Aestheticization Of Violence Research Articles

CARTOONS AND THE AUTOCRATIC CREEDS OF THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: VIOLENT AFFECTS AND EFFECTS IN CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINMENT

This paper asserts that operations and patterns of violence are present in Hanna-Barbera’s Tom and Jerry, Butch Hartman’s The Fairly Oddparents, Thomas Edward Warburton’s Codename: Kids Next Door, and John Kricfalusi’s Ren and Stimpy. Cartoons are meant to be enjoyed by children. However, the incorporation of violence in cartoons can leave imprints in the impressionable minds of the children. With the media and reception of the children's audience in the foreground, the notion of false happiness can be deduced as the comedic and entertaining modes of representation in the cartoons do not just make the audience laugh but can also possibly penetrate their attitudes and behaviors. The cartoons and their violent features can be a springboard to engage media effects which can include aggression, agenda-building, and cultivation. As a framework, the discourses on violence and false happiness are supported by the critical claims of Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry and offshoots of immersing oneself in television. The analysis of the cartoons presented a typology of violence affirming that organized entertainment becomes synonymous with the displays of organized violence. These include blatant and forceful physical violence, subtle familial violence, violence of structural differences and tensions, and the aestheticization of violence.

Exhausting aesthetic critiques of the authoritarian present in Egyptian literature from Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm to Muḥammad Rabīʿ

ABSTRACT In this article, I outline a trajectory of aesthetic critique of the authoritarian present in Egypt from Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm’s novellas Tilka al-rāʾiḥa and 67 to Muḥammad Rabīʿ’s ʿUṭārid, from the disappointments and defeats of the Nasser era to the despair of the postrevolutionary present. This trajectory of critique emerges from progressive time’s collapse upon the present and is rooted in aesthetics of exhaustion and disgust. I read Ibrāhīm’s physiological and sexualized aesthetics as political and social critique and show how Rabīʿ intensifies them by charging them with violence. I argue that Rabīʿ’s subsumption of past and future into ʿUṭārid’s apocalyptic hellscape expresses the totalizing nature of authoritarian violence. Lastly, I argue that Rabīʿ’s aestheticization of violence is the culmination of a critical project whose origins I trace back to Ibrāhīm.

The Aestheticization of Violence in Images

The Aestheticization of Violence in Images

The legacy of A Clockwork Orange in The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (Thomas Clay, 2005) and Bronson (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009): ‘all form and no content’?

This article considers the legacy and influence of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) in contemporary cinema. Kubrick’s film received criticism on its release for the director’s supposed excessive attention to form at the expense of content (what some termed the ‘aestheticization of violence’). Two recent directors that have frequently been compared to Kubrick, Thomas Clay and Nicholas Winding Refn, have similarly been criticised for their aestheticization of violence in their films. Drawing upon news clippings of film reviews, the article compares Clay’s The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005) and Refn’s Bronson (2009) to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange to consider how the media discourse surrounding Kubrick’s film continues to inform contemporary criticism of violence in film. The article addresses the reception of these films through the prism of the form vs content dichotomy initiated by Kubrick himself. Archival material in the Stanley Kubrick Archive relating to the reception of Kubrick’s film is used to support a comparative approach and show that the accusations aimed at the imitators of Kubrick continue a debate that actually started with A Clockwork Orange itself.

