Aesthetic Movement Research Articles

Rubins, Maria Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris (review)

REVIEWS 535 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. A more comprehensive assessment of Békássy the poet can be made by downloading the Bodleian Library’s copy of this now-rare volume from the Internet (free of charge). This little book has been scrupulously, indeed lovingly, edited and annotated by the Gömöris and beautifully produced by Karl Sabbagh’s Skyscraper Publications. It will be of great interest not only to those concerned with Anglo-Hungarian contacts but also anyone whose appetite for reading about the Bloomsbury set remains unsated, as well as everyone with an interest in the ‘lost’ poets of the First World War. It is a worthy tribute to Békássy, in whose memory Darwin’s granddaughter Frances Cornford wrote, in 1915, the Georgian lyric reproduced here (p. 233). Its final stanza runs: We, who must grow staid and old, Full of caution, worn and cold, In our hearts like flowers keep, Your image, till we also sleep. London Peter Sherwood Rubins,Maria.Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, NY, 2015. x + 302 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £55.00. Having been violently separated from their native land and tongue, those Russian writers who found themselves in exile after the Russian Revolution began to anxiously debate the very survival of a literary tradition abroad, fiercely arguing over whether what was being written in Paris, Berlin, Prague and Shanghai could be constituted as a continuation and preservation of this tradition, or whether all such ties had been inexorably severed. In his article on ‘Literature in Exile’ (Paris, 1933), Vladislav Khodasevich, a conservative frontbencher in this debate, adamantly rejected the idea that geographical location should be an integral part of national identity, arguing instead that ‘the nationality of a literature is created by its language and spirit, not by the territory in which its life passed, not the everyday reality reflected in it’. Maria Rubins’sstudychallengesthisnotionandquestionsthemyththatémigréwriters existed in cultural isolation by placing Russian Montparnasse at ‘the epicenter of modernist transnational culture’ (p. 7), suggesting that for the younger, less conservative generation of writers at least, a wider set of considerations need to be applied. By focusing on ‘cases of linguistic ambivalence decoupling the tongue from its original territory’, Rubins calls ‘into question the conventional SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 536 status of language as the chief marker of national identity’ (p. 6). As such, her study proposes to remap and recategorize literature as something more complex than specific national and linguistic parameters, and greater than geographic locus altogether. Rubins structures her study into four parts, each of which examines a distinct aspect of Russian émigré letters by placing them against a cross-cultural background. The study begins with a detailed survey of the evolution of the ‘human document’, a term which, despite its centrality to the debate around the direction which émigré literature should take, has hitherto not received the critical attention it deserves. This genre of writing constituted an attempt by the younger generation to produce a more documentary style of literature, encompassing truthful accounts of ‘real life’, human emotion and existential experience that were often also reflected in its fragmentary form. The second section turns to location, exploring the way in which the city of Paris, with its dark underbelly of metro stations, public toilets and river suicides, may have helped further shape these particular narratives. The argument then moves to explore the wider influences of interwar mass culture, particularly Art Deco and the Jazz Age, the essence of which, she argues, had an indisputable influence on the aesthetics and poetics of modernist writing in this period. Her comparative examination of these writers reveals that their responses to certain markers of urban modernity went far beyond their shared emergence and deracination from Russian literary tradition and instead represented a far broader aesthetic movement common to writers of other nationalities in interwar Europe. In the final section, Rubins turns to examine the complicated way in which Russian Montparnasse engaged with its own national literary tradition, in particular drawing attention to the significant influence of Lermontov and Rozanov...

イーセティック・ムーヴメント : デザイン史的一考察

イーセティック・ムーヴメント : デザイン史的一考察

For Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print & Beyond, 1870–1890: The Grolier Club of New YorkJanuary 25–March 11, 2017CatalogueFor Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print & Beyond, 1870–1890Eric HolzenbergNew York: The Grolier Club, 2017.136 pp.; 146 color ills.Paper over board $50ISBN 9781605830643

For Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print &amp; Beyond, 1870–1890: The Grolier Club of New YorkJanuary 25–March 11, 2017Catalogue<i>For Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print &amp; Beyond, 1870–1890</i>Eric HolzenbergNew York: The Grolier Club, 2017.136 pp.; 146 color ills.Paper over board $50ISBN 9781605830643

