Aesthetic Treatise Research Articles

On Some Pitfalls of the English Edition and Translation of Bolzano’s Aesthetic Treatises

On Some Pitfalls of the English Edition and Translation of Bolzano’s Aesthetic Treatises

«Моя душа это – пыльная библиотека…»: систематизация и хаос как способы организации лирических текстов К. Вагинова

The article attempts to comprehend the genesis and development of the dichotomy of order and chaos in Konstantin Vaginov’s lyrics, establishes its relationship with the poet’s poetics of collecting and the bibliophilic practice. The focus is on the images of Apollo and Dionysus, reinterpreted in the Russian culture of modernism under the influence of Nietzsche’s aesthetic treatise The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. As the article shows, many turn-of-the-century writers turned to the Nietzschean idea of two principles. For instance, Alexander Blok urged to listen to the music of the revolution, that is, he saw the future of Russia in the Dionysian beginning. Andrei Bely clearly distinguished two models of the worldview, but did not decide which of them - Apollonian or Dionysian -would be more suitable for the country. The article expresses and substantiates the idea that Vaginov proposed his own interpretation of Nietzsche’s concept. The material for the study was the writer’s poems, as well as ego-documents, memoirs of contemporaries, and archival data. On representative examples of motive-shaped rows of chaos and its ordering (crowd / herd / swarm, books / shelves / libraries, etc.), the aesthetics of systematization in Vaginov’s poems is considered; its development is outlined in the “poet’s prose”. Methodologically, the article is based on Aleida Assmann’s works on cultural memory, as well as on classical philological works on the history of Russian literature of the 1920s. The article shows that in Vaginov’s works Apollo is presented as a symbol of the culture of the past, of the orderly world. The lyrical hero tries to preserve antiquity by referring to books; respectively, shelves and libraries act as attributes of the organized space of the past. Images of a swarm / round dance / crowd, etc. are used to describe chaotic modernity, that is, they are typical for the Dionysian beginning. However, the contact of the lyrical hero with the culture of the ancient world is far from always marked as positive. In some poems, the meeting with Apollo (the past) gives strength to the lyrical subject; in others, making a sacrifice in the name of the resurrection of the previous culture, the lyrical hero dies or suffers, which does not make sense: the past is irreversible. So Vaginov poses the question of the advisability of referring to the world of the past and the possible consequences of such interaction. Another feature of the poetics and aesthetics of Vaginov’s works is the lack of a clear separation of the Apollonian and Dionysian beginnings. For example, in the poem “I vse zh ya ne zhivoy...” [And Yet I’m Not Alive...], the lyrical hero stands under the Apollo foliage and at the same time compares himself to Prometheus chained to the lyric rock, whose image, according to Nietzsche, is one of the masks of Dionysus. In the same way, the motifs of chaos and order merge: opening the book, the lyrical hero is faced with a round dance of words, sounds, images, which in one case leads to inspiration and in the other to the loss of his own “self”. It is concluded that Vaginov does not take a definite position regarding (a) the nature of the influence of the past on the lyrical hero and (b) the orderliness of the past. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

The Undoing of Culture

The article Undoing Culture: Witkacy’s Tragedy of the End of the West looks at Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s historiosophical conception of the condition of Western culture in the first half of the 20th century. The reading of the Polish artist’s literary works – dramas, novels as well as his philosophical and aesthetic treatises and journalistic writings – runs parallel to the reading of works by contemporary thinkers, economists, political scientists and sociologists. This juxtaposition makes Witkacy’s observations, diagnoses and visions more relevant. They thus become an important tool for understanding the phenomena occurring in the world around us. They are also extremely helpful in studying modernity as such. One of them is the concept of the undoing of culture that is repeatedly considered by the characters in Witkiewicz’s works. As a caricatured embodiment of totalitarian ideas, it is an important point of reference for reflecting on the events of the past century, the effects of which are still being felt today. Witkacy took a keen interest in the condition of the West as a civilizational formation. He was convinced of its decline. The undoing of culture is supposed to delay it, while being one of the signs of the impending and ultimate catastrophe. It will be a strange tragedy. For as a result of it, people will achieve the happiness they have dreamed of since the dawn of time. They will, however, cease to be human. And this is what Witkiewicz feared most.

