Aesthetic Project Research Articles

Experience and the artist's body: resisting the Uber-artist construct in socially engaged performance

Looking back over the past 20 years of my practice, the vista is littered with ambiguities of process and form within socially engaged performance. Sifting through the debris, one question arises: what have I been doing?; another might be: what have I been making? What feels relevant to me is the aggregate of my experiences; the who I am. With the current sector creep towards instrumentalising arts for social agendas, the value and relevance of experience ebbs. Demands on artists extend well beyond aesthetic skill, process facilitation and project management. In this essay, I critique the risk within socially engaged practice of art becoming subservient to social agendas and consider how the shift towards an uber-artist construct renders the sector unsustainable.

Malcolm de Chazal’s Sens-plastique as Aesthetic Remainder

Malcolm de Chazal’s Sens-plastique as Aesthetic Remainder Alexander Dickow L’idiot bêle du regard. * Nuages bas servent de presse-papier au vent. * L’écorce est le crâne des plantes; et la sève en est la matière grise. * Seul Le Feu Peut Lécher Sa Propre Langue. * L’huître En S’ouvrant La bouche Se Parlait Dans L’oreille. * Les lèvres sont le potier des sons. Comme des doigts appuyés sur l’argile, les lèvres moulent les sons que leur transmettent les cordes vocales à vitesses variantes, autour du pivot flexible de la langue.1 [End Page 109] One is best introduced to the Mauritian Francophone writer Malcolm de Chazal by encountering his work, such as the aphorisms above, before his history. Neither the details of the writer’s life as a telephone serviceman, nor his role as a self-styled visionary and eccentric provide much insight into the strangeness of Chazal’s thousands of aphorisms and poems, a strangeness that in the 1940s prompted the immediate admiration and praise of the likes of André Breton, Jean Paulhan and Francis Ponge.2 While this sudden fame has assured Chazal a relative place in literary history, that place remains on its periphery: like other writers far from Paris, far from the center, Chazal is made to play the at once prestigious and marginalizing role of literary Other. Such writers are caught in a machinery that cannot fully integrate them as a working part. Their foreignness makes them hypervisible as Other, yet institutionally invisible, relegating them to the uncomfortable space of the footnote and the passing allusion.3 Chazal’s critical reception has reproduced this double bind in a peculiar way: criticism has privileged his most obscure work rather than the works for which he acquired notoriety. This notoriety arose when Jean Paulhan, his curiosity piqued by the Mauritian poet’s strange work, arranged for Gallimard to publish Chazal’s Sens-plastique in 1948. To the literary world (as opposed to the public at large), this collection of some two thousand aphorisms or mini-essays remains Chazal’s signature work, and the only one to have been completely translated into English.4 Shortly after its release, André Breton would publically praise Sens-plastique; Jean Dubuffet and others noticed and extolled the book, while Ponge compared its importance to that of Lautréamont’s work.5 This brief moment of fame helped establish Sens-plastique as an admired curiosity up to the present day. Some part of Chazal’s readers also know the longer essays of La Vie filtrée (1949), the second and last of Chazal’s books to be published by Gallimard. Yet in-depth critical discussions of Chazal’s work do not generally focus on Sens-plastique, nor on later aphoristic volumes like Sens magique (1957). Instead, they involve charting Chazal’s vast mysticism, developed from the 1950s to the 1970s in books such as Petrusmok: roman mythique (1951), Pentateuque (1953), or L’Évangile de l’eau (1952), among countless others. A relative invisibility, or minoration, of Sens-plastique and the aphoristic corpus results within Chazalian critical discourse.6 In short, Chazal’s critical reception largely runs counter to his broader readership, for whom the aphoristic corpus remains Chazal’s principal legacy. Of what, then, does this legacy consist? Chazal’s aphorisms and poems seem to push the logic of decoration to its furthest confines. His stunning [End Page 110] conceits display the superlative inanity of a fireworks show: all gratuitous spectacle, without consequence or implication beyond themselves. As I will argue in this essay, this aesthetic purity, this nearly subconceptual quality effectively remove Chazal’s work from the realm of critical visibility, making his aphorisms almost philosophically and ethically irrecuperable. In other words, what makes Chazal hypervisible—his singular investigation into aesthesis—is also what renders him, in a sense, invisible. Chazal’s mystical discourse represents an attempt to rationalize the aphorisms’ purely aesthetic project by artificially grafting a metaphysical project onto it. But Chazal’s mystical, metaphysical project, in the end, cannot effectively recuperate the aesthetic project. Along with works like Sens magique, Sens-plastique constitutes a critical remainder, unaccounted...