Editor’s Introduction

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s IntroductionPaul StirtonPaul StirtonBard Graduate Center Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDesign historians and material culture scholars have long been aware of the affective role of one’s surroundings, and the ways in which objects shape and even direct our behavior. In fact, most thoughtful people recognize this. Nevertheless, it was slightly surprising to discover that John Maynard Keynes gave a talk on this very subject to the secret society known as The Apostles in Cambridge University in 1909. But why should we have been surprised? Keynes was incredibly smart by any standard, so it was probably as natural that he should consider the influence of furniture on love, as he might address issues of monetary policy, elasticity of demand, or the law of diminishing returns. The manuscript of this talk lay in Keynes’s papers at King’s College Cambridge and is published here for the first time as one of our Primary Source Texts.The articles in this issue are more widely dispersed than usual; from eighth-century Northumbria to eighteenth-century India, and on to antebellum Philadelphia and postwar Glasgow. Each of these articles examines different media deploying a variety of techniques. Ben Tilghman considers the processes of laying out manuscript pages in the early Middle Ages and how this affects their meaning; Siddhartha Shah traces the changes in symbolism and status that a highly prized diamond undergoes when translated from the Punjab to Britain, from the armlet of Duleep Singh to the crown jewels of Queen Victoria via the Great Exhibition of 1851; Anne Verplanck aims to put some of the people involved in early American portrait photography back into the picture in her study of daguerreotypes in Philadelphia; and Glenn Hooper considers the ways in which design and new materials played a role in re-establishing the British furniture industry in the wake of the Second World War by tracing the business history of one firm, Morris and Co. of Glasgow, between 1948 and 1958.The book and exhibition reviews in this issue are similarly wide-ranging. In England alone, we move from the glorious survivals of medieval embroidered vestments to the equally spectacular psychedelic clothing of the later 1960s, and from a single Lithuanian boot in Cambridge to the occasionally conflicting advice on home decorating in the Aesthetic Movement. Alongside this, one can find discussions of simulacra in medieval Germany, the autobiography of the Viennese émigré Paul Frankl, and a retrospective exhibition of the work of the French furniture and interior designer Pierre Paulin. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 24, Number 1Spring–Summer 2017 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693795 © 2017 by The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Politics of Aesthetics

An examination of the role that art and aesthetic activity have played in the affairs of state can be useful in shaping a framework for a discussion of the more specific issue of the interrelations between music and political life. The following discussion focuses on the manner in which the Russian avant-garde aesthetic movement gradually coalesced with the centrally planned construction of Soviet-style society in the efforts to build a new way of life and a new type of human being in accordance with the developing practice of the Communist-led revolution.

Lasse Braun, rape scenarios, and Swedish censorship: a case study of two 8-mm porn films featuring rape

ABSTRACTThis article examines rape scenarios in two pornographic 8-mm films by Lasse Braun: White Fantasies/Black Power (1969) and Cerimony (1971). Furthermore, it begins an exploration of Lasse Braun, an important figure in late-1960s and early-1970s pornography. Finally, because both films were censored by the Swedish National Board of Film Censors, the article considers their specific national-historical contexts including the legal situation for pornography in Sweden and the shifting discourses on rape in the 1970s, to open up a discussion of whether the elimination of violence in pornographic representations actually makes them less misogynist. The censorship decisions clearly echoed anxieties about race and gender provoked by these two films. A closer look at the films reveals a knowing approach, not only to sexual fantasies, but also to contemporary political and aesthetic movements.

The Aesthetic Interior as Incubator of Health and Well-Being

ABSTRACTDomestic interiors created during the Aesthetic Movement have often been interpreted in terms of the ideas of aesthetic autonomy associated with Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater and Joris-Karl Huysmans. This essay takes a different tack by analysing the aesthetic interior in light of concerns with health reform. It focuses on the writings and designs of architect E.W. Godwin (1833–86) who pursued interior design as part of an effort to foster a healthy life, one that consisted of hygiene, relief from urban stress, and an enlargement of the aesthetic responsiveness of his clients. He conceived of spare and calm interiors that were healthful alternatives to dust-infested Victorian clutter while concomitantly offering psychological respite from the ‘high-pressure, nervous times’ endemic to metropolitan life. This goal accords with Godwin's related interest in dress reform, a preoccupation that led to his participation in the Health Exhibition of 1884. By unpacking Godwin's specific contribution to the sanitary discussions that prevailed in Victorian Britain, I align the aesthetic interior with the central imperative of sanitary reform: promoting health through ameliorating Britain's urban environment.