Aestheticization of violence and politics of perception

Aestheticization of violence and politics of perception

As ideias dentro do lugar

Os problemas que a escravidão engendrou no cotidiano do capitalismo dependente brasileiro ganham representação na ficção machadiana. Roberto Schwarz, na década de 70, publicou o ensaio “As ideias fora lugar”, no qual o crítico procurou descrever aquilo que taxou de “comédia ideológica” nacional, que se caracterizaria pela importação, sem mediações, de ideias emanadas da Europa e dos EUA pelas oligarquias do País no Oitocentos. Essas ideias, supostamente, contrastavam com a realidade nacional, uma vez que, a exemplo do liberalismo e da escravidão, encontravam entraves com as forças produtivas brasileiras, gerando uma espécie de “cacoete ideológico”, um “torcicolo cultural”. O presente artigo abordou a peculiaridade com qual Machado de Assis plasmou a escravidão em Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), a partir da estetização da violência proporcionada pelo metabolismo semicolonial da sociedade brasileira na perspectiva das elites nacionais, ironizadas pelo Bruxo do Cosme Velho. Considerou-se como metodologia de pesquisa o cotejo bibliográfico da fortuna crítica machadiana, das contribuições das teorias literárias e da sociologia, como John Gledson, György Lukács, Octavio Ianni etc. Os resultados do problema ora tratado, a peculiar figuração do liberalismo e da escravidão na obra de Machado, distanciaram-se, assim, das conclusões de Roberto Schwarz no artigo supracitado.

The Positive and Negative Provocativeness of Transgressive Art As a Manifestation of Its Multimodality

Feelings such as moral disgust, protest and antipathy are increasingly understood as the most important aspects of cognitive processes in moral psychology and reveal the complex structure of human nature and culture. Transgressive fiction, cinema or visual arts which are characterized by a graphic representation of violence and different traumatic experiences, are a strong ethical stimulus. In this article, transgressive art is viewed through the prism of its multimodality. The article examines both the positive and negative roles of transgressive art in the constitution and the confirmation of the boundaries and limits of social acceptability. By acknowledging the risks of aestheticization of violence that can expand the ethical boundaries of a person as a witness, this study also elicits that transgressive art offers a safe environment for exploring taboos without consequences for the audience. Although transgressive art depicts various violations of moral norms, it does not deny the boundaries of what is permitted, but only confirms them.
 Keywords: transgressive art, multimodality, transgression, moral norms, public morality, ethical boundaries, screen violence

Compassionate Violence? The Aestheticization of Violence in the Taima-dera jikkai-zu byōbu

Compassionate Violence? The Aestheticization of Violence in the Taima-dera jikkai-zu byōbu

Two Takes On Harriet

Two Takes On Harriet Andrea Schmidt and Frank Fucile TWO TAKES ON HARRIET 2019 Directed by Kasi Lemmons Distributed by Focus Features https://www.focusfeatures.com/harriet 125 minutes Take 1 Kasi Lemmons, director of the haunting Southern Gothic family drama Eve's Bayou (1997), had spent years trying to bring the story of Harriet Tubman to the big screen. Her resulting film is a fantastic genre-mash up of biographical, super-hero, action, and dramatic film that remains hauntingly relevant to today's political climate in the States. Cynthia Erivo plays Harriet Tubman, born Araminta "Minty" Ross. For Erivo's performance alone, the film is more than worth watching. She so aptly embodies and expresses the emotional evolution from the character, from run-away slave to Civil War hero. (As a British actor, Erivo faced criticism for portraying an "American" hero. No doubt, there lies strong racialized/gendered prejudice here, as trans-Atlantic portrayals remain extremely common. The BFI film magazine, Sight and Sound, had a fantastic cover story a couple of years ago on Black British actors and their relation to the historical film and television industries in the United Kingdom and United States.) The film comes into dialogue with other recent films that focus on slavery, like British director Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (2013). Like Twelve, Harriet addresses the use of religion to justify slavery. The opening sequence features an unconscious Harriet under one of her "spells" from which she suffered throughout her life due to a cranial injury from a slave overseer. Later, though others write it off as "brain damage," we learn that she views these "spells" and visions as a connection to God and a form of empowerment. The film follows this visionary sequence with a Sunday church service on the plantation where a black preacher lectures the gathered slaves on how God would want them to remain obedient to their slave masters (watching them all from the porch). Harriet's connection to God then bypasses the religion of white supremacy espoused by the enslavers. When Twelve Years was released, many of my students, unaware of the long history of using Biblical stories like that of Noah and his sons to justify slavery, expressed confusion about the sequence where the slave master reads from the Bible. Both of these films call attention to the White evangelical movement's long held connections to white supremacist groups and devotion to segregation. The use of the black preacher also calls attention to the works of the early black American director Oscar Michaux, extremely critical of the use of religion to silence African-Americans' demands for equal rights. (However, we later learn the reverend in Harriet may not indeed practice what he preaches.) Harriet does not shy away from the brutality of slavery nor the violence people of color in the United States faced even in the "Free States." At the same time, it avoids veering off into what some may view as exploitative depictions, wherein the body then becomes spectacle and the film tries to "make the viewer feel" what the experience would have been like. Indeed, one criticism of McQueen's film upon its release was that its graphic whipping and hanging scenes turned into an aestheticization of violence. The haptic and explicit feature in all of McQueen's previous films, but some would argue then the camera and viewers themselves then become complicit in a voyeur-esque depiction of suffering. [End Page 58] The film also manages to avoid the "white savior" complex that plague other films on slavery. In the case of McQueen's film, Solomon's release from slavery as a result of his encounter with sympathetic white man remains true to the source text. At the same time, the scene did have an aura of "white savior," aided by the fact that Brad Pitt served as producer on the film. (The subsequent controversy with the Italian posters featuring white members of the cast also did not help.) In Lemmons's film, Harriet does escape in part with the help of a couple of white sympathizers, but in addition to her own agency and strength, the success of her...

