Aesthetic Implications Research Articles

When (or how) do the Olympics become ‘stale’?

This paper presents a discussion about the ongoing search for seemingly faddish new events in the Olympic programme, such as golf, rugby, and BMX cycling, which may be intended to liven up the Olympic Games to maintain public appeal. Whilst programme space may be a logistical concern, there is also an aesthetic debate over how the avant-garde in sporting events may take precedence over the classic, more established events with which we are familiar. Consequently, a number of questions are posed in this paper which explores the aesthetic and commercial implications of Olympic taste through the selection and rejection of Olympic events. The paper concludes that the current popularity of the Olympic Games may hang upon a frail sequence of dependencies: an overburdening commercial interest resting upon an ill-defined aesthetic purpose or identity.

A madwoman in the art gallery? Gender, mediation and the relation between life and art in post-1989 Chinese independent film

The figure of the artist is an important subject of Chinese independent documentary and feature film, but while some of the aesthetic and political implications of this figure have been discussed, its gender dimensions have received little attention. This article puts gender at the centre of an investigation of documentary representations of troubled artists, beginning with Wu Wenguang's Liulang Beijing [Bumming in Beijing, 1990] and ending with Gu Yaping's Qin'ai de [My Dear, 2007]. The figure of the troubled artist serves as a trope of the entanglement of immediacy and mediation that constitutes the core formal tension of Chinese independent documentary film. How various instances of this figure are inflected by notions of gender difference, how they embody the tension between art and everyday life and between madness and sanity, and the kinds of performance they engage in are fundamental questions that help reassess the heterogeneous ‘poetics of presence’ shaping this vibrant field of contemporary visual culture.

Radio Studies and 20th-Century Literature: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Remediation

This article provides an overview of the history of radio studies as it intersects with 20th-century literary studies, and outlines recent research trends in the field. Beginning with the earliest theorists and practitioners of radio (including Hilda Matheson, Rudolf Arnheim, and Lance Sieveking), the article considers how mid-20th-century attitudes to radio as a medium of cultural expression varied among Marxist thinkers (Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht), sociologists (Paul Lazarsfeld and Hadley Cantril), and media theorists (Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong). The article then examines how two recent scholarly developments – the expanded conception of modernist culture under the name of the “new modernist studies” and the growth of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field with both aesthetic and historical implications – have, since the mid-1990s, inaugurated a new wave of literary radio scholarship. These distinct but related developments have fostered newly integrated approaches to the study of radio as a medium that intersects not only with literature but with other media; the article therefore provides a summary of recent works that approach radio through a lens of remediation (the mutual influence and interpenetration of various media), as well as works that consider the aesthetic and ethical potential of the medium. The article closes by noting important avenues still to be explored, including questions of cultural hierarchy and “the middlebrow,” transnational broadcasting, and the cultural life of radio in the age of television and beyond.

The Death-Mother in Psycho: Hitchcock, Femininity, and Queer Desire

Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) is a significant work on many levels—to Hitchcock’s career, to film history, to the horror genre. I propose that a crucial aspect of Psycho’s design, one that relates to Hitchcock films as a whole, is its thematization of a concept that I call the “death-mother.” A distinction between Mrs. Bates/“Mother,” on the one hand, and the death-mother, on the other hand, impels this discussion. The death-mother—which relates to the varieties of femininity on display but exceeds their specific aspects and implications—is an effect produced by the film text and can only be understood through an analysis of the work as a whole. Exceeding the specifications of the Mrs. Bates character, the death-mother maps onto tropes and preoccupations in Hitchcock’s oeuvre but, more importantly, indicates the aesthetic implications, for the male artist most commonly, of the dread of femininity. I develop the concept of the death-mother from the writings of Freud, Nietzsche, and André Green and from feminist psychoanalytic theory: Barbara Creed, in her reworking of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Diane Jonte-Pace, in her analysis of Freud’s work. My analysis focuses on the relevance of the death-mother to issues of femininity and queer sexuality crucial to and enduringly controversial within Psycho.

