Cultural Ambivalence Research Articles

Poe and the Revenge of the Exquisite Corpse

POE AND THE REVENGE OF THE EXQUISITE CORPSE Judith E. Pike Salisbury State University Although Poe' s debt to the Gothic genre is documented in his tales with numerous references to Gothic texts and occult literature, Poe' s "architecture of death"1 is not merely a case of belated romanticism.2 The resurgence of the Gothic architectures of death in Poe should instead be read as a literary response to cultural attempts to raze those very structures and replace them with a new ideology of death. By Poe' s time, death was being sublimated by a whole new industry and aesthetic of mourning, which in effect commercialized and domesticated death. Although numerous cultural historians have surveyed the shift in the iconography of death from the eighteenth century through to the Victorian period in America, they have failed to theorize fully how the nineteenth-century cult of mourning reveals a profound cultural ambivalence toward the unsublimated dead body, especially the female dead body.3 Poe's writings not only expose this ambivalence but reinvest the dead body with the corporeality that the cult of mourning attempts to eradicate. Poe figures the female living dead as an embodiment of the Lacanian real, which dismantles the nineteenth century's emergent fetishism of the exquisite corpse. At the heart of the nineteenth-century romantic cult of the dead lay a profound ambivalence towards the dead body. On one hand the dead body achieved a certain stature with its own elaborate memorials— death bed scenes, wakes, monumental tombstones—and even, with the garden cemetery movement, its own private property, a fenced-in private plot.4 On the other hand, the dead body was at the height of its exclusion from public view. One ofthe period' s most popular funerary sculptures, the urn, privileged a pile ofashes—the disembodied body— as the figure of death. The more the dead body was memorialized, the more it was forgotten. Phillipe Ariès cites numerous examples of how memorial representations, such as mourning pictures, replaced the natural body; mourning pictures, he argues, "played the role of the tomb, of the memorial, a sort of portable tomb adapted to American mobility ."5 The body was everywhere immortalized but nowhere to be found. 172Judith E. Pike The profound ambivalence toward the dead body inherent in the cult of mourning gave rise to new technicians of death and sublimation . While garden cemeteries and funerary sculptors had successfully rid themselves of any reminders of the dead body, other aestheticians of death were reclaiming the dead body. With the 1839 invention of the daguerreotype, photographers created a new technological means of disavowing death, through postmortem photography. While the deceased are most often portrayed as sleeping, some postmortem photographs display the dead in more lifelike poses, sitting up in a chair or gazing out at the viewer.6 Later in the century, with improvements in embalming techniques, morticians began vying amongst themselves for the best looking corpse. There was even a competition announced by the National Funeral Director's Association for the best looking corpse after sixty days, with a prize worth $1,000.6 Morticians became another genre of body snatchers whose task was to replace the natural body with a sublime one that could survive death, at least up to sixty days. This effort to deny death and the decomposition ofthe dead body nurtured what I am calling the fetish of the exquisite corpse. However, all these elaborate techniques to sublimate the dead body and transform it into a "sleeping beauty" or an exquisite corpse led to a shocking conclusion: the nineteenth-century tombstone no longer marks the site of the dead body nor of the bereaved living, but of the living dead. By the time the body is ready for burial, it has been revived by the photographer's and mortician's arts; in a sense, it is buried alive. All these nineteenth-century technicians were trying to give the dead body a decent burial. Decent burials, however, are all too often premature burials, replacing the naturalistic dead body with the sublime body of the exquisite corpse that hovers somewhere between life and death. It can neither be too alive, for then...

Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England

Famed for his learning, wordplay, fantasy and insight, the French writer Francois Rabelais (1494?-1553) was also widely known for scoffing, supposed atheism, salacious writing and irresponsible whimsy. This book explores Renaissance England's response to the humorous yet difficult and ambiguous Rabelais. Anne Lake Prescott describes in detail how a host of English writers - Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Donne, James I, Shakespeare and Michael Drayton, among many others - collectively and sometimes individually appreciated and condemned Rabelais. Prescott documents the extent to which Rabelais's name and work permeated Renaissance English literature and thought. Tudor and Stuart writers quoted him, told funny or scandalous stories about him, imitated him, abhorred him, even judged Rabelais without reading him. In this wide range of responses, from the urbanely appreciative to the pompous and grumpy, Prescott finds understandings of cultural ambivalence and the ambiguities of literary reception. She shows that precisely because Rabelais's reputation was contradictory, appropriating his name or words was useful in Renaissance England for expressing division on topics ranging from authorship and sex to heresy and political secrets.

The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.

