Aesthetic Project Research Articles

Odyssey Renewed

The first home video-gaming console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972. Its limited graphical capacities led Magnavox to ship it with a number of plastic overlays for the user's television that would admit a little variety into the then relatively crude gaming experience, limited to a built-in, Pong-like game. Computer and video games have come a long way since then, but it often seems as if critical approaches to gaming have continued shuffling through these plastic films, taking transformations of the screen, or on-screen events, for the whole of the gaming experience. It seems to me that reflection has been paralysed, becoming a discourse of regulation as it revolves around anxieties about gender, violence and narrative. I'd like to explore these anxieties as they've emerged in a few places, and then see if I can articulate the beginnings of an approach that might afford us a more complex, less pessimistic aesthetics of gaming.

The aesthetics of illness: narrative, horror and the sublime

First‐person accounts of life‐threatening or terminal illness appear frequently in the academic literature and in the media. This paper takes up the question of how these accounts might provide, for their authors, a sense of coherence and freedom, and for their readers a grasp of suffering and its potential. By focusing upon the ‘horrors’ integral to such accounts, the argument is made that such horrors are basic to the sufferer’s symbolisation of an illness‐world. This world, rather like the adventure, is torn from life, grounded in the sensuous fragments through which its elusory powers are expressed. Seen as the problematisation of life as a work of freedom, the illness account can then be analysed as an aesthetic project. The paper discusses this proposal, distinguishing between aesthetics and aestheticisation as social phenomena. It uses this distinction to make a critical observation upon attempts to understand suffering in the modern world in terms of power or of myth.

Hypermedia, Eternal Life, and the Impermanence Agent

We look to media as memory, and a place to memorialize, when we have lost. Hypermedia pioneers such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush envisioned the ultimate media within the ultimate archive—with each element in continual flux, and with constant new addition. Dynamism without loss. Instead we have the Web, where “Not Found” is a daily message. Projects such as the Internet Archive and Afterlife dream of fixing this uncomfortable impermanence. Marketeers promise that agents (indentured information servants that may be the humans of About.com or the software of “Ask Jeeves”) will make the Web comfortable through filtering—hiding the impermanence and overwhelming profluence that the Web's dynamism produces. The Impermanence Agent—a programmatic, esthetic, and critical project created by the author, Brion Moss, a.c. chapman, and Duane Whitehurst— operates differently. It begins as a storytelling agent, telling stories of impermanence, stories of preservation, memorial stories. It monitors each user's Web browsing, and starts customizing its storytelling by weaving in images and texts that the user has pulled from the Web. In time, the original stories are lost. New stories, collaboratively created, have taken their place.