The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 by Rachel Price

Reviewed by: The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 by Rachel Price Rebecca Kosick Rachel Price, The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968. Northwestern UP, 2014. 272 pp. In The Object of the Atlantic, Rachel Price develops an historically-rooted theory of "concretude" that takes shape in the Atlantic region between empire and globalization. Through readings of writers such as José Marti, Joaquim de Sousândrade, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Brazilian concrete and neoconcrete poets and artists, Price demonstrates how a shared aesthetic interest in concretude alternately mirrors, engages, and anticipates economic shifts from objects to networks. The book's definition of its central theme is wide-ranging, moving between spectrums that include the endpoints of material and immaterial, presence and absence, "thingly" and virtual. Within these categories is further variety still. Objects are contrasted to networks, processes, dematerialization, and voids, and they are paired with materiality, commodities, products, and the everyday remnants of material culture, among other things. Materiality, in turn, sometimes refers to the fact of these various objects as depicted in writing and other times refers to the materiality of writing itself. The materiality of writing includes written form, as in Price's discussion of a "signature use of colons" in Martí's late-nineteenth-century New York chronicles. Price describes how Martí's chronicles, a series of newspaper articles written by the Cuban poet while living in New York City, "juggle distant geographies and carefully modulated paces, miming the global operation of capital" (53). She argues that, in these chronicles, frequent and unorthodox use of colons "visually string together far-flung places and times into a delicately connected whole—a concrete diagram" (53). Just as the chronicles "mime" global capital, the colons create a diagram-like effect. Later, Price describes how their "form enacts the culture of the stock market: harried, pitching, linking far and near through the exchange of commodities—made equivalent, as the colons make chunks equivalent" (55; emphasis added). The materiality of writing here is thus a formal and visual strategy that serves to imitate an extratextual material reality. Later, Price pushes back against a dominant reading of mid-twentieth-century Brazilian concrete poetry that suggests the movement's aesthetics were straightforwardly reflective of "the euphoric national developmentalism characteristic of the era of President Juscelino Kubitschek" (166). Instead, Price shows that what concrete poets Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos, and Haroldo de Campos called "'ultimate' or 'total' realism" had specifically to do with "a desire to make word equal thing" (167). Here, she argues that the materiality of writing is not a visual and formal "representation of external reality but reality itself" (167) and makes the case for prescient links between concrete poetry and the coming rise of "a more networked, more virtual, and more extensive capitalism" (21). Though the neoconcrete movement that formed in (somewhat antagonistic) response to concrete poetry and art accused concrete poetry of "a naïve fidelity to a scientific objectivity that conflated antilyrical anti-expressionism with a fetishizing of objecthood," [End Page 539] Price argues that concrete poetry already showed an interest in the pairing of the material and immaterial that would predate later moves away from the objectual and toward the processual in neoconcretism as well as in the poema/processo movement that coincided with the dawning digital age. A careful revealing of this type of insight—one in which literature anticipates coming aesthetic and political-economic shifts—is one of The Object of the Atlantic's strongest claims. And the book's meticulous, historical exploration of transatlantic networks of power juxtaposed with close readings of the region's aesthetic output helpfully reveals further ways aesthetic concretude relates to extraaesthetic reality. One example would be Price's address of the complex relationship between Spain and Latin America as it engages questions of objecthood and subjecthood at turn of the twentieth century. Resisting the persistent divide between Latin American and Penninsular studies, her discussion of Spanish critic and theorist Ramiro de Maeztu shows how Cuba's "independence (or loss) is but one event in a dense web of multiple, interrelated movements throughout the...