ISSUES OF DEFINITION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATEGORY OF STYLE IN MUSICOLOGY

At the present stage of the studies of musical art, more and more attention is paid to the issues of style as an important category of musicology. Style is a multi-level category that is interpreted by scientists from different positions and views. Ambiguity of style predetermines long development of this category, evolution of its perception, emergence of new, modern studies that have become relevant in the scientific space. The purpose of the paper is to reveal the problem of defining the style and the principles of using the term, taking into consideration the historical aspect of understanding this category in musicology. The use of the concept of “style” began with the oratorical art of ancient Greece and can be found in the writings of Aristotle (“Rhetoric”, “Poetics”), in musical art and architecture. Aesthetic treatises of the Renaissance view style as a collection of certain features that make it possible to distinguish artistic phenomena among themselves. However, the term itself is used only in relation to figurative art, painting. The concept of style is becoming more acute on the brink of the historical epochs of the late Renaissance and the Baroque, but is mixed with the category of genre. The need to use the concept of “style” in Art Studies was raised in the musical-historical works of the early eighteenth century. The basics of understanding the style, as a special manifestation of artistic and creative thinking, laid in the era of the Enlightenment, became the basis for most definitions of this concept. Since the 19th century, interest in the style issues has increased, due to the growth of the personal factor in art, the emergence of national schools, including composer schools, in the epoch of romanticism; crystallization of the concept took place, its main meanings were polished. In the first half of the twentieth century there appears a certain number of works, where, to varying degrees, the problem of style is displayed. In the development of style problems important became the achievements of B. Yavorsky and B. Asafiev, who identified the following ways in its study: the scientists are united by the common understanding of style, as the embodiment of musical thinking. The style of B. Yavorsky is connected with the historical and epoch-making value and manifests itself in the entire spiritual culture. B. Asafiev creates a rather original interpretation of the problem of style, the basis of which is the theory of intonation. Realizing the ambiguity of the concept of style, presenting different approaches in understanding the style, its historical aspects and the principles of style analysis, M. Mikhailov gives his own definitions of the concept, revealing its content from different points of view. Thus, the scientist often relates the definition of style with the linguistic aspect and thinking. The concept of style acquired significant development in musicology due to modern interpretations. The category of style class has a fairly long history of formation and has prospects for further research, which is reflected in the nature of perception of the style of different periods of the history of music, individual and national style. Multiple meanings and versatility of the application of the term in musicology indicates broad possibilities of this category, the study of which makes it possible to reveal the essence of many aspects of contemporary art.

THE CATEGORY OF "PERFECTION" IN AL-FARABI'S PHILOSOPHY

The article is devoted to the study of the category of “perfection”, presented in the philosophy of Al-Farabi in the following natural-scientific, historicalphilosophical, social, ethical and aesthetic treatises: “On the Views of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City”, “On the Origin of Sciences”, “Indicating the Path to Happiness”, “Civil Policy”, “Aphorisms of a Statesman”, “The Great Book of Music”. While analyzing the category of “perfection”, Al-Farabi places it in the context of achievement of human happiness. The study concludes that the category of “perfection” in AlFarabi’s treatises manifests itself at the ontological, axiological, religious, social, ethical and aesthetic levels of philosophical understanding.

The Dionysian and the Aesthetics of the Impossible: Contributions of the Young Nietzsche to the Modern Fantastic