A Critical Engagement with Monetary Interfaces

The current economic condition of digital participation is described by the proponents of the neoliberal model of economic efficiency as a new economic revolution. Τhe simulated existence of the market in computer networks and graphic interfaces presents itself as the ultimate reality of value at the same time as it tries to make other forms of social valuation subordinate and even unreal. Reflecting on the mystification of the effect of digital interfaces on social participation, the article raises a series of questions for the analysis of the cultural effects of the mediating function of monetary interfaces by reflecting on their economic, technological and aesthetic implications. The critique focuses on the new digital architecture of the monetary system by investigating how money intervenes in information exchanges and signals the creation and transfer of economic value. The ability of payment interfaces to impose, both overtly and covertly new relations of ownership as well as new forms of surveillance, suggests their capacities as technologies of political control of the individual. The aim is a theoretical framework for the analysis of the reorganization of the economic system and its dependence on money.

The Formal and the Foreign

Kaye Wierzbicki, “The Formal and the Foreign: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Garden Fences and the Meaning of Enclosure” (pp. 56-91) This essay argues that Sarah Orne Jewett theorizes garden design—particularly the question of whether or not a garden should be fenced—in order to theorize the aesthetic and social implications of her local color genre. Specifically, Jewett’s polemical defense of the garden fence is central to her ability to incorporate foreignness into her fictional landscapes. By placing Jewett’s garden-centric writing into the context of American garden history, this essay counters the prevailing notion that garden fences are transhistorical symbols of rigid protectionism and cultural exclusivity. Instead, Jewett’s garden fences should also be read as theoretically loaded and historically specific sites in the late-nineteenth-century debate between the fence-dismantling garden naturalists and the Colonial Revivalists who sought to preserve or re-erect these fences. As Jewett’s participation in this debate reveals, a garden fence can become a mechanism for defining “the local” as a formal practice that embraces foreignness, in contrast to competing definitions of “the local” that privilege native plants and native persons. Ultimately, Jewett uncovers new theoretical possibilities in the fenced, formal, Colonial Revivalist garden in order to make a case for the cultural expansiveness permitted by local color writing.

Un-fixing Baker: Against a Criticism of Stasis

Much of the biographical and critical work on Josephine Baker seeks to recuperate Baker from discursive and visual layers of racialized colonial vestments and proposes to repair her story by putting Baker in the role of agent. This locks Baker into a counter-narrative that minimizes the complexity and context of her performances; arguably, these methods lose sight of the aesthetic and political implications of a dancing body that incorporated and put into motion wildly disparate elements and influences. The methodological problems posed by the nature of Baker's work present an opportunity to develop a critical approach that resists fixity in favor of mobility. Methodologies that sustain discursive mobility will equip our critical work to engage with the aesthetic production of the dancing body. In the case of Baker and perhaps more widely, we might draw upon emerging methods that shift critical foci from solid arguments to mobile analyses.

Historical and Cultural Connotation of the Architectural Wood Carving Ornament in the Ancestral Temple of Chen Family - With “Feast in Bronze Sparrow Terrace Held by Cao Cao” and “Jiantu Conference” as Examples

The paper aims to analyze the features of the craftsmanship and composition and study the architectural ornament art and cultural and aesthetic implication of the architectural wood carving of the Ancestral Temple of Chen Family, which is the key cultural site under the state protection.

Analysis of Ancient Chinese Architecture Aesthetics

the ancient Chinese architecture after two thousand years of development, formed the unique architectural style and aesthetic implication of Chinese traditional culture, this kind of architectural style and aesthetic connotations mainly reflected in the structure of the structure, roof shape, layout and color, etc. Appreciate the ancient Chinese architecture, can give a person very special aesthetic pleasure.

Writing Violence: JonBenet Ramsey and the Legal, Moral and Aesthetic Implications of Creative Non-Fiction

This essay began as a hybrid critical/creative paper that was presented as part of an all-female panel discussing the intersections between writing and extreme violence. My own paper was on the relationship between my creative nonfiction novel The Museum of Atheism and the real life murder of six-year-old beauty queen, JonBenet Ramsey. This essay is an attempt to represent the writing process of the creative nonfiction author, and to consider the ways in which critical theory can be used to highlight, or conversely obscure, fictional writing. In addition to considering the effect of using a real story, a true crime, as the basis for a semi-fictional work, this essay will also consider the relationship I had as a writer to my publisher, editor and agent, and their interventions in the writing process to ensure that facts were deliberately skewed or warped in order to avoid litigation. Finally, I will consider my own relationship to the material, and the impact that this had on the writing process.