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter Seth Wilson Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole. By Joel Schechter. U of Exeter P, 2016. Cloth $85.00, Paper $34.00. 288 pages. Joel Schechter may have written the perfect book for this historical moment. His purpose is "a mapping of paths to future theatrical satire and activism, through a survey of earlier routes explored by Brecht and his precursors in England" (3). Schechter locates these precursors, as his title suggests, in the eighteenth century. He offers a framework for evaluating British theatre artists like George Farquhar, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Charlotte Charke, among others, as pioneers of the techniques that Bertolt Brecht would later use in forging his Epic theatre. Combining methodological approaches from theatre history, literary studies, performance studies, and historical fiction, Schechter clearly demonstrates Brecht's debt to the eighteenth-century British stage as he forcefully advocates for the importance of today's theatre drawing on the same techniques in service of speaking truth to power. Schechter brings a lively and highly readable style to Eighteenth-Century Brechtians, which makes the daunting task of teasing out the parallels between two seemingly disparate aesthetic movements easy to follow. The breadth of the connections that Schechter makes is impressive: he weaves together Brecht with eighteenth-century satirists like Fielding and Gay, performers like Charke and David Garrick, later twentieth-century writers like Dario Fo, Vaclav Havel, and Carl Grose, and the contemporary social protest of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The most successful section of the book, and one that illustrates Schechter's methodology clearly is chapter 21, where Schechter puts James Boswell, William Hogarth, Garrick, and the comic book artist R. Crumb into creative tension with one another. Beginning by discussing Hogarth's prints of Macheath, Schechter then positions Crumb as a latter-day Hogarth whose comics are a similar type of visual satire. Examining Crumb's pornographic comic illustrations of Boswell, Schechter discusses the idea of extra-theatrical social performance before transitioning to the debate between Boswell and Johnson over Garrick's relative merits as an actor. Schechter concludes by reading Boswell's defense of Garrick as an early example of Brechtian Epic theatre wherein the actor's presentation of the character is meant to disrupt a total identification. Throughout, Schechter makes a complex thread lively and easy to follow, and uses the Brechtian theory to enhance his readings of each object. Another similarly successful case study, chapter 5, details the relationship between John Gay and his patron, the Duchess of Queensberry, as she champions his work and becomes, in Schechter's estimation, a real-life Polly Peachum. Chapter 9 positions Fielding's work with his Great Mongol company at the Haymarket as analogous to Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, while chapter 10 uses the Brechtian conceit of the book to offer novel readings of The London Merchant and Fielding's The Covent-Garden Tragedy, concluding that Fielding's satirical take on domestic tragedy prefigures the ways in which late capitalism will commodify human beings. Finally, chapter 16 uses both Brecht and Marx to analyze the precarious nature of the acting profession in the eighteenth century through a number of labor disputes. Obviously, in each of these chapters, he teases out a number of threads; nonetheless, Schechter's writing remains lucid throughout. The result is a clear, [End Page 147] nuanced, novel reading of theatrical events and plays that demonstrates their vitality and relevance today. The most striking feature of Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is the frequent historical fiction interludes that Schechter employs. These serve both to creatively fill in gaps where the historical record is incomplete, and to offer an example to practitioners interested in taking up the mantle of the eighteenth-century Brechtians. Seven of the chapters are imaginative reconstructions of various items, including "lost" Messingkauf Dialogues, the fictional memoirs of Macheath, imagined diary entries, and dramatizations of the historical personae going about the business of mounting productions. One additional piece is a fictional future press release that hopefully imagines a day when the National Theatre—under the command of Cate Blanchett—stages Gay's Polly and prepares...

In a Muddy Land, Wearing a Historical Costume: Posttraumatic Humanism in Post-Stalinist Soviet Culture

This paper discusses the reinvention of the humanist ideas and values in the Soviet post-World War II and post-Stalinist culture (the 1950s and the1960s) with the help of plots and images in Soviet semi-official art, the main examples being Pavel Antokolsky's poem Hieronymus Bosch (1957), the Strugatsky brothers' novel Hard to Be a God (1963), and Grigory Kozintsev's films based on Shakespeare's Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), as well as David Samoilov's poem Bertold Schwarz: A Monologue , set in the late Middle Ages. The paper isolates an aesthetic movement that developed in the Soviet culture of those decades; I propose to call this movement humanism. It was based on the new aesthetic idiom of gloomy Renaissance, including images of conflagration, ruins, violence. The works of this movement did not use the Aesopian language — or, at least, did not use it as a primary or only tool. Rather, it involves a covert comparison of the Soviet present with the European pre-Enlightenment past and aesthetical valorization and sublimation of 20th-century catastrophic experience. Images of gloomy Renaissance conveyed the erosion the Soviet belief in progress and moral modernization as inevitable consequences of Bolsheviks' revolution. One of the earliest mature works of posttraumatic humanism in Soviet culture was Vasily Grossman's essay The Sistine Madonna (1955). Alexei German Sr.'s film Hard to Be a God (2013) can be regarded as the concluding and summarizing work in this movement.