Hays's intellectually incendiary Cultural Contradictions could add needed nuance to feminist thought-and perhaps ignite change in mothersi overburdened lives.-Phyllis Eckhaus, The Nation lucid, probing examination of our culture's contradictory and troubled relationship to motherhood-and how it affects mothers. . . . A thoughtful analysis of the paradoxes that surround mothering. Hays is sensitive to the emotional issues involved-and equally astute in perceiving their sociopolitical context.-Kirkus Reviews thoughtful and carefully written new book that provides excellent material for family demography or women's studies courses at the graduate level.-Sandra L. Hofferth, American Journal of Sociology An ideology of 'intensive mothering' exacerbates the inevitable tensions working mothers face, claims sociologist Sharon Hays. While women are expected to be nurturing and unselfish in their role as mothers, they are expected to be competitive and even ruthless at work. Drawing on ideas about mothering since the Middle Ages, on contemporary childrearing manuals, and on in-depth interviews, Hays shows that 'intensive mothering' is a powerful contemporary ideology. These unrealistic expectations of mothers, she suggests, reflect a deep cultural ambivalence about the pursuit of self-interest.

The Jazz Tinge in Dominican Music: A Black Atlantic Perspective

its inception, jazz has developed in dialogue with Afro-Latin musics; as Jelly Roll Morton affirmed, were integral to early jazz in quintessentially Caribbean city of New Orleans (quoted in Lomax 1973, 63). The two world wars spread North American popular culture along with U.S. hegemony, and jazz was subsequently domesticated worldwide. Especially fertile fusions of jazz and local musics developed in African-influenced music cultures (see Averill 1989; Coplan 1985; Pickney 1989). Afro-Cuban jazz became internationally known in 1940s under influence of Cuban musicians Machito, Mario Bauza, and Chano Pozo and of bebopper Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie once wrote about his rapport with Pozo: Since Chano couldn't speak English, people always asked, `Well, how do you communicate?' `Deehee no peek pani, me no peek Angli, bo peek African,' Chano would answer [Dizzy no speak Spanish, I no speak English, but we both speak African] (Gillespie and Fraser 1979, 318). Similarly, Machito once said that merging of jazz with the rhythms of Cuban music was not a conventional union--it was a marriage of love (quoted in Waxer 1994, 154). But black Atlantic musics are a variegated constellation not a uniform soundscape; as Paul Gilroy (1993a, 109) affirms, Race carries with it no corona of fixed absolute meanings. The study of music in African diaspora thus involves struggling with one question in particular. It is puzzle of what analytic status should be given to variation ... between black cultures which their musical habits reveal (Gilroy 1993b, 79-80). While Latin jazz developed into a full-fleged genre in New York City (see Roberts 1979), jazz tinges became important in Dominican popular music. This article critically considers history of jazz tinge in Dominican music, tracing its reception and stylistic development. The Dominican Republic's population is estimated at 80 percent mixed African and European, 15 percent black, and 5 percent white; Dominican sociologist Pedro Perez Cabral (1967, 75) aptly calls his country a comunidad mulata, or mixed-race community. The African element in this mix is cardinal; as Martha Ellen Davis (1976, 2) attests, Dominican Republic without doubt, should be considered an Afro-American nation--that is, a New World nation in which African cultural influence figures prominently, if not predominantly. Unlike Africans and British, however, Africans and Iberians were not strangers when they met in Americas; two groups had shared lifeways for over seven hundred years during Moorish occupation of Iberian peninsula. The occupying forces in Spain came from as far away as Timbuktu (Ortiz 1952-1955, 3:64), and many of those who came to Caribbean from Spain were free settlers of partial African descent (Curtin 1969, 31). By end of eighteenth century, black and mixed-race freedmen outnumbered both whites and slaves in colonial Santo Domingo. The Spanish colony of Santo Domingo was founded in 1493 by Christopher Columbus. Its western third was ceded to France in 1697, and Republic of Haiti was founded there in 1804 as result of a successful slave uprising. With ideal of ridding entire island of colonialism and slavery, Haiti invaded Spanish Santo Domingo, unifying island in 1822. Although Dominican slaves welcomed Haitians, Eurocentric ruling classes looked disfavorably on Haitian occupation, repelling invaders and proclaiming independence of Dominican Republic--from Haiti and not from Spain--in 1844. then, Dominican upper classes have consistently propagated a Eurocentric notion of national identity that stands in stark contrast to highly African-influenced culture of their country's majority. The ensuing racial and cultural ambivalence is, as Frantz Fanon puts it, inherent to the colonial situation (1967, 83; see also Herskovits 1937, 295-296; Bourguignon 1951, 1969; Wilcken 1992; Austerlitz 1997, 7). …

Aging and Identity in Premodern Times

In premodern as in modem (and postmodern) times in the West, the social and personal identity of the aging and aged is mediated through the decay of the gendered and biomedicalized body. The social identity of the premodern aged was marked by ambivalence: images of the wise, spiritual, or useful elder contrasting with that of the spiteful, fearful, and ugly aged person. Both social place and personal identity were shaped, for aging men, by war, work, and sexual potency, and for aging women, by the reproductive, domestic, and cosmetic body. The movement toward collective identity in modem times is not likely to change Western cultural ambivalence toward the aging self, since aging, unlike gender, race, or sexual orientation, represents and is represented by physical decline.