DIY Cheese-making and Individuation: Towards a Reconfiguration of Taste in Contemporary Computer Culture

DIY Cheese-making and Individuation: Towards a Reconfiguration of Taste in Contemporary Computer Culture

Introduction: “What Have You Learned Today?”

idea for this special issue of Comparative Drama, The Audience as Player: Interactive Theater over Years, emerged from an ongoing conversation with my son Daniel. A novelist, he also writes dialogue and devises plots for video games and is himself an avid player--I, a mere audience. Daniel was telling me about ways in which video games have become increasingly interactive, how medium has progressed far beyond Pac Man stage. In Heavy Rain, for example, player at controls is not just a shooter represented by a stock character making his way through a maze to a goal. Instead, gamer joins game designer, charting plot, devising dialogue, shaping onscreen characters, even injecting his or her own personality into central character. I added my own experience as a director, actor, and--most certainly--audience member in over years, starting from street protest in 1960s and extending through work with improv companies, where our audience (including inmates during a tour of Florida prisons) was invited to come onstage as fellow actors, to more recent efforts at involving audience in productions (Brecht to Shakespeare). Some successes, and more than my share of failures, I must confess. These exchanges led, inevitably, to our raising idea of parallels (as well as differences) between and video games, both times when spectator is no longer a passive receptor but a participant, a collaborator, if you will, with playwright or game designer, where distinctions break down between stage and house, screen and living room. When I was asked to be guest editor of this special issue of Comparative Drama, I suggested in call for papers that this enhanced role for audience has, surely, philosophical and aesthetic implications, not to mention practical consequence during an actual production. One of joys of being a guest editor is that going over everything from punctuation and stylistic lapses to writers' arguments and accounts of personal experiences, not to mention their takes on those larger issues, you really get to know essays submitted. My favorite high school English teacher, and my own model when I too became a teacher, Alan Glathorn, used to end every class with a simple question: What did you learn today? Below, grouped under seven general categories, is what I have learned from essays in this collection. Interactive Theater Can Take Many Forms If interactive theater is taken to mean shows where audience gets to speak up, either in house or onstage, playing a role either assigned or chosen, then a piece like You Me Bum Bum Train, reviewed along with other New York shows in Homans' The Interactive Theater of Video Games: Gamer as Playwright, Director, and Actor, is conventional, if that adjective can ever be confidently applied to this otherwise different, sometimes radical form of theater. In You Me Bum Bum Train spectators are transported in wheelchairs to rooms where they play characters ranging from a football coach urging on his team to a rock star surrounded by fans. But mixing actors and audience, or converting latter to characters, with or without dialogue--as is case in show Tony and Tinas Wedding, where audience is limited to playing silent guests, then later dancing with actors playing characters at ceremony--doesn't begin to cover scope of what means today or, for that matter, has meant in past. Jennifer Flaherty in Dreamers and Insomniacs: Audiences in Sleep No More and Night Circus cites letters, blogs, websites on play, responses, and online communications about this popular show where audience members describe their trips through McKittrick Hotel, as visitors, as detectives, as participants in that, while they don't have dialogue and are rendered invisible by wearing white masks, they do chart two-hours traffic of their progress through hotel's rooms, some choosing to follow a specific character choice called the Tail) loosely based on one in Shakespeare's Macbeth, others moving randomly, still others pursing a specific object (the Search). …

Perforator based propeller flaps in limb reconstructive surgery: clinical application and literature review.

The reconstruction of loss of substance due to trauma or oncological excision may have relevant functional and aesthetic implications. We report our experience in twenty-one cases of propeller flaps for the treatment of loss of substance of the upper and lower limbs. The etiology of defect was tumor excision in nine cases, trauma in seven cases, surgical wound complications in four cases, and chronic osteomyelitis in one case. Clinical results were favorable in most cases and eighteen flaps survived. We observed an overall complication rate of 33% with four cases of superficial epidermolysis that spontaneously healed and three cases of partial flap loss ranging from 10 to 50% that required surgical revision by means of skin graft (two cases) or ALT free flap (one case). Propeller flap harvesting requires great care and experience, and potential complications may occur even in expert hands. When indicated by the characteristic of the defect, these flaps can be a useful surgical option for the treatment of loss of substance of upper and lower limbs.