The “Green Consumption” and the Rhizomatic Capital Strategy: Ads and Reports in the Brazilian Media

The purpose of this essay, whose theoretical bases are inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is to investigate the relationship between consumption, subjectivity, capital and nature, in the context of the world society of control, the production of the “green” consumption market in Brazil and the representation of the “human having” as an identity proposition, which is revealed through “subjectivity kits” in this market. The research is exploratory, qualitative and theoretical-empirical, carried out through bibliographical (books and authors that dialogue with the subject investigated) and documentary techniques (selected ads and reports in searched journals). Through the conception of the rhizomatic capitalism, the above mentioned relationships are, in principle, articulated within a logic capable of reflecting the “liquefaction” of the concept of sustainability in contemporary times. Thus, the perspective of the theme of “liquid sustainability” (through the concept of “capitalistic culture”) sets up the production of new ways of being (pret-a-porter identities), the capture of new desires and the creation of new devices of social control, in which all the social actors that are involved in its production participate (and empower) in the ideation of an Ecopower. In particular, the companies and the media, which publicizes and “produtilizes” the nature, are liquefied as a consumer brand and aestheticized with authenticity features on the market, as a brand and marketing modeling of the consumption of appearances, a true simulacrum with speeches of green washing, social washing or green social washing. Through different aesthetic movements of agency, the market of “green consumption” is conceived as a brand that semiotizes and influences the production of subjectivity. An unbearable lightness of having and the “subjectivity kits”—everlasting—that stick, peel off and contradict each other, fed back through the strategic fluidity of the rhizomatic capital in the Brazilian market.

Language, art, and the (social) body in modern and postmodern aestheticism: A comparison of Wilde and Nabokov

In this paper, the author argues for a theoretical difference between the modern and postmodern aestheticism and considers their political implications arguing that modern aestheticism carried progressive or radical political impulse; whereas, under postmodernism, its character shifted into a reactionary politics. The specific political implications that are derived from these two kinds of aestheticism concern the attitude towards human nature, different kinds of narcissistic tendencies and divergent attitudes towards art/culture. Next, the author uses the examples of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and Nabokov's Lolita to demonstrate how these differences manifest themselves in the works of these two prominent, if not pivotal, artists related to the aesthetic movement in the history of literature. It is concluded that the politics of Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov differ radically and these differences stem from the fact that their works embody divergent conceptions of aestheticism.

The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany by Patrizia C. McBride