Haunting Transcendence: The Strategy of Ghosts in Bataille and Breton

An examination of the trope of the ghost in Andre Breton's Nadja (1928) and Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'ceil (1928) [1] enables one characterize both the political urgency of the authors' aesthetic projects in the late 1920s and 1930s and the public acrimony that erupted between them during that time. [2] The trope of the ghost was resonant for them in part because of its powerful and influential utilization by Marx and Engels, who begin their Manifesto with the declaration A specter is haunting Europe-- the specter of Communism. They continue: It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself (8). The publication of the communists' beliefs, which haunted the capitalistic structure of Europe, made the individual communist plain and visible. Many ghosts circulate in the novels of Breton and Bataille, but neither writer trusts these specters anchor a Marxist enterprise. Instead, they use the ghost as a way of considering the boundaries of conventional identity. Both find that the economic crisis of capitalism is bound up in sexual and gender factors that are difficult channel into a single political movement. By examining the definitions, operations, and formulations of ghosts in the fiction of Bataille and Breton, one sees how differently they configure the political value of art. Whereas Breton uses the metaphor of the ghost dramatize the subject's dissolution as he tries escape ideology, Bataille uses the ghost examine the ideological terms through which both subjectivity and the threat of subjective dissolution are realized. The ghosts in Breton reflect a hopeful potential for art transcend psychiatric formulation and economic ideology. Bataille's ghosts deny transcendence and reflect a trace of the old sense of the word gho st: to wound, tear, pull pieces (OED). Breton formulates the identity of Nadja thus: Who am I? If this once were rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount knowing whom 'haunt' (Nadja 11). Nadja, whom the narrator initially haunts and who eventually haunts him, demonstrates the central points of Breton's manifestoes. In his preface for a reprint of the Manifesto of Surrealism, he writes: simply believe that between my thought, such as it appears in what material people have been able read that has my signature affixed it, and which the true nature of my thought involves in something but precisely what do not yet know, there is a world, an imperceptible world of phantasms. (ix) The believing subject is stranded between two ideal points of a cause--effect sequence: the author and the text, or the author's intention and the text in which the intention is communicated. For Breton, the phantoms circulating in the area between the ostensibly stable poles of author and novel afford an ironic self-recognition. Breton's subject becomes a shuttlecock, batted between the cause and effect of the author and the text (or the text and the author). Although the notion of an author and a text may blur in the subject's confusion, this does not reflect merely a reversal of agency, but instead a complication of the preconditions necessary in speaking of Breton's subject. Subjectivity, or the self-recognizing me, relies on this tension between the I (or the public, authoring self) and the text. For Breton, phantoms fluctuating between these formerly stable poles of subjective intent and textual product represent symptoms be monitored in probing the subject. This erosion of subjective certainty ironically corresponds with a determination maintain the subject's autonomy in the face of stifling convention. Breton is not abandoning agency, but instead attempting reject the drastically determining nature of political, social, and economic ideologies. …

Subcondylar fracture of the mandible: An endoscopic-assisted technique

The treatment of displaced mandibular subcondylar fractures has been controversial. Nonsurgical management with maxillomandibular fixation rarely achieves fracture reduction. Functional adaptation to the altered condylar mechanics is the mainstay of conservative treatment. However, the persistent shortened ramus height and malreduced condyle leaves a structurally disadvantaged mandible with increased risk of oromasticatory dysfunction, unappealing loss of aesthetic chin projection, and deviant jaw motion with potential for late internal derangement of the contralateral temporomandibular joint. Open fracture repair has been advocated as a reliable method of anatomically restoring condylar position and mandibular height. However, established methods of open surgical repair have not been popular because of the risk of facial nerve transection, external facial scarring, impaired fracture visualization, difficult dissection, and fixation. Using endoscopic visual enhancement with an intraoral method of fracture reduction and rigid fixation, the disadvantages traditionally associated with open subcondylar fracture repair have been minimized. More importantly, anatomic fracture reduction with restoration of normal condylar mechanics and immediate jaw motion can be reliably achieved with most adult extracapsular noncomminuted subcondylar fractures. Premorbid oromasticatory function,esthetic chin projection, and dynamic jaw motion can be achieved within minimal risks. Endoscopic subcondylar fracture repair has been efficacious at functional, aesthetic, and radiographic restoration of the mandible without postoperative maxillomandibular fixation.

Technologies of the Self and the Aesthetic Project of Alternative Health

Utilizing ethnographic materials and data from thirty-eight interviews, this article investigates the relevance of alternative health bodily regimes as a source of involvement in public life. These regimes, we argue, have an aesthetic core, a quest for perfect harmony and balance, that step by step makes people available for participation in public life. The article seeks to overcome the neglect of aesthetic sources of participation in public life as well as the neglect of the body as a symbol of risk and a source of resistance to dominant institutional arrangements. Foucault's later writings on “technologies of the self” are used to interpret alternative health regimes and open up their politicizing potential.