The Dionysian and the Aesthetics of the Impossible: Contributions of the Young Nietzsche to the Modern Fantastic Patricia García “L’inexpliqué nous séduit, surtout l’inexplicable.” (Montorgueil 319)1 The Dionysian Vision of The Birth of Tragedy (1872) In 1872, Nietzsche released The Birth of Tragedy, his first published work on the philosophy of art. Much more than a simple aesthetic treatise, The Birth of Tragedy presented a critique of modern German culture and a reflection on the relationship between art and life, as well as an attempt to identify an antidote for what Nietzsche regarded as modern decadence. A central dimension of the book was Nietzsche’s perspective on the origin of the Greek tragedy, which argued for the importance of its reinterpretation in the context of modernity. The Birth of Tragedy (henceforth BT) raised many of the concerns that Nietzsche would later reformulate and refute but to which he would ultimately return. Nietzsche himself considered this work to be an early exploration of his philosophical intuitions, as he acknowledged in his prefatory essay “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (henceforth “ASC”), which he published fourteen years after the original edition of The Birth of Tragedy. Among the key philosophical explorations was the concept of the Dionysian, which Nietzsche used to frame his attack on Christian morality, on the “hatred of the ‘world,’ a curse of affect, fear of beauty and sensuality, a world beyond, invented in order better to slander this world” (“ASC” 9). The Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy later came to be regarded by critics as an early formulation of an anti-Christian attitude, challenging the morality that Nietzsche considered as contaminating Western culture through its refusal to celebrate [End Page 319] life as worth living in itself, rather than as a preparation for death. The harsh criticism that Nietzsche himself directed at his early work does not invalidate the value of many of the ideas he presented. One of the most innovative aspects of The Birth of Tragedy was its comparative method. The study of Greek Antiquity, specifically of Greek tragedy, was superimposed onto the philosopher’s contemporary period in order to develop a critique of the present. Nietzsche’s combination of metaphysics, cultural anthropology, and philosophy was met with resistance from his peers, and yet the transcendence and transgression of traditional boundaries between academic disciplines and methods that characterize The Birth of Tragedy renders this work a model of comparative literary thinking. In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi refer to The Birth of Tragedy as “a major early example of comparative study as a mode of oppositional cultural criticism, blending linguistic, literary, and philosophical analysis to pose a stark challenge to the moral norms, and the intellectual protocols, of his day” (27). Following Nietzsche’s comparative spirit, this article offers an interpretation of the Dionysian as the foundation of fantastic literature, the latter understood here as an aesthetic phenomenon that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as a critique of rationalist optimism. The main thesis of The Birth of Tragedy is apparent from the first sentence of this work. The opening passage contains some of the most important concepts, indebted to Schopenhauer, concepts to which Nietzsche, in an echo of the Wagnerian style of motif recurrence, later returns: We will have achieved much for the discipline of aesthetics when we have arrived not only at the logical insight but also at the immediate certainty of the view that the continuing development of arts is tied to the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, which are engaged in a continual struggle interrupted only by temporary periods of reconciliation. (BT 19; emphasis in original) A key thesis of this book concerns two fundamental and opposing impulses in the understanding of artistic practice: the Dionysian and Apollonian. As the work develops, it becomes clear that these antagonistic concepts define the essence not only of art but also that of the human being. The young Nietzsche understands art as a human metaphysical activity; the Dionysian and Apollonian are thus...

Poe-Related PhD Dissertations (2017–2021)

Poe-Related PhD Dissertations (2017–2021)

Effeminate Edmund Burke and the masculine voice of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the gendered and nationalist rhetorical strategies Mary Wollstonecraft used in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Man which was written as an open letter of response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France . While a number of scholars note Wollstonecraft’s adoption of a masculine voice in her systematic feminizing of Burke, this article also pays attention to the ways in which Wollstonecraft impugns Burke with the taints of being crypto-Catholic, Irish, and quasi-French. We notice how Wollstonecraft’s masculine voice is rational, combative, righteously passionate, middle-class, patriotically English and critically Protestant. We compare the fashioning of Wollstonecraft’s voice with contemporary political caricatures of John Bull and the cartoon depictions of Edmund Burke that appeared as Wollstonecraft was composing her VRM. Wollstonecraft’s VRM gained her considered attention and her critique of Burke’s character, (and what this article claims is her misreading of his aesthetic treatise), have been remarkably influential even to the present day. The characteristics of the distinct voice created in Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication are also evident in her second and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, the rhetorical commitments entailed in Wollstonecraft’s public voice created challenges for her arguments in the second Vindication that demand careful attention.

Amor Bellitās

Hannah Arendt discovers a theory of politics in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic treatise, the Critique of Judgment. However, the relationship between Kant and Arendt’s politics remains unfinished. This article seeks to present a syncretic view of Arendt’s work on politics with her work on Kantian judgment. Vital to Arendt’s politics is the concept of amor mundi, the love of the world. Yet, in order for amor mundi to resonate with groups and individuals in the world, one must view the world as beautiful and, in Arendt’s words, ‘a fit place for men to live’. In other words, one must love beauty to love the world and be prepared to execute judgment upon particulars in that world according to Arendt. Such use of this judgment, however, is likely to err in ‘dark times’. Thus, Arendt views the love of the world and beauty as an open-ended process.

Dancing on the Tongue

"Unwrap your chocolate, place it on your tongue, close your eyes, and let your tongue choreograph the dance of chocolate,' instructed Alice B. Toklas in This Is Not A Theatre Company's A Serious Banquet. Music wafted over the dinner guests to accompany their site-specific dance. Many immersive and participatory performances include food and/or drink. In most cases the food and drink is not simply an attempt to lower inhibitions (although it can serve that function too), but an attempt to create multi-sensory, multimodal, semi-synaesthetic, embodied engagement; it is an attempt to create theatre that can be tasted, smelled, and touched. What does it mean to "taste" theatre? What does it mean to "taste" meaning, or emotion; to apprehend the world through taste? Asking partakers to eat and drink during performances literalizes the Sanskrit aesthetic theory known as rasa. The Sanskrit term "rasa" has been variously translated as juice, flavor, extract, and essence. In the context of performance theory it is the "aesthetic flavor or sentiment" tasted in and through performance. The Natyasastra, the Sanskrit aesthetic treatise attributed to Bharata, notes that when foods and spices are mixed together in different ways, they create different tastes; similarly, the mixing of different basic emotions arising from different situations, when expressed through the performer—or, in the case of immersive and participatory theatre, through the smell of garlic, the taste of chocolate, or the gentle touch of a hand—gives rise to an emotional experience or "taste" in the partaker, which is rasa (Bharata 55, emphasis mine). Rasa posits the interactive audience as participant and partaker – and co-creator --of the event. Rasa is active, sensorial, experiential, and embodied. It is, then, a theory of aesthetic immersion and participation. As such, it is crucial for understanding and describing the modes of engagement in immersive and participatory theatre.