Comparison, Allegory, and the Address of “Global” Realism (The Part about Bolaño)

Roberto Bolaño’s work repeatedly asks readers to compare various entities (continents, national literatures, ethnicities, the realms of culture and politics). The essay reads this obsessive comparativism as the first step in a totalizing aesthetic project, one tied to Bolaño’s preoccupation with the twentieth century’s supreme comparand of state crime, National Socialism. Bolaño’s seeming promotion of Nazism to mythical status in fact serves the more urgent geopolitical project of mapping a continental American history with US political power firmly at its center. The essays reads Bolaño’s fascist preoccupation—visible from early works like the coauthored Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Advice from a Morrison disciple to a Joyce fan) and The Third Reich—in terms of Erich Auerbach’s elaboration of figura, the mode of medieval exegesis according to which Old Testament events lose none of their historical validity once they are interpreted as figures for New Testament events to come. Bolaño’s employment of this arcane hermeneutic device records the insistent geopolitical closure that has been registered across a variety of cultural realms under the name of globalization. This obscurely but palpably unified world is Bolaño’s subject in 2666, which locates an Auerbachian interpretive provocation on the geopolitical ground of the US-Mexico border (one of the most spectacularly visible dividing lines between global North and South). Bolaño’s spatializing of Auerbachian figura offers a potent model for a contemporary comparative practice, one that recognizes the necessity of mapping totality precisely in recording the geopolitical obstacles to doing so.

Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life by Omri Moses (review)

Reviewed by: Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life by Omri Moses Sarah Posman Omri Moses. Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. 296 pp. $65.00 (cloth). At first sight this book seems to be out of tune with the new modernism studies and its agenda of both recalibrating what we understand by “modernism” (a radically expanded field) and our methods of reading modernist texts (reading “badly”) (see Mao and Walkowitz). Moses deals with canonical modernist authors who share a commitment to the intricacies of psychology (23). He moves from the late prose of Henry James (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl), past Gertrude Stein (“Melanctha” from Three Lives [1903] and the chapter on Henry James in the late Four in America [1933]) to the early poems of T. S. Eliot. His focus on “character” and its relation to ethics returns us to one of the classic themes in literary criticism. But of course Out of Character is a wayward title, signaling that the book wants to move away from the well-trodden paths. The feat of this study is that it constructs a complex story of dynamic continuities—between different authors, between realism and modernism, classic and vanguard ways of reading, individual and community, the intimate and the public—that accentuates rather than downplays the innovative agendas of modernist writing. In engaging perceptively with vitalism, furthermore, Moses makes an important contribution to recent work in modernism studies that is reconsidering vitalist thought as a fruitful intellectual context (see Burwick and Douglass; Jones; Ardoin, Gontarski, and Mattison). Moses’s path “out of character” leads him via George Eliot’s, Joseph Conrad’s, and Herman Melville’s approaches to character into the “psychic life” explored by James, Stein, and Eliot. He argues that where, in realist fiction, character was grounded in an overt (Eliot) or mysterious (Conrad) consistent system, Melville’s poetic of inconsistency paved the way for modernist experiment with agile, adjusting [End Page E-1] selves. Where Melville veers toward a sterile inconsistency, however, the modernists’ fascination with continuous change over time—inspired by, according to Moses, primarily Darwin, William James, and Bergson—enables them to invent new modes of relationality: interest for James, habit for Stein, and voice for Eliot. Moses’s stress on the self as category and his attention to the question of how the exploration of affective constellations by both authors and readers relates to a communal endeavor align his project with other recent work in both affect studies and literary criticism (see, for example, Ngai; also Izenberg). In the first chapter, before embarking on the case studies, Moses tackles “personhood beyond personality.” Here he positions his approach to a dynamic modernist self in relation to a range of other disciplines and methodologies, calling for a critical perspective that brings to light frictions in modernist thinking rather than staging a critical version of the radical modernist “make it new” story. He argues, for example, that the modernist discourse around impersonality has often been understood in too-rigid terms. Rather than an attempt to erase a self, the concept of impersonality should be seen as part of a complex psychological enterprise, with authors relating different psychological templates from ego psychology to behaviorism. On the questions of psychology and ethics (how does individual life relate to the good life?) and of self and history (how determining is context?) Moses repeats this gesture of moving beyond an either/or logic. Concerning the former, for example, he suggests we understand ethical life analogously to an artistic or aesthetic project, with creativity and the ability to change and adapt as inherent to the process. Fictional ethical life is important to our “real” ethical deliberations, furthermore, not because it promotes useful identification through exemplarity but rather because its very fictionality enables us to deal with decision-making on another level. Fiction, and the real emotions that it elicits, makes it possible for us to access a mode of reflection that stands apart from efficient or productive living. Moses’s dynamic stance and his attention to non-instrumental modes of reflection are informed by the vitalist framework he uses. In the introduction he...

