page 234] Countering an earlier essay by Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson, Bennett’s 2007 article, “Was Sigourney a Poetess? The Aesthetics of Victorian Plenitude in Lydia Sigourney’s Poetry,” takes issue with the newly recovered term Poetess and asks whether it should be applied so widely to American women’s poetry.2 Prins and Jackson’s “Lyrical Studies” responded to various projects recuperating and interpreting transatlantic Victorian women writers, Bennett’s among them.3 They claim that the Poetess occupied a role constructed around well-understood aesthetic conventions. By resurrecting the term, Prins and Jackson seek to dislodge the feminist orthodoxy that the lyrical self embodied in the speaking subject or “I” might be read wholly as the poet’s personal self. Rather, they question the degree to which female authors might be able to identify with the emotion traditionally expressed by speakers within the lyric and argue that the Poetess instead comprises “not a speaker, not an ‘I,’ not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self.” Unlike Bennett, Prins and Jackson define the theory of women’s writing as “lyrical,” rather than focusing on the “lyric” genre, in order to question the limits to which the Poetess must subscribe but which also doom her to obscurity.4 They claim that British women poets, such as Christina Rossetti, L. E. L., Caroline Norton, George Eliot, Michael Field, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning invoke Sappho, both as harbinger of a female literary tradition rooted in a classical past and as a figure of disappointed love and spendthrift emotion. In doing so, British women poets initiated a Poetess tradition of what Bennett terms “succinctly, self-enclosed poems aestheticizing woman’s pain” that proved both highly popular among readers and effective at reducing the poets themselves to empty ciphers.5 In contrast, Bennett claims that American female poets not only resisted the term Poetess, but that they wrote other types of socially relevant poems.6 In America, editors and publishers, rather than aesthetes and literary historians, [End Page 235] shaped publication history by responding to the literary market, thus creating a more competitive environment for poetry than existed in Britain. Perhaps women in America wrote Poetess poetry, Bennett insists, but so did American men, and their poetic production far exceeded this one type.7 Indeed, while in Britain female poets referred to themselves more often as poetesses, in America, female poets eschewed this term—as they largely also eschewed the Sappho figure—in favor of viewing themselves as working professionals without pretensions to literary aestheticism—as Sigourney describes herself, “a schoolmistress and a literary woman.”8 Unlike in Britain, where women poets responded to aesthetic views, in America the reigning model emphasized literary production and the marketplace forces that made poets, among them Sigourney, household names.9 Given Sigourney’s widespread notoriety and public renown, for instance, the publisher of Godey’s Lady’s Book paid the poet $500 per year simply to list her name on the masthead, capitalizing on her reputation.10 And if male editors and critics in...

Making something out of nothing: Dissipating Legacy and the Legacy of Dissipating in “Babylon Revisited”

Abstract “Babylon Revisited” (1931) embodies a paradox in the Fitzgerald canon. On the one hand, it first appeared in the publication (The Saturday Evening Post) that its author believed wasted his talent by forcing him to write for cash instead of the aesthetic accomplishment attainable in the novel. But the story is also widely considered one of his greatest achievements, a complex exploration of the dissipating moral values of the 1920s that at once critiques the era's profligacy while reminiscing nostalgically over irresponsibility from the austere perspective of the Great Depression. This article examines the depiction of dissipation through a thorough stylistic analysis to provide formal evidence of the story's literary worth. Specifically, it argues that the story's dramatic tension rises from two interrelated conflicts between dissipation and legacy. The aesthetic staging of these conflicts parallels Fitzgerald's own metatextual struggle to resolve his feelings of having too long squandered his literary talent with commercial short fiction, effectively reversing the plot's insistence that one cannot recover from dissolution. The article demonstrates that “Babylon Revisited” aesthetically represents Fitzgerald's capacity to “make something out of nothing” by turning the thin air of dissipation and disillusion into economical yet valuable prose.

Early Canadian Botanical Photography at the Exposition universelle, Paris 1867

Sites et végétaux du Canada was an early photographic experiment in botanical illustration. Presented at the 1867 Paris exposition, the album’s 35 albumen prints were part of the Canadian displays. The photographs were a collaborative effort between Joseph-Charles Taché, Canada’s Executive-Secretary at the exposition; Louis-Ovide Brunet, a Catholic priest and botany professor at the Université Laval; and Livernois &amp; Cie, a Québec City photography studio. Previous work has considered the album as the aesthetic accomplishment of Jules-Isaïe Benoît dit Livernois, excluding Taché and Brunet from the art historical narrative. In this paper, I consider the album’s political and botanical contexts, and viewership, to more clearly situate the album in the visual culture of early Canadian science. In its representation of Canadian landscapes and native-plant specimens, the album effectively employed photography to present Canada as a centre of cutting-edge scientific investigation.