Cherubino’s Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment. By Richard Kramer.

‘This is a book of snapshots’, Richard Kramer writes at the beginning of Cherubino’s Leap, and indeed the monograph provides numerous fascinating insights into short segments of more or less well-known musical works from the second half of the eighteenth century. Kramer is able both to elucidate these segments through detailed musical analysis and connect them to larger aesthetic contexts. The unifying aspect of the moments Kramer has chosen for his analysis is the condition of a surprise, an unexpected shift in the musical qualities of the composition under consideration, in which ‘the composer’s ear turns inward, beneath the elegant surface … to some less comfortable recess, beyond convention’ (p. 10). In the opening chapter, Kramer provides a few non-musical analogues to the musical moments, for example, Joseph Lange’s famous unfinished portrait of Mozart invisibly playing an absent piano. From the aesthetic treatises of the Enlightenment, Kramer selects Moses Mendelssohn’s concept of Überraschung (surprise) and Johann Gottfried Herder’s idea of Anerkennung (recognition) to explain better the specific qualities in the musical works discussed. These concepts are certainly present in all of the works analysed throughout the book and allow the author to come up with striking new readings and insights into late eighteenth-century music.

Por uma teoria da modernidade em Poesia Ingênua e Sentimental

Poesia Ingênua e Sentimental figura atualmente como uma das reflexões mais instigantes do poeta alemão Friedrich Schiller. Embora o dramaturgo tivesse como interesse imediato ponderar acerca das formas de sentir e produzir o belo, sobretudo, na poesia e na dramaturgia, o impacto que o texto causou em sua própria comunidade intelectual e a recepção destas ideias ao longo dos séculos XIX e XX o tornaram significativo para investigar o conceito de história que permeava o debate estético, bem como analisar a construção da identidade moderna no bojo deste processo histórico. O objetivo deste trabalho consiste em analisar o tratado estético de Schiller tencionando compreender como sua proposta é constituinte de uma experiência temporal notadamente moderna; assim como ponderar acerca de sua contribuição para a construção da identidade do homem moderno e investigar sua relação e influência em um ambiente cultural no qual a criação intelectual era cada vez mais associada a um procedimento reflexivo.

‘Facing’ Identity in a ‘Faceless’ Society: Physiognomy, Facial Appearance and Identity Perception in Eighteenth-Century London

English men and women confronted many new questions about the relationship between identity and appearance during the eighteenth century. How did the face reveal information about a person’s character, morality, health, class, gender, nationality and race? How should faces be perceived in forms of social interaction? Could appearances be trusted? Through analysis of physiognomic texts, urban literature, aesthetic treatises, conduct books and cosmetic manuals, this article examines the changing social and cultural meanings attached to the face, and developments in the ways contemporary authors advised it should be ‘read’ as a signifier of character, identity and social difference in eighteenth-century London.

Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World by Zara Anishanslin

Reviewed by: Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World by Zara Anishanslin Stephanie Koscak Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). Pp. 432; 43 b/w illus. $45.00, £27.00. How do we write the comprehensive history of an object? While this question has inspired a great deal of interdisciplinary scholarship in recent years, it was also one that eighteenth-century Britons asked themselves about the expanding world of commercial goods. Banknotes, coats, coaches, and corkscrews all divulged their secrets to readers in the pages of object-narrated novels, telling meandering tales about the producers and consumers they encountered as they circulated across space and class. In many ways, Zara Anishanslin's Portrait of a Woman in Silk is reminiscent of an eighteenth-century it-narrative: although Anishanslin does not draw connections between her own work and recent interest in thing theory, she describes her book as "a methodological celebration" of object-centered history, adopting an episodic "narrative structure that allows [material things] to speak" (21). The thing, in this case, is a 1746 oil portrait of Philadelphia matriarch Anne Shippen Willing by the American portrait painter Robert Feke. Anne was the wife of a wealthy Bristol-born merchant and mayor of Philadelphia, Charles Willing, and Feke rendered her in an olive-and-gray English silk damask gown with a large floral design. The gown was actually owned and worn by Anne, stitched by an anonymous mantua-maker of Spitalfields silk woven by Simon Julins using a pattern he commissioned from the London silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite in 1743. In this remarkable and unique book, Anishanslin uncovers the multiple histories embedded in this single material object, which connected these four individuals—designer, weaver, wearer, and painter—in a transatlantic community of taste, aesthetics, and imperial ideologies. The book is divided into four parts as it follows this material-visual object from its origin in Garthwaite's fabric designs through Feke's completion of the painting, exploring the interconnected worlds, ideas, labor, and material communities of these four "protagonists" (13). While Anishanslin is not the first to recognize that Willing wore in her portrait a silk damask woven by Julins and designed by Garthwaite—both Natalie Rothstein and Linda Baumgarten have recognized this connection—her book is the first to focus so completely on the intertwined and layered histories of this canvas, which Anishanslin deftly uncovers to reveal the lives, intellectual networks, and imperial commerce that shaped people and goods as they circulated within the British Atlantic world. Despite their positions and professions, Garthwaite, Julins, Willing, and Feke left almost nothing in the way of written archival material such as letters, diaries, and business records; their histories emerge instead from the visual and material objects that they produced [End Page 347] and purchased. Anishanslin analyzes these in relation to a broader collection of sources, including illustrated books on botany and architecture, scientific and aesthetic treatises, popular engravings, and letters sent between groups of natural historians, traders, and amateur sericulturists on both sides of the Atlantic. Part 1 follows the little-known Garthwaite, spinster daughter of a Lincolnshire minister, as she moved from York to London with her widowed sister in the later 1720s to design silk patterns. Garthwaite favored elaborate floral and botanical arrangements, as evinced in the more than eight hundred labeled water-color patterns that she left behind, and she was one of only a handful of women working in skilled aspects of Spitalfields' silk industry. By reconstructing the scientific and natural history networks of which Garthwaite was a part, Anishanslin argues that her designs celebrate the georgic improvement (and acquisition) of land and Enlightenment networks of intellectual exchange, while also demonstrating that women and material objects were central to imperial knowledge networks. Part 2 examines the life and labor of Julins, a master weaver of French Huguenot extraction and an important member of the Weavers' Company. Here we learn about structures of apprenticeship and the guild's continued political influence in mid-eighteenth-century London, as well as the various ways in which silk became...

Regulatory aesthetic treatises era (normative aesthetics) as a base for the construction of the state cultural policy (in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and Russian Federation)

Regulatory aesthetic treatises era (normative aesthetics) as a base for the construction of the state cultural policy (in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and Russian Federation)

Complicit bodies: Excessive sensibilities and haunted space

Abstract Studies like Alan Holgate’s Aesthetics of Built Form (1992) and Juhani Pallasma’s The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (2005) indicate the extent to which the role of the senses has recently caught the attention of architectural critics. Likewise, Gothic studies have always acknowledged the central role of senses and sensations in literature and other mediums; from the study of the eighteenth-century concern with the Sublime, to interest in the techniques of fear in cinema, scholars have consistently addressed the significance of senses, sensations and the body in Gothic works. This article suggests that a Victorian aesthetic concept – Einfühlung or empathy – can be employed as a philosophical and aesthetic notion in order to understand haunted space and its effects in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Originating in the German aesthetic tradition, this nineteenth-century concept was enthusiastically adopted by British aesthetes, most notably Vernon Lee. Empathy may be defined as the identification of a person with an external object by reacting intellectually and physically to it and ascribing to this object feelings or attitudes present in oneself. This article insists that this phenomenon sheds light on the intimate relationship that is established between characters in Gothic fiction and the haunted space that they traverse. The discussion pursues two main objectives: first, to outline the main premises of the notion present in aesthetic treatises of the time (focusing on the nineteenth-century German tradition); and second, to illustrate the presence and significance of this notion in Gothic fiction, specifically in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) and Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Empty House’ (1906). Gothic studies have often focused on concepts or philosophical techniques such as terror or horror, in order to understand how fear is both generated and experienced in Gothic works. This article suggests that the aesthetic notion of Einfühlung might also be used as an interpretive technique in order to understand the sensations experimented by characters (and ultimately readers) that encounter and intimately experience haunted space.