An Idiom for India

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers, consequently, understand each other most of the time, but not all of the time, though they can never read each other's texts. Their shared space, Hindustani, finds no official recognition in India or in Pakistan, but it denotes, particularly in the early twentieth century, an aspiration for Hindu–Muslim unity: the dream of a shared, syncretic culture, crafted from the speech genres of everyday life. Beginning with the colonial project of Hindustani, the essay focuses on a discussion of the works of early twentieth-century writers like Nehru, Premchand and Sa'adat Hasan Manto. I argue that the aesthetic project of Hindustani attempted to produce, not a common language, but a common idiom: a set of shared conventions, phrases and forms of address, which would be legible to Indians from all religions and all regions. By theorizing Hindustani as an idiom, and not a language, I explain its persistence in Bollywood cinema well after its abandonment in all literary and official registers. Bollywood, I argue, is Hindustani cinema, not only because of its use of a mixed Hindi–Urdu language in its dialogues, but also because of its development of a set of clearly recognizable, easily repeatable conventions that can surmount linguistic differences.

Race, Writing, and Don Juan

MARK CANUEL Race, Writing, and DonJuan T here are many ways in which lord byron’s narrator defends the cause of slavery’s abolition in Don Juan. We frequently read the speaker’s pronouncements of political allegiance to the cause of William Wilberforce, the greatest parliamentary leader on behalf of abolition and the “moral Washington of Africa”; in the same vein, the speaker vilifies false Christian “bigots” who make their “pure creed” into the “sanction” for slavery’s “ill.”1 In this essay, however, I want to show that Byron’s op­ position to slavery and the slave trade is a great deal more complicated than we might think ifwe were merely to take at face value the poet-narrator’s claims to be “born for opposition” (15.22). While generally voicing sup­ port for abolition (a support that Byron openly expressed elsewhere), Don Juan nevertheless depends upon a subtle yet profound logic that insistently privileges the purity and beauty of white bodies. This is not because the poem merely expresses a racist ideology, but rather because its inter­ twined configurations ofpolitical and aesthetic value are inseparable from a self-consciously constructed racial hierarchy. Byron is fully aware ofthis hi­ erarchy’s artificiality, but this awareness cannot detract from the sway of race over the poem, and from the sway ofrace within a cultural history that the poem brilliantly and comically instantiates and endorses. The work of David Theo Goldberg has shown how conceptions of rights (which include rights expounded upon in abolitionist discourse) have been historically inseparable from raced conceptions of the political subject. Such conceptions have aimed at discriminating between those sub­ jects who are, and those who are not, capable of civilization and selfgovernment .2 Helen Heran Jun has continued this line of argument to show how even recent twentieth- and twenty-first-century views of citi­ zenship depend upon exclusionary understandings of racial difference.3 1. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto 14, stanza 82; canto 15, stanza 18. All references to the poem are from Jerome J. McGann, ed., Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-1993), vol. 5; hereafter cited in the text by canto and stanza. 2. Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: WileyBlackwell , 1993), 14-40. 3. Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (New York: New York University Press, 2011). SiR, 54 (Fall 2015) 303 304 MARK CANUEL Such accounts, and others like them, collectively show how attempts at lib­ eral inclusiveness depend upon still deeper inequalities; to some extent, they therefore might lead us to see why Byron’s poem could appear to be politically progressive in some respects, even while it compromises or com­ plicates its commitments in others. Still more than even these accounts al­ low, however, I wish to show how and why white bodies are so crucial for the poem’s aesthetic project. It turns out that the crux of Byron’s Don Juan—its celebrated ability to represent “life’s infinite variety” (15.19)— depends upon the preeminence ofwhite flesh. Whiteness is the ground for registering gorgeous articulations of features on the body’s alabaster sur­ faces; whiteness is the condition for capturing the seductive altering hues that demarcate mood and solicit desire. Simultaneously, and most impor­ tant, the white body is analogized at key moments to the poet-narrator’s own work—printed on white “foolscap”—as ifpoetic composition and the raced subject were finally inseparable. By exploring the dynamics of race in the poem’s political aesthetics, I embark on a discussion that merges with a long-standing interest, among many ofByron’s critics, in his political or ideological affiliations. For a few readers, Byron adheres to the most traditional of values. Malcolm Kelsall argues that, in the Whig tradition, he upholds “aristocratic oligarchy”;4 Marilyn Butler, though acknowledging his sympathies with less conserva­ tive causes, also sees him as a “liberal” who is only “superficially rebel­ lious.”5 The vast majority of critics take his rebellions more seriously, how­ ever. From the time of the poem’s appearance, Byron and his publisher John Murray feared prosecution...