“White Trash” in Literary History: The Social Interventions of Erskine Caldwell and James Agee

That [Erskine] Caldwell was unshakably committed to his craft should not be questioned. . . . That he mounted, throughout his career, an uncompromising assault on social injustice should likewise not be questioned.-Wayne Mixon, from The People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South. . . Agee insisted that the connections between ethics and politics, means and ends, human compassion and social jus- tice were always tenuous and paradoxical. For the most part he distrusted the activists and reformers who spoke of the sharecroppers as a problem to be solved.... Precisely because he was acutely sensitive to all the social, moral, and aesthetic implications of a particular experience, precisely because he wanted to alter the way his readers saw reality, precisely because he believed that the total understanding of a problem would not immobilize but liberate mankind, Agee had fash- ioned the most radical work of the 1930s.-Richard H. Pells, from Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression YearsKnowledge and power are integrated with one another. . . . It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge; it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.-Michel Foucault, from Power/KnowledgeIn the twenty-first century, literary scholars and teachers have become more invested in an interdisciplinary understanding of the connection between socially interested writing and literary history. However, in spite of what may be characterized as a general critical movement away from the organic, signifying aspects of textuality, a central focus of much American literary criticism remains on the canon and authorship, even when situating texts within their historical moment in the interest of better historical/cultural understanding. In spite of a more historical orientation, we are often left with a surprisingly canonical distinction between which American texts are worth studying and which are not, and these reasons usually derive at least in part from a sense of authorial merit, literary or social or both. However, this prioritization becomes increas- ingly difficult to justify as contemporary American literary scholars become ever more aware of the role of literature in the workings of social power and of the active part that canonical valuations and shifts can play in these operations. It is with the intent of suggesting the benefits of a less canonically rooted, and more interdisciplinary, literary scholarship that I engage with the work of two rather noncanonical American writers of the thirties: Erskine Caldwell and James Agee. My purpose is to investigate the ways in which their works offered potent, if problematic, historically situated social discourses. And, while it may not provide definitive answers about writing the truths of poor rural whites, this comparative discussion may allow us to raise significant questions about class representations and Otherness.Enormously popular during their own time, the central fictional works of Erskine Caldwell, specifically Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), have fallen out of fashion in literary circles these days. They are read by many critics as failed attempts to produce legitimate social intervention through art, and their failings are typically seen in terms of lack of awareness of stereotyping and the degree to which they constitute a confusing amalgam of genuine social concern and an incommensurate literary style based on gothic humor. In contrast, the work of James Agee, particularly his social intervention through art, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), not popular in its own time, has apparently come into its own in current circles of cultural, if not literary, scholarship.1 Agee's ethics and orientation are touted and emulated, and his book has become an academic touchstone for engagement with social otherness, particularly in the social sciences. But it is not my purpose here to take issue with the aesthetic evaluation of these works. …

Vor-Augen-Entstellen

This article examines relationships between literature and quantum physics form a socio-epistemic perspective. It shows that such formations were hierarchy-freely and interwoven on a linguistic-aesthetic level. To make this point, the article first unfolds rhetorical and aesthetic implications of the so-called “loss of visualizability” in the emergence of quantum mechanics. Then it shows that these implications correspond to aspects of the poetics of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung. After demonstrating these correspondences, the article sketches relevant literary-theoretical consequences: Literature is localized as a social place where tricky epistemological problems are epistemically constituted.

Zyklusbildung in Beethovens letzten Sinfonien

The article discusses the theory that Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, worked out in the so-called Petter sketchbook of 1811/12, are not a pair like the Fifth and Sixth but rather the first two parts of a symphonic “triptych” that reached completion in 1824 with the Ninth Symphony. That this conspicuous relationship between the last three symphonies has gone unnoticed in spite of ample research on the subject are due to two causes: the particular point of view of specialists for this sketchbook, and the irrefuted opinion that the earliest notations for the Ninth are located in the Scheide sketchbook of 1815/16. However, a closer reading of the documentation in the Petter sketchbook reveals the possibility that a symphonic triptych was conceived at that earlier date, which in turn leads to a revisioning of the respective aesthetic implications involved.