Modernism, Literature, and Dance by Susan Jones (review)

Reviewed by: Modernism, Literature, and Dance by Susan Jones Michelle Clayton Modernism, Literature, and Dance. Susan Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 360. $99.00 (cloth). Prompted in part by the transatlantic centenary celebrations marking the scandalous success of The Rite of Spring, modernism and dance have of late been performing an exciting pas de deux. Through symposia, traveling exhibitions, articles, and book-length studies of Ballets Russes choreography, music, and artistic and literary connections, viewers and scholars have been treated to an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) series of windows on the historical relation between modernism and dance. We might wonder, then, if there could possibly be anything left to say about their intersections. Susan Jones’s monumental book Modernism, Literature, and Dance proves that there is plenty, and that there are great discoveries to be made in the ongoing excavations. Instead of closing down discussions or providing the definitive word, it helps us to find new angles on certain thoroughly familiar authors (Pound, Eliot, Beckett, and particularly Woolf), but also to discover artists whose choreography might lend itself to the same rich readings previously reserved for modernist writers (Massine, Nijinska, Tudor, Schlemmer). Jones frames her argument to appeal to specialists and non-specialists in literary and dance studies alike. Guiding her reader through condensed histories of classical dance and modern dance, explaining differences between body positions and movements for the untrained reader (6), she deploys excellent literary close-reading skills to argue for parallel treatments of, for instance, memory in the work of Anthony Tudor and Marcel Proust, or gender relations in Virginia Woolf and Bronislava Nijinska. Acknowledging the risk of oversimplification, which attends on drawing parallels between two media, she nonetheless advances compelling arguments about the onslaught on traditional forms (bodily, syntactic, narrative) in modernist dance and literature alike, although she also takes pains to note that prior tendencies in the nineteenth century had already begun to move dance in this direction (5).1 Part of the richness of Jones’s book comes from the multiple windows she opens onto dance’s place in the modernist period and beyond. Any treatment of dance in this period necessarily includes performances by the Ballets Russes, but in Jones’s account those performances spill out beyond the stage—into the various cities in which they performed, and into their variegated audiences. Her subtle analyses follow their publics–such as the Bloomsbury group or Ezra Pound—back to their own homes and studios, wherein the lingering memory of the dances took on flexible new plastic or verbal forms. Nor did the Ballets Russes and their contemporaries spring fully formed from the minds of their creators and dancers. Jones further fleshes out the place given to dance in philosophical and aesthetic treatises in the nineteenth century, noting in particular the dynamic of Dionysian and Apollonian forms in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and not only tracking Mallarmé’s writings on specific dancers but also pulling the reader’s body into the picture by hinting at Mallarmé’s deployment of insights gained from dance spectatorship in the typographical experiments of his late poetry (26). Jones’s book is studded with readings of particular choreographies by Nijinska, Massine, Tudor, and others, deftly placing us as readers in the body of the dance. She also turns our gaze on the dance’s spectators, on the flickering and focusing of attention that is at work in their writings. Writers such as Yeats or Pound, she resonantly argues, found in dance not an illustration of their aesthetic concerns but a vehicle for their processing: “a way of thinking about their practice, about forms of creativity and the troubling issue of creative authority” (11). Virginia Woolf, watching concert and social dance alike, betrays a kind of exhilarating envy in feeling the ungainliness of her own bodily movements, registering in dance-like terms the coming-and-going of affective pulses, hopes, and memory traces, as Jones notes in wonderful close readings of The Voyage [End Page 203] Out and Through the Lighthouse. Indeed Jones’s reading of Woolf becomes quite mesmerizing as she draws connections to the choreography of Bronislava Nijinska: noting the modernist gap in the narrative unspooling...

Slavish Poses: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Aesthetics of Abolition