Animating, Entertaining, Educating: A Dialogue between Oliver Gaycken and Ariana Killoran

The field of animation studies has begun to move beyond the canonical works of entertainment animation (from Bray to Disney to Pixar) to examine the myriad other forms that animation has taken over the course of the twentieth century. Many of these alternative kinds of animation are part of the nontheatrical domain of media production: moving images produced for exhibition outside of commercial cinemas, that is, schools, museums, laboratories, public health campaigns, and so forth. Because these forms of animation have only recently become an area of scholarly interest, very little has been written about them within cinema and media studies. This interview with a current practitioner offers an opportunity to get a sense of the details of one person's animation practice and to ask how this animator perceives her relationship to her field, both in the present and historically.The following interview with Ariana Killoran, an artist and animator who has created a series of Flash animations for the personal genomics company 23andMe, comes out of a 2012 workshop at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. The interview continues a conversation initiated there about the intersection of science and animation (the other participants on the workshop panel were Kirsten Ostherr, editor of this issue, and Scott Curtis and Robert Lue, whose conversation also appears in this issue). The interview with Killoran took place over e-mail in two phases beginning in the summer of 2013 and concluding in the summer of 2014.Introduction by Ariana KilloranIn 2006, I began creating Flash movies that teach basic genetics, human prehistory, and genetic disease risk. They were not created for students, though they are used by thousands of students and teachers all over the world. They were created for the customers, actual and potential, of 23andMe, a personal genotyping service. 23andMe has a product heavy on both science and technology. From a customer's saliva sample, the company takes over half a million genetic data points (a series of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs) and provides them with information about their personal ancestry. Until recently, customers also received information about their individual health risks, drug responses, and physical traits. In order to engage with all this information, customers needed basic genetic literacy. And to be a responsible company, 23andMe needed to effectively educate its customers, because misunderstanding information about disease risk, for example, could lead customers to take action or inaction with grave results. My challenge was to create educational materials that would entice customers to self-educate, to study when there was no test. I used film because I didn't want this education to feel like work.The first films I made for 23andMe comprised a four-part Genetics 101 series. They look like I drew them with my foot, and that is not far off, as I had almost no digital illustration or animation skills at the time. But I like to think that this aesthetic projects accessibility. Genetics is complex and intimidating material, so in this film series the visuals are stripped down with no backgrounds to clear out any distractions that might impede understanding. The Human Prehistory 101 series is more story driven, about our distant ancestors in distant environments, so the films have a richer visual language, though they retain the same general feel.Before a certain age, sometime in high school or just afterward for most of us, science seems knowable. When we are very young, our daily discoveries are almost entirely scientific. When we are a little older, we are experts on dinosaurs, volcanoes, planets, zoology, how to burn things with magnifying glasses, and magnets. And to explain science, we use everything at our disposal-we perform skits, create dioramas, construct three-sided poster boards, and build models. And then somewhere between ages sixteen and nineteen, a chasm appears. …