Pastoral and Masque at Ludlow

Our two major categories for defining Milton's Ludlow Maske — as masque and as pastoral — do not coexist very comfortably. The generic `split' between them only appears to be solved by subordinating one kind to the other (Rosemond Tuve, for example, even says, `given the genre, we expect pastoral elements' [133]). As a description, `pastoral masque' harbours paradox if not actual contradiction. The theory behind both the poetic and moral absolutes of the masque is Neoplatonism, with its sharp dichotomy between body and soul and its clear rejection of this world for another. Pastoral, on the other hand, builds its meanings in this world, most notably on the relationships among the creatures (usually men, shepherds) who live here. The masque's emphasis on `things subjected to understanding ... [above] those which are objected to sense' predisposes use of a personification allegory based on emblematic or other iconographical material that facilitates a rather simple didacticism. Pastoral, by reinforcing a second or counter-impulse of the masque, the drive to social integration that represents its formal closure, becomes in effect a way of complicating and even interrogating the stark outlines of the masque's aesthetic project.

Formalism and the Return to the Body: Stein's and Fornes's Aesthetic of Significant Form

r 1 o open the question, as Shoshana Felman once prefaced a I famous volume, let me begin with a modernist text on form. In JL. The Meaning of Art, the art critic Herbert Read writes: Form, though it can be analyzed into intellectual terms like measure, balance, rhythm and harmony, is really intuitive in origin; it is not an intellectual product. It is rather emotion directed and defined, and when we describe art as 'the will to form' we are not imagining an exclusively intellectual activity, but rather an exclusively instinctive one. . . . Frankly, I do not know how we are to judge form except by the same instinct that creates it.1 It is the thinking, reading, and judgment of form that will concern me in the following pages, in an inquiry with a specific as well as a more general motivation. Generally (and schematically) speaking, it appears that current critical approaches to form run the risk of falling into either of two traps: the modernist trap of mysticism/metaphysics, or the postmodernist trap of the empty gesture, the attention to form which has exhausted, or is about to exhaust, its potential for significance. Specifically, such limitations of critical discourse seem to apply with particular relevance to the work of Gertrude Stein and Maria Irene Fornes, two writers for the theater whose aesthetic projects are in many ways related, and who appear to me to be somewhat awkwardly posi tioned in current critical discourse, between a politicized postmodernist project and a formalism generally held to be deficient. Examining these writers together may bring more clearly the nature of their attention to form as well as serve to reopen more generally the question of form, its significance and its possible reading effects. This pairing off of Stein and Fornes may come as a surprise to some, especially in view of the critical tradition of considering Fornes (as opposed to Stein) a directly political writer, whose realism, if stylized, is always unquestionably referential, concerned with the world out there. As commentators before me have noted, however, Fornes's consistent attention (whether as writer or director) to the stage as visual and auditive field defines her as formalist at least in that sense of the word, and sets up the connection to Stein. Another less noted connection

Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-Modern Moment

When Robert Penn Warren wrote his highly ironic line Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical (321), he compressed into five deceptively economic feet nearly a half-millennium of hegemonic philosophy, both its rhetorical strategies and underlying presuppositions. Buzzard, carrier of the ostracizing power of discourse, the trope which declares the otherness of the (Nielsen 117), does not simply assert inferiority but reconstructs and reaffirms the mutually exclusive mythic realms white and black must inhabit in order to sustain five hundred years of radical inequity. As ametaphysical, (or, better yet, blackness) must exist beyond the aesthetic, beyond the redemptive possibilities central to the humanistic tradition of arts and letters. As fictive signifier of the nonwhite (Nielsen 10), blackness serves as a repository of reifying antitheses: anti-intellectual, illiterate, subhuman, and ahistorical. All in all, Warren constructs a blackness thoroughly banished to the margins of the human community, a blackness of radical absence proclaiming the final and ultimate abstraction of damning eternal sameness. Indeed Warren (and by extension what I will call hegemonic or conventional modernism) achieves much of his coherence through the assertion of objectified blackness, through a tropic vocabulary of necessarily reductive poses impervious to change over time (see Nielsen, North). Yet it is precisely the cultural force of these poses and the pervasive nature of the objectifying language which would drive James Weldon Johnson, William Pickens, Carter G. Woodson, and even W. E. B. Du Bois (in Conservation of Races) to advance a countering but often equally reductive discourse. Johnson's ragtime piano players, for example, are guided by their natural musical instinct and their extraordinary sense of rhythm; thus Johnson effectively reinscribes essentializing tropes in an attempt to assert a negro exceptionalism worthy of notice and, ultimately, of citizenship (20). The profound condensation of Warren's single line was not lost on Sterling A. Brown, whose famous retort some years later undermined entirely the conception of ahistorical blackness. His reply in a 1974 interview with Steven Jones, Cracker, your breed ain't exegetical, appropriates Warren's five-foot economy in order to parody both the sound and sense of his poetry. Through such signifying Brown points to a crucial blindness which makes possible an assertion of ametaphysicality. Signaling much more than a lack of specific exposition, Brown alludes to a profound illiteracy, a lack of attention to a broad corpus of texts and cultural idioms which assert African American complexity and change. So, too, Brown remained skeptical of these countering tropes on the part of New Negroes, tropes which could not account for the burgeoning complexities he found in Southern life. Positioning himself outside (or perhaps beyond) the two competing discourses, Brown questions the fundamental assumption (or acceptance) of ontological blackness, and so begins to formulate an Afromodernism (both a poetic vocabulary and a theory of folk culture) capable of exploring a more dynamic range in African American being. In short, Brown embarks upon an artistic and aesthetic project which fundamentally reconceives modernity. Appropriating contemporary notions concerning subjectivity and process, and applying them to a range of idiomatic expressions and rituals, Brown reworks the language and tropes he inherited in order to explore the inventive ways in which African Americans articulate their modernity; that is, express a presence, a historicity, an ongoing engagement with the contemporary moment. A reading of Odyssey of Big Boy, both within and beyond Southern Road, helps to illustrate Brown's larger concerns. Brown introduces Southern Road with an allusion to travel and experience, to independence, self-discovery, and the romantic possibilities of immortality. …

Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture (review)