Elizabeth Barrett Browning arrived late to the party. By the time her sonnet Hiram Powers' Greek appeared in Household Words in 1850, a slurry of similar poetic tributes to Powers's sculpture had been published on both sides of the Atlantic. Her decision to compose poetry on the Greek then, was conventional in the strictest sense of the word: it shared both subject matter and conceptual preoccupations with a far larger body of work that is now more or less forgotten. On an even broader level, however, her sonnet is built upon conventions, as it purposefully examines the political potential of convention itself. Barrett Browning uses her verses to ruminate on Powers's controversial manipulation of classical ideals of femininity to ignite cultural controversy--in particular, his canny deployment of a traditional female nude to arouse indignation about slavery and sexual double-standards. In its meditations on the artistic means to political ends, Hiram Powers' Greek constitutes an aesthetic treatise in miniature, one that plays a central but mostly overlooked role in the development of Barrett Browning's antislavery poetry. second of three poems on American slavery that she published during her lifetime, Hiram Powers' Greek revisits conventional discourses about sexuality and Christianity that shape Barrett Browning's earlier abolitionist work, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point. ideas advanced in the sonnet provide a window onto the process by which Barrett Browning reworked the tropes of race, sex, and religion that appear in The Runaway into the sophisticated, subversive aesthetic strategies of her final antislavery work, Curse for a Nation. Close attention to the forms of conventionality running through Barrett Browning's three poems thus reveals the importance of both Hiram Powers' Greek and the statue it memorializes to Barrett Browning's formulation of an aesthetic strategy that would allow her to denounce slavery from her complex cultural position as a white, British, woman poet in the mid-nineteenth century. difficulties of staking out her speaking position manifest themselves most clearly in the formal and ideological intricacies of the poems themselves. As she struggled to create political poems that could proselytize for an internationally divisive cause, Barrett Browning also had to overcome conventional notions of what constituted appropriate female poetic subjects. She had, in other words, to rework both the subject position of the white, British, female speaker and the idea of her proper subject matter. This reworking plays out in the tensions visible within the poems, where conventional discourses about female passivity and the sanctity of motherhood tug against the political points the poems advance. same tensions are visible in the body of scholarly work devoted to Barrett Browning's abolitionist poems, which tends to focus rather single-mindedly on either the works' radical commitments or their conservative conventions. A full appreciation of these poems, however, requires attention to their extraordinary ability to turn apparently oppressive conventions to progressive sociopolitical ends. This ability evolves over the course of Barrett Browning's oeuvre, so exploring it in detail involves tracing her changing commitments to convention across all three of her antislavery works. In her earliest abolitionist publication, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, Barrett Browning imposes a Marian Christian narrative on a runaway slave's story in order to locate a site of specifically feminine intervention into those earthly politics long supposed to be the exclusive sphere of men. same tropological preoccupations reappear in Hiram Powers' Greek Slave, where Barrett Browning theorizes the advantages of locating her abolitionist appeal not in the voice of a slave herself but instead in the persona of a conventionally pure, white, and thoroughly Victorian woman. …

Marriage, Gender, and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy by Edward T. Potter (review)

Reviewed by: Marriage, Gender, and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy by Edward T. Potter Nicole Calian Marriage, Gender, and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy. By Edward T. Potter. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. 210. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-1571135292. Potter’s study examines how various comedic texts of the mid-eighteenth century—the satirical Saxon comedy, the sentimental comedy, and the pastoral play—were involved in generating “their own symbolic universe, in which marriage functioned differently than it did in the contemporary cultural context” (177). This “contemporary cultural context” is explicated mainly in chapter one through Christoph Gottsched’s aesthetic treatises as well as Johann Fürchtegott Gellert’s university lectures. Chapter one functions as the point of departure as well as the theoretical backdrop against which the other plays are read. The plays are then also read against each other to reveal a disjuncture in the Enlightenment project to morally reform a populace by aesthetic means. The “symbolic universe” in the selected comedies promotes cross-dressing, marriage resisters, and male and female same-sex desire as alternatives to the emerging discourse of the new normative concept of marriage (i.e., marriage based on sentiment, not on economic or social considerations). The comparatively obscure dramatic works limited to the time period of the 1740s navigate relatively unchartered territory, which is always exciting. These plays are: J. C. Gottsched’s Atalanta, C. F. Gellert’s Die zärtlichen Schwestern, J. E. Schlegel’s Der Triumph der guten Frauen, G. E. Lessing’s Der Misogyne (the one-act version of 1748, not the more popular three-act version of 1767), and Th. J. Quistorp’s Der Hypochondrist. The choice of comedies rather than tragedies follows Christian Neuhuber’s assertion that comedies “regularly exhibit a potentially destabilizing self-reflexivity that is not present in tragedies” (22). This presumed self-reflexivity serves Potter as procedural focus when he evaluates the poetics and pedagogical aesthetics of selected comedies in their efficacy to convey moral messages. As such Potter’s study situates itself between the methodological approaches of close reading, performance studies, gender studies, queer studies and most importantly, given his focus on meta-reflexive dramatic commentary, reception aesthetics. The approach preferred by Potter himself however is that of a “densely contextualized close reading” (1). While this leads to a very welcome complete paucity of theoretical jargon, when discussing each of the individual comedic texts it also makes an overarching analysis that would situate these individual readings in their highly connoted contextual discursive practices fall somewhat short. When these close readings based on theatrical self-reflexivity work well, ambiguous conflations in reader response vs. efficacy of moral reform are revealed: In chapter two, entitled “The Virgin Huntress Tamed: J. C. Gottsched’s Atalanta and the Erasure of Female Autonomy,” Potter shows that on the surface, the threat of the figure of Atalanta as marriage resister is defused by the evocation of the incest taboo. However, the inter-textual reference to the cognitive failure of Atalanta to reflect upon and reform [End Page 163] her marriage resisting ways independent of biological considerations calls into question the very promotion of the institution of marriage based on love. Potter thus concludes that the efficacy of Gottsched’s own stated theoretical project of moral reform via the theater is not fulfilled by his own concurrent literary output. On the other hand, a different level of supposed female freedom is undercut as chapter four, entitled “The Clothes Make the Man: J. E. Schlegel’s Der Triumph der guten Frauen,” lays out. In Schlegel’s play the character of Hilaria engages in the potentially liberating practice of female cross-dressing. This practice, however, does not explicate female same-sex desire. Rather, the construction of gender identity aids in attaining knowledge, which in turn allows for a shift in the balance of power. The aesthetic function of this shift in power serves to entangle Hilaria in a traditional form of marriage, thus limiting her cross-dressing ways. The play not only negates the potential for female same-sex desire, but it also subjugates its female characters into a normative institution of marriage sustained by fundamentally patriarchal structures of power...