CREATIVITY AND AESTHETIC APPLIED TO ECOLOGICAL EDUCATION / KŪRYBIŠKUMAS IR ESTETIKA EKOLOGINĖJE EDUKACIJOJE

The present research attempts to reveal how ecological (environmental) education could be conveyed through aesthetic, visual art and various creative projects. Over a long time philosophers had developed the implementation of art as a powerful tool of education. Writers, painters themselves also quite often understood their mission as a didactical one which may support and improve system of education of their time. The author will exhibit various reasons why creative education performed with the help of arts were supportive to a cultivation of ecological skills. Different aspects of Chinese thought, particularly Daoism, are presented through their potential usability for contemporary creative education of ecological topics. The author also highlights some limits and difficulties of using Chinese philosophical ideas for contemporary Western culture. Finally various creative projects used in raising ecological awareness are analyzed on their efficiency for education. Santrauka Straipsnyje nagrinėjama, kokiais aspektais ekologinė edukacija gali būti vykdoma pasitelkus estetiką, vizualiuosius menus ir įvairius kūrybinius projektus. Jau prieš daugelį šimtmečių filosofai bei pedagogikos teoretikai pastebėjo ir pabrėžė, kad menas yra galingas edukacinis įrankis. Rašytojai, dailininkai taip pat neretai jausdavosi turintys didaktinę misiją ir siekė plėtoti bei tobulinti savo laikmečio edukacinę sistemą. Straipsnyje nagrinėjamos įvairios priežastys, lemiančios, kad kūrybinė edukacija vykdoma pasitelkus įvairius menus ir geba efektyviai formuoti ekologinius įgūdžius. Taip pat nagrinėjami įvairūs kinų mąstymo tradicijų aspektai, daugiausia dėmesio sutelkiant ties daoizmo mąstymo tradicija, kuri gali būti sėkmingai panaudojama kūrybiškai taikant ekologinę edukaciją. Autorė atskleidžia kai kuriuos pavojus bei ribotumus, su kuriais susiduriama bandant kinų mąstymo tradicijose plėtojamas interpretacijas pritaikyti dabartinei Vakarų kultūrai. Taip pat parodoma, kaip įvairūs kūrybiniai projektai taikomi ugdant ekologinį žmonių sąmoningumą, svarstoma, kokios priežastys lemia jų populiarumą ir sėkmingumą. Reikšminiai žodžiai: estetika, kūrybinė edukacija, daoizmas, ekologinė edukacija, aplinka, vizualieji menai, Vakarų filosofija.

Aesthetic Radicalism: Langston Hughes’s Lost Translation of Federico García Lorca’s Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding

ABSTRACT: Langston Hughes’s long-lost translation of Federico García Lorca’s play Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding (1933) – Fate at the Wedding (1938) – demonstrates a synchronicity between two 1930s aesthetic radicals who shared a transnational perspective. Through his act of translation, Hughes not only perpetuates and amplifies Lorca’s concern with social issues but he uses his own version of Lorca’s total theatre, with its graphic and sound effects, to deploy a unique blend of avant-garde European and fringe modernist styles of the Latin American and Caribbean worlds he knew intimately. Hughes’s act of translation opens a politicized space in the play that reveals his own aesthetic project, wrought in terms of colour, vernacular discourse, and a hybrid notion of American musicality and culture. He thus melds his subversive message with Lorca’s own and highlights the latent radicalism of the Spanish playwright’s aesthetics and politics. At a time when he was intensely politicized and often didactic in his writings on race and class oppression, Hughes chooses to infuse the experimental style of Lorca’s play with political potentiality, reading it as an internationalist study of the mechanics of oppression, without reducing it to a single political or racial reading.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Sound in Text and Context in Latin America