Manubrial-Clavicular-Chest Wall Explantation to Expose the Anterior Thoracic Inlet

The anterior thoracic inlet is difficult to access surgically because of the overlying pectoral-shoulder girdle, clavicle, and manubrium. With both the Dartevelle and Grunenwald approaches, retraction of an osteomuscular flap is required, and patients may be left with the functional and aesthetic implications of partial clavicularresection. We describe a novel technique involvingmanubrial-clavicular-chest wall explantation with preservation and reimplantation. Manubrial and clavicular plating is performed to stabilize the anterior chest wall and clavicle after reimplantation. This approach represents an alternative technique that provides excellent visualization of the entire anterior thoracic inlet.

La Escenificación de una Mirada y el Testimonio de los Cuerpos en el Teatro Documental de Vivi Tellas

RESUMEN En este artículo recorreremos algunos enfoques teóricos para analizar la propuesta artística de la directora argentina Vivi Tellas materializada en su proyecto de teatro documental Archivos, el cual se enmarca dentro de su macro-proyecto Biodrama. Analizaremos distintas claves que definen su modo particular de trabajar con aquellos materiales reales con los que construye sus espectáculos, reflexionando sobre las posibles implicancias éticas y estéticas de este trabajo. Un lugar privilegiado tendrán en esta reflexión las ideas de Giorgio Agamben respecto principalmente de la noción de testigo, que nos permitirán acercarnos a una hipótesis sobre el tipo de testimonio que brindan los cuerpos - de personas comunes y corrientes - y también los objetos/documentos que Tellas lleva a escena.

Towards an ethnographic turn in contemporary art scholarship

While an ethnographic turn has indeed taken place in contemporary art practice, this is not necessarily the case with scholarly research in contemporary art. This is especially surprising considering the conditions under which research on contemporary art production takes place. The particular processuality of the artworks does not allow for an exclusive use of established methods in art history, but requires additional approaches. This article calls for an ethnographic turn in art scholarship that complements established approaches with methods and research questions derived from social anthropology and sociology, such as participation, observation and qualitative studies in social and aesthetic production, reception and perception. Artists working in the ethnographic modality normally seek social interaction, but scholarly analysis hardly considers the actual exchange taking place during the art project, and both its social and aesthetic implications. In order to keep up with new artistic practices, art scholars need to adopt empirical approaches that go beyond the exhibition space and other sites of art mediation, and instead take into consideration the factual social and aesthetic processes and impacts in the ‘field’. These processes occur during both the project period and its aftermath in both the artist's life as well as the lives of the people/groups involved. Drawing attention to these social interactions and interpretations is necessary not only in the analysis of projects by ‘northern’ artists in ‘southern’ contexts, but in any art practice that involves and aims at social exchange.

Husserl’s struggle with mental images: imaging and imagining reconsidered

Husserl’s extensive analyses of image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and of the imagination (Phantasie) offer insightful and detailed structural explications. However, despite this careful work, Husserl’s discussions fail to overcome the need to rely on a most problematic concept: mental images. The epistemological conundrums triggered by the conceptual framework of mental images are well known—we have only to remember the questions regarding knowledge acquisition that plagued British empiricism. Beyond these problems, however, a plethora of important questions arise from claiming that mental images are structural moments of imaging and imagining. Any attempt to clarify the structure and conditions for the possibility of aesthetic experience must first provide an unambiguous account of pictorial depiction—a task unattainable through the mental images discourse. Similarly, exposing the import of the imagination for theoretical scientific inquiries (be they positive or eidetic) requires an initial explication of the structure of this consciousness; this explication, however, must address our ability to imagine non-spatially determined objects—something the conceptual framework of mental images utterly fails to accomplish. In this paper I argue against Husserl’s reliance on mental images in his phenomenological analyses of imaging and imagining and propose an alternative structural account for both. This account is free of this reliance and able to steer clear of its insidious implications for epistemology, aesthetics, and methodological reflections. By closely following the development of Husserl’s account I suggest alternative descriptions while building on Husserl’s important work.