Touching history and making community. The memory of the 1980 Turkish military coup in the 12 September Museum of Shame

ABSTRACTThis contribution draws on ethnography conducted in Istanbul to analyse the Museum of Shame, an amateur exhibition dedicated to the memory of leftist militants who were victims of state violence following the 1980–1983 military coup in Turkey. This museification is the work of a group of ex-revolutionaries and can be considered a cultural practice that challenges statist historiography and creates a mnemonic community. By exhibiting the possessions of murdered militants, it inscribes their personal experiences into collective frames and fosters intergenerational transmission. Its temporality reflects the ethos of the revolutionary fighter, turning mourning into a political statement. However, though this museum practice allows the community to become an agent of history, it is unable to encompass the varying experiences of ex-militants. Its aestheticization of violence and its moral injunctions limit the extent of social solidarity and advance essentialisms that contribute to the construction of marginality from the inside.

Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus

Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus

Material Memory: The Politics of Nostalgia on the Eve of MAGA

Material Memory:The Politics of Nostalgia on the Eve of MAGA Bryan D. Price (bio) Charlottesville Click for larger view View full resolution On the evening of August 11, 2017, images began coming over the internet and cable news transoms of mainly young and serious-faced white men carrying torches and chanting "you will not replace us"—a phrase with a European provenance geared toward Muslims—along with the anti-Semitic derivation, "Jews will not replace us," and the Nazi-tinged incantation of "blood and soil." They were marching in a column toward the Rotunda on the University of Virginia's campus in Charlottesville, which houses a statue of the school's founder, Thomas Jefferson. This torchlight march bearing the ritualism of a midnight ride by the Ku Klux Klan or even a Nazi rally—many of the participants displayed Nazi paraphernalia—was a precursor to a rightwing demonstration the following day to protest the [End Page 103] impending removal of a memorial to the Confederate General, Robert E. Lee. That day's rally erupted in violence culminating in the death of a young woman. As the chaos unfolded, the former Klansman and past member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, David Duke, told a news reporter that the rally would "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump." This vague comment seemed to draw even closer together the ideologies of the President and his most fervent white nationalist supporters, who had gathered that day in an unashamed display of a self-conscious white supremacy the likes of which seemed hidden away in our nation's id. When the President failed to condemn the far right participants who precipitated much of the violence—or differentiate between the far right protesters and the liberal counter-protesters—it seemed to confirm the fears of many that President Trump's ideological predilections were intimately bound up with a particularly virulent strain of nativism, if not outright white supremacy. MAGA Much of what many have found so alarming about the recent turn of events has to do with the ways in which this confluence of whiteness and what it means to be American is inflected by the contested nature of collective memory. The instigation, for instance, of the Charlottesville debacle had to do with the civic worthiness of a Robert E. Lee statue, an object in which many see a distillation of Southern courage and heritage, and yet others see a monument that commemorates a time of mythical white unity, erected, like many Confederate monuments, as a symbol of the power, awe, and terror of white supremacy. The President, since Charlottesville, has made the protection and celebration of Confederate monuments a dominant feature of his culture war posture known, if only euphemistically, as Trumpism. Trumpism is by no means a precise ideology—at least not yet—but in a very broad way it is characterized by an indifference to suffering, fear-mongering about perceived outsiders, the exacerbation of existing cultural fissures in order to undermine any kind of consensus, the aestheticization of violence, and, most important for the purposes of this essay, a revanchist need to reclaim the hegemony of a largely patriarchal whiteness lost to liberalism's meddling desire to topple it. This longing is characterized by the deeply nostalgic slogan Make America Great Again, shortened to the quickly mutating neologism MAGA, a phrase that, if one is troubled by this recent reckoning with American Fascism, chills the blood. In this climate of MAGA, it is difficult not to see battle lines drawn across the arc of time in which we ask ourselves what constitutes not only America and greatness, but at what temporal point did it all turn so wrong? Even if we believe that history is cyclical and dynamic, as I do, it is hard to argue that this particular moment is not characterized by some kind of intense and rare malaise. Given this feeling of melancholy across the ideological spectrum, it is natural to seek out critical shifts or even ruptures where time breaks and we are prompted [End Page 104] to gaze back over the abyss. As our horizons of expectation concerning future happiness have become constrained, a reaction, for many...