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Sound in Text and Context in Latin America Michael O’Brien Keywords Sound Studies, Tango, Samba, Nationalism, Media Studies, Argentina, Brazil, Popular Music, Radio alejandra bronfman, and andrew grant wood, eds. Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2012. 165 pp. florencia garramuño. Primitive Modernities: Tango, Samba, and Nation. Trans. Anna Kazumi Stahl. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011. 216 pp. Imagining the modern nation in Latin America has often been a musical enterprise, and since the late 1990s, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have been particularly attentive to the processes through which vernacular musical genres have been central to the emerging national imaginary in modernizing nation-states across the region.1 It is no accident that these projects of cultural nationalism via popular music coincided with the development of technologies to produce and disseminate these sounds, crossing social and political boundaries in complex ways. Similarly, musical sounds themselves bleed over into other forms of cultural practice, including political discourse, dance, and other art forms. Two new volumes, drawing on a variety of disciplinary perspectives, examine music and sound in Latin America in ways that are productively attentive to these forms of boundary-crossing and their significance. While music is a central object of analysis in both books, they share an interest in moving the subject of the book away from “music” as a bounded category, although they accomplish this in very different ways. Together, they suggest the richness that the topic of popular music can have for scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines and methodologies. The first of these, a recent translation by Anna Kazumi Stahl of Florencia Garramuño’s 2007 volume Modernidades primitivas, examines the role of two popular music genres, tango and samba, in the construction of a modern national identity in Argentina and Brazil, respectively. Although music is at the heart of [End Page 223] Garramuño’s study, the book also benefits from an impressively interdisciplinary examination of the prismatic representations of those musical genres through a variety of media in both elite and popular-culture registers: the visual arts, literature, commercial advertisements, and film. The second, Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America, an interdisciplinary and disparate collection of essays edited by Alejandra Bronfman and Andrew Grant Wood, represents a collective exercise in decentering music within the fields of aural production and consumption in Latin America. While music is central to some of the book’s chapters, it is entirely absent in others. Taken as a whole, the volume makes a solid argument for understanding the soundscapes of Latin America, where music intersects with speech, fireworks, and noise, as well as the technologies used for their production and reproduction, in ways that blur the boundaries between the public and the private, challenge power relations, and do crucial cultural work that demands to be taken seriously. Florencia Garramuño explores the way in which tango and samba, two of the most prominent genres of Latin American popular music during the early twentieth century, became consecrated as representative of the emerging nationalistmodernist aesthetics in their respective nation-states. A literary scholar by training, Garramuño is not primarily interested in understanding these musical genres in themselves, but rather in tracing their representations as “faithful thermometers” that register the evolving discourses on primitivism and modernity in Argentina and Brazil (24). The roles that samba and tango played in their respective emergent modern national identities has been explored in prior work, and Garramuño draws extensively and thoughtfully from that literature,2 but Garramuño’s contribution is unique in considering them in conjunction. Garramuño’s central thesis is that in both of these cases, and in contrast to their counterparts in Europe, modernist thinkers and artists in Brazil and Argentina developed, in and through these genres, a national cultural identity and aesthetic that was both primitive and modern. More importantly, the emergence of modernity as an aesthetic project in Brazil and Argentina, which coincided and was intertwined with the emergence of the modern nation-state as a political project, did not imagine the “primitive” folk and vernacular cultural practices of their own populations as opposed...

Racism, Invisibility, and the Alienation of the African American in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Although Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has enjoyed a plethora of readings, how the Marxist concept of alienation and estrangement figure in the narrative has been largely ignored. Moreover, critics appear not to be in agreement about Ellison’s aesthetic project in this novel. While some acknowledge the “Negro slant” of the novel, others argue otherwise. This paper contributes to the debate. Using the Marxist concepts of alienation and estrangement in the reading of Ellison’s Invisible Man, it argues that Ellison’s fundamental project in this novel is to show how the skin colour of the African American makes him invisible and alienates him from the socioeconomic and socio-political structures of the American society. In this way, the essay establishes a confluence between the racial experience of African Americans, and their invisibility and estrangement in America as depicted in Ellison’s poetic space

Afinal, o que Querem as Mulheres?: Luiz Fernando Carvalho's Metafictional Critique of Brazilian Television Fiction

Although perhaps best known outside Brazil for the feature-length film Lavoura Arcaica (To the Left of the Father) (2001), the majority of Luiz Fernando Carvalho's professional activity has been in television, where he has directed a number of commercially successful and critically acclaimed telenovelas, mini, and microseries. In Afinal, o que Querem as Mulheres? (After All, What do Women Want?) (2010), the director's first original screenplay for television, Carvalho lays bare his assessment of the audiovisual field by constructing a work of metafiction that is simultaneously a critique of Brazilian television fiction and an example of what an artistically engaged alternative might look like. With the intention of synthesizing Carvalho's position and his aesthetic project as they pertain to the broader field of Brazilian television production, this article analyzes select aspects of Afinal, o que Querem as Mulheres?, highlighting instances of the director's use of non-traditional narrative devices and the microseries as a metafictional critique of standardized Brazilian television fiction.