“Negative Entropy and the Energy of Utopian Potential in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead”

“Negative Entropy and the Energy of Utopian Potential in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead” Craig Morehead (bio) Energy: Constant, but entropy, the spending tends toward a maximum—a “mixed-up-ness,” and in this end of levels to which we drive in isolation, to which all systems tend, Withdraw, he said clearly. — Rukeyser, “Gibbs,” Collected Poems, 185. In her biography of Willard Gibbs, the preeminent nineteenth-century scientist and mathematician, Muriel Rukeyser remarks on “key words” that unlock truths upon which new systems are made: “They are a key that belongs to art, science, philosophy, and religion” (366). These “keys” are the organizing principles that can explain and remake the world as they indicate new relationships that establish new imaginative responses and possibilities for the future. Rukeyser understood energy as one of those key concepts arising out of the nineteenth century because “every act depends upon the exchange and transformation of energy” (239). The utility of energy as a key concept derives not only from its applicability for understanding “every act,” but also from its revolutionary possibilities in re-shaping art, science, philosophy, and religion: “Revolutions had already been brought about by the idea of energy—definitions, criticisms, recastings [End Page 329] had been underway. New departures had been made. . . . The underlying unities of every gesture of the universe had been detected” in the exchange of energy (239). In Gibbs’s work on energy, particularly on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Rukeyser found a clear and usable theory that “correlates all forms of energy” and reveals its dynamic utopian capabilities (239).1 Rukeyser viewed Gibbs as the paradigm for a rare kind of abstract thinker “of the pure imagination” with “the system-building spirit” of both the poet and the scientist, whose communication of new imaginative order signaled the potential for restoring vital energies of a degrading system (7). Rukeyser positions Gibbs as a purely theoretical scientist who was little concerned with either the era’s middle-class appetite for invention and industry or its prevailing tendency to think “of energy in terms of labor, and of progress in terms of labor-saving devices” (129). In her estimation, Gibbs’s effort to illuminate the foundational laws of energy freed him to pursue his investigations as a poet and gave rise to a new language in the service of building new relational systems of essential ideas, progressive ideas that lead to the free-use ordering of future systems for the benefit of all. In this essay, I explore the concerted effort in Rukeyser’s early works to promote Gibbsian scientific principles of thermodynamics in order to explain her thoughts on the connections between the utopian functions of science and poetry.2 Gibbs’s influence on Rukeyser’s early work is profound. Rukeyser devoted first a poem to him, “Gibbs” (1939), and then the lengthy biography Willard Gibbs (1942), written as a “footnote” to the poem.3 In 1949, her commentary on his work, entitled “Josiah Willard Gibbs,” was published in Physics Today. In addition, she frequently referred to Gibbs in her aesthetic treatise on poetry’s form, use, and function, The Life of Poetry (1949), assembled from a series of lectures given at Vassar College, the California Labor School, and Columbia University throughout the 1940s. In these works, Rukeyser sought to recuperate Gibbs as a major American thinker. Why did this forgotten professor of mathematical physics deserve all this attention? Gibbs served as a touchstone for Rukeyser’s argument that false barriers erected between art and science inhibit the possibilities for establishing new imaginative systems and meaningful approaches to change. Rukeyser decried the narrow application of scientific principles in industry and business as a vulgarization of science’s potential for preparing new systems of thought with the power to change people’s consciousness. [End Page 330] As an abstract thinker in theoretical science, Gibbs worked with “pure imagination” to arrive at his theories on energy and entropy; he provided Rukeyser an exemplary figure to illustrate how the mutual drives underlying the arts and sciences work to establish new orders and desires for progressive social change in a system tending toward a state of decay. While critics have discussed Rukeyser...