216 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press By Michael Ugarte In the preface to his Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture, Michael Ugarte makes it clear he has written a book of literary criticism he wants readers to find intellectually engaging as well as pleasing. Ugarte has made a theoretically provocative, gracefully argued contribution to the study of urban Spanish literature from around the last decade of the nineteenth century to the first three decades or so of the twentieth. His treatment of Madrid literature (chiefly prose, with the exception of Valle-Inclán's esperpentos) introduces a fresh, fruitful way for Hispanists to approach Spanish literarure written at the dawn of Spain's modernity. It is also accessible to those in other fields conducting comparative studies. Across rhe disciplines, many intellectuals whose theories of culture have been closely tied to the historical have underestimated the importance of space, place and geography in artistic representation of all kinds. Ugarte, inspired in part by Walter Benjamins reading of nineteenth-century Paris, seeks to "lay bare the concrereness of culture, its materiality both in relation ro the commodity system and to the social practices of which it is both the producr and the producer " (15). The relarionship between Spanish urban history and rhe history of the Spanish nation-state is always a given in Ugarte's study. He draws (not uncritically) on other socially minded scholars such as RaymondWilliams, Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson, and fellow Hispanist Edward Baker in his interrogation of the role of history, gender, politics and economic relations in Spanish literary production at the turn of the century. His position is that history is an undeniable and concrete teality but at the same time he is sensitive to, as he states in his introduction, "the multifaceted, subjective, and quirky constructions of history conveyed through language. Indeed quirkiness (or marginality, and that which does not fit into the accepted categories) is precisely what leads me to read women's assimilations and representations of cities in conjunction or againsr those of the more-established male writers. In short, what follows is a doubleedged (and I hope problematic) attempt to offer a panoramic view of Madrid representation around 1900 and to create a tension in that very panoramic view by considering the glimpses, the writing rhar does not mesh easily with previously defined categories" (6-7). For Ugarte, therefore, the production of meaning is a social act within specific times and spaces whose understanding is impossible without historical considerations. Ugarte carefully selects authors who recreate city space as a replica not only of a locale but of an entire aesthetic project. The first chapter, "Reading Madrid's History," is a brief introduction to urban Madrid as represented by authors such as Larra, Mesonero Romanos, Galdós and Pardo Bazán. The second , "Urban Sociology and Narrative" provides close readings of parts of Baroja's Book Reviews 217 La lucha por la vida trilogy and El árbol de la ciencia, focusing on the authot's socioscientific worldview and his seemingly uncritical belief in reality and empirically verifiable truth. A woman reads and recreates Madrid in Chapter 3. Carmen de Burgos, writing at atound the same time as Virginia Woolf, is not entitely unlike her female characters whom at some point take charge of their urban environment. In Chapter 4 "the Bohemian frivolity of life in the street was both Ramon's trademark and his aspiration," (105) says Ugarte of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, whose works of supposed nonfiction (the greguerÃ-as) simultaneously contain a clash berween the mundane object of description and its seemingly transcendent value. Chapter 5 focuses primarily on "Madrid as esperpento," or the relarionship between an essentially urban Bohemia and modernism in selected works of Ramón MarÃ-a delValle-Inclán. "Madrid's Grand Country Bumpkin : AzorÃ-n" is the last chapter which deals wirh José MartÃ-nez Ruiz's recapturing of the Madrid of his more politically radical youth with specific attention to the dichotomy between country and city. This last chapter skillfully...