Reviewed by: The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany by Patrizia C. McBride Daniel Schwartz (bio) Patrizia C. McBride, The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 236 pages. In her interesting and insightful book, The Chatter of the Visible, the Germanist and Musil scholar Patrizia C. McBride articulates a novel framework for approaching one of the foundational aesthetic practices of the twentieth century—montage. Rather than focus on one specific aspect of montage, McBride turns her attention to the material, cultural, and signifying practices surrounding its use in aesthetic movements ranging from Dadaism to New Objectivity. This allows her to craft a unique investigation across a range of artists and theorists, including Hannah Höch, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Benjamin, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Kurt Schwitters. Together these figures generate a constellation for original comparisons and novel re-articulations of an otherwise well-worn subject matter. McBride intervenes against a particular conception of montage—implicit in the work of avant-garde scholars such as Peter Bürger, Rosalind Krauss, and Jacques Rancière—that emphasizes its ability to deconstruct codes and disrupt meaning. This notion of montage as an antinarrative, antihermeneutic practice captures the fragmentary, ephemeral, and radically open-ended quality of modern experience in an age of disruptive technological change. Its bold juxtaposition of physical objects becomes a weapon against idealist and illusionist practices of aesthetic representation that stress the continuity of signification over the materiality of the signifier. Montage, on such a view, throws the detritus of the material world into the idealistic workings of hermetically and hermeneutically sealed systems of representation. McBride's book challenges this description's opposition of materiality to meaning, signifier to signified, and corporeality to narrativity. Rather than emphasize opposition, McBride stresses cross-contamination. Montage practices reveal that inscription is itself "part and parcel of [a] thing's thingness, and not simply . . . an effect of signifying strategies that superficially overlay the object" (20). Likewise, "the material status of language [is] reliant on the physical properties of specific media and modes of inscription" (20). As such, montage "does not stand in antithesis to signification but is rather the result of a complex interplay between an object's (or medium's) physical qualities and available signifying modes" (20). Montage reveals the intricate [End Page 775] weave of materiality and signification as opposed to the obstinate materiality of a mythical given.1 McBride explores this complex interplay of materiality and signification through the idea that modernist and avant-garde montage practices are not merely modes of disruption and interruption but in fact integral parts of narrative construction. To this end, she utilizes an expanded conception of narrative—one that privileges the "experientiality" of narrative practices over their function as discursive modes of sense making and signification. McBride borrows this term from the work of Monika Fludernik, according to whom experientiality is "a quasi-mimetic evocation of 'real-life' experience."2 Experientiality, for Fludernik, stresses the embodiedness of a cognitive subject in relation to their environment, as opposed to the forward motion of plot. Taking this into account, McBride argues that "[n]arrativity is the ability to perceive the relational structures engendered through repetition of embodied forms as constitutive of communicable experience . . ." (10). This reorientation of narrative around the body makes it possible to read a number of seemingly disruptive montage practices as simultaneously constructive of experience as experientiality—that is, the experience of embodied forms mimicking a techno-materialist world. McBride's book title, The Chatter of the Visible, is meant to evoke this type of experiential narrative. Montage practices "upended the uninspected conventions of a traditional, print-based culture, . . . demanding instead that words be viewed like pictures and images decoded like signs" (4). These painted words and legible images underscore the chatter of the visible, "the physiognomic belief that the visible surface of reality speaks to us in a language of sorts . . ." (4). Helping us decipher this chatter—this mesh of material modes of signification—montage not only highlights the materiality of the signifier but also allows us to construct novel ways of embodying experience. By "shaping the encounter between...

Art, Music, and the Emotions in the Aesthetic Movement

This article explores two phenomenologically distinct aspects of cultural production, art and music. It shows how they overlap, exist in counterpoint or in harmony, and coalesce around specific themes and preoccupations to represent, articulate, produce, or, indeed, repress feelings. Focusing on the work of William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, Frederic Leighton, and Aubrey Beardsley, the article examines the claims of a realism in which the representation of emotions is achieved through narrative forms and close description of the material world, and a formalism which claims that the manipulation of abstract structures in art or music can directly affect the emotional state of the viewer or reflect that of the creator. Integral to this discussion is the relationship between sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure at the point of intersection of art and music.

The insoluble conflict of the racial divide – white and black – in Nella Larsen’s novels Passing and Quicksand

Este trabalho apresenta uma leitura dos romances Quicksand e Passing na sala de aula focando nas questões de raça e conflitos de passing. Esses romances foram publicados, respectivamente em 1928 e 1929, pela escritora Afro- mericana Nella Larsen durante o movimento cultural e estético chamado Harlem Renaissance, um movimento cujo apogeu aconteceu nos anos 20 do século passado provocando a elevação da consciência racial e a emergência da literatura Afro-americana. Nesta década, a experiência de passing constituía um dos temas privilegiados em alguns romances de escritores Afro-americanos. Minha análise se sustenta na obra de Thadious M. Davis, Elaine K. Ginsber e Martha J. Cutter em relação a conflitos raciais e identitários. No entrelaçamento de elementos psicológicos e culturais, minha leitura mostra como esses romances dramatizam o conflito insolúvel da raça dividida – branca e negra – que destaca as lutas e dificuldades das personagens quando se deparam com o vazio do pertencimento do qual trata a experiência de passing. Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo abordar e discutir em sala de aula o aspecto cultural de conflitos raciais que é algo sempre atual e relevante.

Whose Latin American Cinema?

What do we talk about when we talk about Latin American cinema within the borders of the United States? Discussions of cinema from the region remain limited to the means of production: which films are produced and financed; how local filmmakers secure the money and access to make the films that then get tied to any given country's national cinema; the aesthetic and cultural movements that these films engender and replicate. But what of the distribution templates that circumscribe the kind of films and filmmakers that can make it to the United States, and under which circumstances? Looking at examples of film programming and distribution that are actively circumventing the established arthouse-release model that has become the de facto way of releasing Latin American cinema in the U.S., this article points to new efforts at defining cinemas of the region outside the bounds of an increasingly obsolete system.

Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature. By Laura R. Brueck

In this accessible volume, Laura Brueck draws the reader into the world of Hindi Dalit literature, providing an extended introduction to this fascinating political and aesthetic movement. In the initial half of the book, she explores the development of this literary genre and voice, as Dalit writers and critics strive to control representation and revision identities and social relations. In the second half, she examines the works of selected Dalit authors writing in Hindi, moving beyond the genre of autobiography and the concomitant focus on content that has marked so many earlier studies to offer literary aesthetic analyses of selected short stories. In so doing, she traverses a wide range of issues of representation and resistance, authority and authenticity, class and gender, of interest to a broad audience; even as she situates her analysis in the dense weave of Indian culture and society and in relation to Dalit literature in other regions and languages.

PERJALANAN RONGGENG TAYUB DI PRIANGAN

A study of ronggeng viewed from the historical perspective interested. In fact it has beeninfluenced by a pre-historical period where human believe in super natural. Peopole in the prehistoric period connected the rituals with dance atraction for their own significance. The ronggengincluded as a dance figure connected to the rituals because of its originally from the saman danceand it similiar to the dance of woman priest. It remains us to the function of ‘catalyst’to theancestors. Ronggeng was symbols of recovery rites in the human believe. Ronggeng was alsosymbol of a fertility rites in the human believe in addition to the relationship of its function hasbeen influenced by the Dongson’s culture for the mostly Southeast Asia societies where theybelieve on the Goddess of Rice. Therefore the information of ronggeng has been wrote in Indian’sliterature and sculpture or relief panels of the temple. Eventually the ronggeng is identicallywith fertility rites because of its relation to the Sri Devi and in other side is its atraction has alsoviewed as laisure among the aristocrats. In the Islam’s period where performing arts used to be away of dakwah, so that the ronggeng status in herent with the sufi a manifestation of ma’rifat’sways, where the human assumted to their God. In feudalism feriod of Priangan the ronggeng as apersonal symbol. During this period ibing keurseus appeared as a new version of tayuban bystressing on aesthetic movement appearance. At last the ronggeng unappeared because of its ignorance to the etic norm of religion.Keywords: the ronggeng, continuities, the changing function.

Trollism, Reality Hunger, and Vulnerability. Trolls in film and literature in the 2000’s

Abstract Trolls have become increasingly salient in contemporary Nordic film and literature. This article sets up to understand the dissemination of cinematic and literary trolls of the 2000’s by providing a comparative analysis of three contemporary texts: the Norwegian mockumentary Trollhunter (André Øvredal, 2010) and two fantasy novels, Troll: A Love Story by Finnish writer Johanna Sinisalo (2000) and Stallo by Swedish author Stefan Spjut (2012). In addition to comparing contemporary trolls to more established troll conceptualizations from Nordic folklore and children’s literature, I will also analyze trolls in a larger cultural and socio-political context by tying them to aesthetic movements such as the reality hunger in contemporary Scandinavian art and the vulnerability of the contemporary socio-political moment.

Robert Frost's ambivalence: Borders and boundaries in poetic and political discourse

Phrases from Robert Frost's well-known poem “Mending Wall” are often used to frame discussions of borders in academic and political discourse. Used by some to justify the construction of physical barriers, others have used excerpts from the poem to fundamentally question the truism it appears to project. In light of recent interest in borders, our paper returns to Frost's full poem and its contexts in order to define, theorize, and critically mobilize what we take to be a useful ambivalence regarding fences. We use Frost's formulations to address the universal difficulty of moving beyond the borders of our daily lives, whether imposed at the edges of the nation-state, inscribed in our social relations, or inferred within the formal dimensions of a poem. Working at the crossroads of political geography, psychoanalytic theory, and literary analysis we argue that addressing the central role of borders in our lives and Frost's deep ambivalence about fences and borders is a useful step in any political and aesthetic movement forward. We cannot be “good neighbors” in other words or even good co-inhabitants until and unless we acknowledge that we are ambivalent not only toward the Other, but also about the very concept of borders and boundaries itself. Ideas presented about ambivalence provide border scholars and political geographers with an opportunity to re-evaluate our positionality and recognize how our own humanity intersects with that of others.