El asco: reflexiones estéticas sobre la violencia neoliberal en Centroamérica

This essay focuses on the writing of disgust as a central aesthetic project in contemporary Central American narrative. Taking Horacio Castellanos Moya's El asco as a point of departure, I argue that an “aesthetics of disgust” can be underlined both as a recurrent trope or theme and as an aesthetic affect in works by a diverse group of authors. The article undertakes a detailed analysis of two Guatemalan novels: Diccionario esotérico (2005) by Maurice Echeverría and El leproso (2007) by Méndez Vides. Working with several theories of disgust and the transmission of affect, I argue that disgust is written in these fictions as a central thematic point and as a means to evoke a visceral reaction in the reader and that it reflects a wide-ranging literary movement that transcends genres and generations as it reflects upon the neoliberal episteme in the region.

Take Your Geography and Trace It

The twentieth century's long list of connections underneath the colour line, dubbed provocatively (if sometimes ahistorically) ‘cosmopolitanism’, reveals a network of international interlocutors spanning India and the United States during the interwar period. This essay reads Dhan Gopal Mukerji's semi-autobiographical Caste and Outcast (1923) alongside W. E. B. DuBois's fictional Dark Princess (1928), in relation to Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation (1997). DuBois and Mukerji, throughout their career, were centrally concerned with developing aesthetic protocols to correspond to a more cosmopolitan, globally just politics: a project that they share at the intersections of anti-racist and anticolonial struggles during the interwar period. I suggest here that specific attention to errantry of transnational movement, which structures both books across their respective genres, undergirds a shared aesthetic project. Such transnational circuits are the basis, for Glissant, of a poetics of relation; an errant way of being in the world. Reading Caste and Outcast and Dark Princess together (and in the context of the global history of anti-racist and anticolonial solidarities) offers us an aesthetics of cosmopolitanism available in the interwar period. By reading these writers together, this essay illuminates the aesthetic lineaments of this cosmopolitanism, fundamentally organized around errancy, historical injustice and relations with Others.

Correction of severe congenital nipple inversion by dermal breast compound tissue flap

Objective To explore a technique to correct severe congenital nipple inversion,which has preferable clinical curative effect and lower recurrence rate.Methods 16 patients with bilateral severe congenital nipple inversion were included in the study.The rhomboid skin incision and triangular dermal breast compound tissue flap was designed in two directions.One compound tissue flap was pulled out through the tunnel under the nipple to the opposite side and sutured at the base of the other flap.The cross-fixation was accomplished to support the nipple tissue.The shortened lactiferous ducts and fibrous bands beneath the nipples were released.The nipple neck was tightened by suturing the shorter diagonal of rhomboid skin incision.Results No complications,such as infection,hematoma and necrosis,were found in all cases.All nipples manifested satisfactory aesthetic projection without recurrence after 6-24 months follow-up.Conclusions In the treatment of severe congenital nipple inversion,the technique of the nipple suspension using two triangular dermal breast compound tissue flaps could provide a strong suspension system with less recurrence rate.And the nipple neck could be tightened by suturing the shorter diagonal of rhomboid skin incision in the meantime.The nipple will manifest satisfactory aesthetic projection. Key words: Compound tissue flap; Correction; Congenital nipple inversion

"Palabras para Julia" and the Latin American songs

Connected to the work of transmitting an ideology and aesthetic project close to the people and contrary to the different dictatorships that are installed throughout Latin America, José Agustín Goytisolo and his poetry are recovered by the so called songwriting or new song from both sides of the Atlantic, fact presaged and desired by the social poets and has managed to give the mass audience a civil song with patent historicalconsciousness. In this sense, his classic composition, “Palabras para Julia”, has been set to music insistently by various songwriters and folk groups, especially, those seated in the Rio de la Plata, who believe in their testimonial value, but also as a timeless legacy, stripped of absolute truths, have sung and redefined every time, alternately making a film soundtrack, music political acts and tributes to human rights.