Aestheticization of politics and ambivalence of self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker’s The National Anthem

This paper is focused on the meaning of the artist’s ‘theatre of violence’ and self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker’s The National Anthem (2011), a parable of power and resistance in the age of technology. To interpret ‘the first great artwork of the 21th century’ (as this resistance is called in the film), I critically draw on Jean Baudrillard’s post-Maussian theory of spectacular terror and on Walter Benjamin’s reflection on technology and the aestheticization of violence. Technology and mass media carve out a ‘domain of the sensible’ where hegemonic power and reactive violence are, as in The National Anthem, theatrically staged with contrasting effects, carnivalesque and dramatic, funny and abject. In Brooker’s film, the aestheticization of dominant power and subversive violence obliterate, and at the same time unveil, a moral problematic. By manoeuvring the logic of the spectacle of hegemonic power, the artist short-circuits it, and clings to the aspiration to an alternative or a political ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin) the staging of a global carnival is a moral protest meant to free people from the delusions of political and mass media power.

The `PB' and the aestheticization of violence in Northern Ireland

This article examines the creative appropriation and transformation of a protest vehicle such as the petrol bomb. I show that the human imagination can create an aesthetic out of even the street protest, carnivalizing and translocating such violent practices into the dance studio, the theatre, and even the everyday.

Symphonic aspirations: German music and politics, 1900-1945

Introduction Part I: Tradition in a Modern Age: Bruckner and Mahler at the Fin de Siecle 1. Symphonic Idealism in Crisis 2. Symphonic Conventions of a World Past 3. Sensuality and Redemption Part II: The Politics of Tradition: Mahler and Bruckner, 1914-1933 4. Mahler's Progressive Legacy and the Aestheticization of Violence 5. Bruckner's Nationalist Legacy and the Aestheticization of Space Part III: Symphonic Traditions under National Socialism 6. Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony and Symphony Ambitions under National Socialism 7. Symphonic Defeat Notes Index

Toward a Homosocial Theory of Sex Roles: An Explanation of the Sex Segregation of Social Institutions

Occupational segregation of women is a major reflection of the generalized segregation that characterizes all aspects of Western social life. It is the visible sign of a massive institutional substructure on which we are most likely to founder unless we are able to find a way around it. Two of the papers in this section deal with macrosociological segregation patterns that link different institutional sectors of society: Safilios-Rothschild addresses the question of sex segregation in the articulation between the institutions of the family and the occupational world; Gates explicates the ways in which the legal institutions buttress the segregation of the domestic and occupational domains. The Laws paper, operating on a different level of analysis, looks at different theoretical approaches to women's segregated involvement in the labor force.