Werewere Liking: Pan/Artist and Pan-Africanism in the Theatre

The figure of Pan escapes definition. Should one even attempt to ascribe a gender? Try to seize him (or her) as the forest god and Pan will turn up as the spirit of fertile fields. Imagine Pan as an impish charmer and Pan transforms into a wily adversary. Pan is multiple and everywhere, englobing but also electrifying. Used as prefix, ‘pan’ imparts to political movements and aesthetic projects a Utopian vision, the progressive notion of broad-based co-operation and community. Yet ‘pan’ can also evoke a potentially discordant assembly.

Participatory Aesthetics: Reading Mallarmé and Joyce

PARTICIPATORY AESTHETICS: READING MALLARMÉ AND JOYCE Dudley M. Marchi 2Ju reste, tauteparok étant idée, Ce temps d'un langage universeCviendra, —Arthur "RimBaud, Letter ofMay 15, 1871 The polyvocaUsm of the word in Stéphane MaUarmé's Un Coup de dés n'abolira jamais le hasard and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake produces strategies of suggestion and provides an intertextual field in which to examine their interrelated writing projects. By suggestion is meant the evocation ofobjects as opposed to their naming—the attempt to extract a pluraUty of signification from language whereby readers coUaborate vicariously with the text in order to produce meaning. This aesthetic project is outlined by Manarme in Sur l'Evolution littéraire as follows: "choisir un objet et en dégager un état d'âme, par une série de déchiffrements"—the poet thus provides for the reader "cette joie déUcieuse de croire qu'Us créent" (Oeuvres Complètes 869). Joyce stresses the importance of "sound sense," of the maUeable tangibiUty of individual words, and most importantly of the attention demanded by the signifier, equal to that of the signified: Who in his heart doubts either that the facts offeminine clothiering are there all the time or that feminine fiction, strangerthan the facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Orthat one may be separated from the other? Or that both may then be contemplated simultaneously ? Orthat each maybetaken up and considered in turn apart from the other? (Finnegans Wake 109.30-35) One must thus consider the covering before what is inside. The signifier functions no longer as a window through which we have direct access to meaning, but displays semantic polyvalency and uncertainty that put Unguistic communication into question and subsequently invigorate the poetic experience. As CoUn MacCabe has stated: "It is this struggle between meaning and sound, between story and language, between male and female thatFinnegans Wake enacts, introducingthe reader to a world inwhichhisorherownlanguage cansuddenlyreveal new desires beneath old meanings as the material oflanguage forms and reforms" (25). Joyce is concerned with many ofthe same issues as MaUarmé, using different, yetrelated techniques. In examining some ofthe latter 's critical writings and portions of Un Coup de dés, then exploring points of contact with Finnegans Wake, we can better understand, even in their obvious differences , MaUarmé's and Joyce's paraUel strategies ofUterary production. MaUarmé, Uke Joyce, insists on the physicaUty of language, as well as on the instabiUty of Uterary interpretation, and uses words to evoke Vol. 19 (1995): 76 THE COMPAKATIST diverse significations that continue nevertheless to belong to a central hermeneutic paradigm as inscribed by the text. The text can, issuing from its denotative meaning, generate many connotative ones whose number is virtuaUy endless. MaUarmé condenses words, chooses syllables rich in resonance, embedding meaning in phonemes, etymologies, and resemblances to other words. Joyce explodes his into a carnival of portemanteaux and calembours—not to destroy words but to make them more powerful. In both Un Coup de dés and Finnegans Wake (as weU as in Ulysses) signifieds palpitate inside signifiers, rendering meaning not something to be recovered but pursued. Both writers play on the phonetic and Uteral senses of words to disrupt them and provide texts radicaUy scriptible in design, one condensing, constantly voiding the page oflanguage, the other expanding, endlessly filling it. The scriptible quaUty oftheir work produces a thematics of deferral that perpetuates the reader's continual struggle toward self-affirmation. MaUarmé maintains that there should be greater self-assertion on the part of the reader in the Uterary experience, leaving the form of quotidian communication , the transmission of dogmatic knowledge, to popular writers, poUticians, journaUsts, and merchants. He thus caUs for a gesture of performance to actively produce textual signification. He also distinguishes between the referential and emotive functions of literature —language is no longer solely in the service of social exchange, but is a special activity attentive to itself and to its informed consumers. The message becomes intransitive—the traditional relationship between content and expression is dismantled in the production of an open, polysemous mode of writing. This is certainly also the case with Finnegans...

Le projet esthétique de Beaumarchais

Pierre Hartmann : Beaumarchais's aesthetic project. The novelty and originality of Beaumarchais's dramatic language have long been recognised, but the importance of his poetic writings has often been underestimated. This article undertakes a new reading not only of his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux but also of the different prefaces he wrote for his theatrical works. This new perspective shows the existence of a coherent aesthetic project which reveals both a playwright convinced of Enlightenment philosophy and a writer involved in the political struggles of his time. At the centre of his aesthetic project is a democratic redefinition of the notion of the public which is the incarnation of "general opinion". Thus Figaro is the perfect representative of the nation and of that "frank and true gaiety" which aristocratic taste had expelled from the theatre ; Beaumarchais proposed to reinstate it, thus creating a sort of alliance between the "assembled public" and the innovating artist, a genius in Diderot's and perhaps already Hugo's sense.

Fernand Léger and the spectacle of objects

Abstract Fernand Leger customarily presented his own esthetic project in terms of a central modernist goal: the transformation of quotidian appearances into highly organized, intensified and formalized esthetic matter. The painter pursued this aim by isolating and sometimes fragmenting represented forms — industrial, organic or human - and deploying them in systems of comparison or opposition designed to suggest unexpected thematic and formal affinities. Leger called this visual scenario ‘object-spectacle.’ The idea of object-spectacle provided a logic for Leger's estheticism. The painter also offered this same concept — the artistic objectification of the mundane — as an intervention in modernist cultural politics. I propose, first, to investigate the concept of object-spectacle as the ideological crux of Leger's work and thought during the years between the two World Wars. Second, I will trace selected aspects of the critical debate surrounding that same concept as that debate took shape toward the mid-...

Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Use and Abuse of the Unborn Child

Franz Xaver Kroetz was arguably the most popular West German playwright of the seventies, and at the same time, one of the most explicitly political authors of that decade. His work sought to confront West German society with the victims of its own economic successes. And yet his aesthetic strategies and thematic emphases always seemed to hamper the realization of his political ambitions. Works of art that are generated on the basis of an explicitly political aesthetic are generally just as self-contradictory as are works of art that have no pretense to an expressed political foundation, and it is at points of inner contradiction that an analysis of an explicitly political aesthetic strategy can often be most productive. Such an analysis of Kroetz's overall political aesthetic project uncovers contradictions between his avowedly radical leftist position throughout the seventies and early eighties and his presentation of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and birth in his plays of that period. This article examines the following questions: How do the discrepancies between Kroetz's political aesthetic objectives and his perception of socio-political realities manifest themselves within one specific thematic area such as pregnancy? How does he construct the (unborn) child to crystallize certain views on contemporary society or to further his own political, aesthetic project? Where does the unborn child fit into his overall portrayal of interpersonal relations generally and relations between the sexes specifically? Kroetz became the dramatic sensation of the West German stage when two of his early one-act plays premiered to a scandalized German audience in 1971. One scene that met with vehement vocal opposition was the onstage attempt by one of the characters in Heimarbeit to perform an abortion on herself. The view of a young woman wielding a knitting needle with the explicit intent of using it for a home-abortion, albeit facing away from the audience, proved too much for staid West German theatre audiences. The attempted abortion incited intense protest within the West German public, and the demonstrations clearly expressed the public's outrage with the author's work. Yet the scandal itself may very well

Beautiful Statues, Beautiful Men: The Abjection of Feminine Imagination in Lessing's Laokoon

In his Laokoon essay, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing concludes that “[b]ei uns scheinet sich die zarte Einbildungskraft der Mütter nur in Ungeheuern zu äuβern” ‘in modern times the susceptible imagination of mothers seems to express itself solely in monsters.‘ In contrast, masculine imagination yields beautiful statues, beautiful men, and subsequently harmonious cultures. The idealization of classical sculpture displaces the generative power of the mother, who, if not totally impotent, is the source of the fragmented, deformed body. The Laokoon text incorporates and abjects the fragmented body of the woman. It is ironic that she represents both the void and the only object capable of filling the subjective vacuum. Stable masculine subjectivity is contingent on the abjection of woman and yet unattainable without her recovery. Accordingly, the Laokoon is based on the abjection of the feminine while simultaneously stuffed full of fragments of the woman's body and imagination. Lessing's aesthetic project fosters the circumscription of feminine imagination by the myth of the unifying function of masculine fantasy.

Violence and prospect-refuge values.

Appleton's prospect-refuge theory of landscape aesthetics is joined to Kupfer's treatment of the more contemporary forms of violence as aesthetic projects. The insufficiency in the modern urban environment of good opportunities to see without being seen stresses the present and near future into heightened feelings of vulnerability, adding with untoward social circumstance to activate more extreme measures to secure an advantage in our dealings with the world. From the standpoint of prospect-refuge theory, violence directed to asserting the self as someone who matters is a misbegotten effort to unstress the present and near future. Violence valued only for the aesthetic satisfaction in dismembering persons and things to formlessness suggests an attempt to kill time. As the likelihood of violent incidents increases, revisions in the prospect-refuge map together with institutional reforms become more urgent.

Criticism, Literary History, and the Paradigm: The Education of Henry Adams

Literary historians have persistently regarded The Education of Henry Adams as a “paradigmatic” text. While “historical explanations“ stress the book's historical achievement, “critical explications” portray it as a failure of historical consciousness that achieves its success in the ahistorical arenas of aesthetic integration and imaginative projection. To relate the products of “explication” with the aims of “historical explanation,” I regard the work's true “paradigm achievement” as an inquiry into “historical being.” For Adams this achievement embodies disciplinary formulation and professional commitment and thus coordinates historical speculation and self-cultivation. One must assess the ethical density and cultural significance of the text before explaining its historical identity. The Education, despite its origin in epistemological chaos, makes the past eternally relevant to the present; for it is a personal and theoretical discovery of how the narrative structures of history and selfhood create the possibilities of individual and social life.