Atmosferologia e atmosferografia: come mettere ordine tra le atmosfere?

The project of a full-fledged atmospheric aesthetics is largely committed to the descriptive tools of felt experiences, just in keeping with a phenomenological – or, better, a neo-phenomenological – approach. However, description, what we might call ‘atmospherography’, all the more one allegedly accomplished from a first-person point of view, is always a partial, if not particular, perspective. Thus a coherent aesthetics of atmospheres has also to envisage a systematic way of connecting the manifold of descriptions in a theory, call it ‘atmospherology’, which in turn should be able to account for a number of possible experiential counterfactuals. The present paper critically explores the consistency of both the epistemological and ontological consequences of an aesthetics of atmospheres, as sketched mainly by Gernot Bohme, a pioneer and a leading figure in this research field, and tries to specify at least some refutability conditions for such a theory.

Kierkegaard's Phenomenology of Spirit

AbstractKierkegaard's preoccupation with a separation between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ runs through his work and is widely thought to belong to his rejection of Hegel's idealist monism. Focusing on The Concept of Irony and Either/Or, I argue that although Kierkegaard believes in various metaphysical distinctions between inside and outside (the inwardness of faith and the outwardness of ethics and language; the inwardness of emotion and the outwardness of behavior), he nonetheless understands the task of the philosopher as that of making outside and inside converge in a representation. Drawing on Hegel's philosophy of art, I show that Kierkegaard's project in both of these books is the aesthetic project of revealing the inner essence of something in its outward appearance. Kierkegaard's portrait of Socrates in The Concept of Irony is a phenomenology of the spirit of irony. My interpretation adds a new dimension to our understanding of Kierkegaard's aesthetics and his relation to Hegel; it presents him as a follower of Plato, whom he is usually thought to have dismissed; and it uncovers a deep connection between Kierkegaard's first two books, which are never read in conjunction.

The Meaning of Indeterminacy: Noise Music as Performance

In aesthetic terms, the category of ‘sound’ is often split in two: ‘noise’, which is chaotic, unfamiliar, and offensive; and ‘music’, which is harmonious, resonant, and divine. These opposing concepts are brought together in the phenomenon of Noise Music, but how do practitioners make sense of this apparent discordance? Analyses that treat recorded media as primary texts declare Noise Music to be a failure, as a genre without progress. These paint Noise as a polluted form in an antagonistic relationship with traditional music. But while critiques often point to indeterminate structure as indicative of the aesthetic project’s limitations, we claim that indeterminacy itself becomes central to meaningful expression when the social context of Noise is considered. Through observational and interview data, we consider the contexts, audiences, and producers of contemporary American Noise Music. Synthesizing the performance theories of Hennion and Alexander, we demonstrate how indeterminacy situated in structured interaction allows for meaning-making and sustains a musical form based in claims to inclusion, access, and creative freedom. We show how interaction, not discourse, characterizes the central performance that constructs the meaning of Noise.

SOUND, MEANING AND MUSIC-DRAMA IN LACHENMANN'S DAS MÄDCHEN MIT DEN SCHWEFELHÖLZERN

AbstractThis article argues that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern demonstrates a unique approach to music-drama that stems from the perceptual capacities of listeners, and their desire to search for meaning in what they hear. Beginning with the claim that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern can be viewed as the culmination of an aesthetic project begun at the point of Lachenmann's emergence as a distinctive voice of the European avant-garde during the 1960s, the article first examines two major aspects of Lachenmann's aesthetics – musique concrète instrumentale and aura – outlining a composing philosophy that has been at the heart of Lachenmann's practice throughout his career. The article claims that Lachenmann sought to establish a rejuvenated semiotics, freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners. Drawing upon the studies of Naomi Cumming and Luke Windsor, it outlines a theoretical framework that takes into account this composing philosophy and its implications, applying it in analyses of various excerpts from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. My analysis illuminates a music-drama that forms around the interplay of internally represented images and sensations, the emergence of which is facilitated by a musical language that prepares sounds to take on certain types of meaning. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications this has for audience members.