Are pharmacology and constructivist psychotherapy mutually exclusive?

The argument is made that pharmacological therapy and constructivist psychotherapy have no common ground and are mutually exclusive. Therapeutic examples are then offered of how drug and talk therapies interact, in a effort to see whether there is a common ground after all. Some of the incompatabilities can be minimized by changing the amount of control the patient has over the medication, but the displacement of “the problem” from life in the world to chemicals in the brain is a more intransigent difference between the 2 practices. Basic conceptual differences involve definitions of helping as well as problems, suggesting that this issue is yet another example of cultural ambivalence toward technology.

Fathers and daughters in a south Indian goddess myth: Cultural ambivalence and the dynamics of desire

Desire in kinship creates ambivalences which the kinship system itself does not resolve, and while this has been understood—especially with reference to the mother-son relationship in South Asia—little attention has focused on the relationship between father and daughter. The Jalari (a Telugu fishing caste) myth of the seven goddesses turns on the relationship between Shiva and his daughters. Alternately impeding and assisting each other, Shiva and his daughters represent, in their relationship, one of the central paradoxes of south Indian kinship: How can fathers and daughters love but relinquish each other, given the exigencies of development, and especially marriage? The myth presents a solution by transforming daughters into goddesses, preserving the father—daughter bond, and making marriage contingent on cooperation among women, not men. It is argued that ambivalence is central to south Indian kinship, and the fons et origo of an important regional mythical system.

Addiction or compulsion: Politics or illness?

Abstract Confusion exists about the use of the terms addiction and compulsion. In the case of sexual addiction and compulsion, the issues seem to be more volatile. In part this reflects our cultural ambivalence about sex, and in part this reflects professional ambivalence about sex addiction. This article summarizes the clinical usage of the terms sexual addiction and sexual compulsion and the issues that result across five separate disciplines: sexual medicine, addiction medicine, trauma medicine, psychiatry, and criminal justice rehabilitation. The summary reveals many parallels in the five disciplines and their reactions to the terms sexual addiction and sexual compulsion. Research across the disciplines points to a paradigm shift which may resolve issues of clinical understanding of the terms.

Remarks on the Foreign (Strange) as a Figure of Cultural Ambivalence

Remarks on the Foreign (Strange) as a Figure of Cultural Ambivalence

Making the Rounds The Ethical Development of Medical Students in the Context of Clinical Rotations

Often in the hospital setting I feel I intrude into people's lives, take what I want, and move on. Does the experience of serving as a clinical clerk on the hospital wards change the ethical views and moral values that students bring to medical school? If so, what aspects of this experience and its environs most affect students' ethical development? What are the fundamental elements of the ethical dilemmas that students encounter, and what do these dilemmas reveal about the medical training process and the basic 'human condition' of young clinical clerks and house officers?[1] These questions, based upon earlier studies of medical students and our experiences leading ethics discussions among third-year students, frame the subject of this essay: the actual ethical predicaments that clinical clerks struggle with. In a previous paper we provided a taxonomy of student ethical dilemmas, emphasizing that the predicaments students confront differ from those that house-staff and attending physicians face.[2] Here, we want to explore these dilemmas in greater depth by examining the social context in which medical students encounter ethical quandaries, with particular focus on the hierarchy of authority and power that exists in hospital medicine. This hierarchical social structure configures the ethical difficulties that medical students encounter--dilemmas that display some of the deep cultural paradoxes and ambivalence manifest in current hospital practice. Students' interactions with these dilemmas, in all their social and cultural dimensions, shape their personal ethical development. Our intention in this essay is to illustrate, ethnographically, the importance of these dilemmas for students' moral conceptions of medicine, and to make recommendations that we hope will enable students to maintain and nurture their ethical self-identity. First Steps: Medical Student Ethical Dilemmas I was on my first rotation of internal medicine as a clinical clerk. One evening, Mrs. S arrived on the floor. My senior resident, having already interviewed and examined Mrs. S, told me that this ninety-year-old who presented with a swollen leg would be a good patient for me to follow. Knowing that this rotation required me to perform several thorough histories and physical examinations, I was eager to get started, and I went to her room. It was nine o'clock. Largely because of Mrs. S's hearing impairment, it took me two hours to complete her medical history. Before I had begun the physical exam, my resident knocked on the door to tell me that Mrs. S. needed blood cultures and labs sent. Since the intern was busy working up another admission, she told me that I should get them (even though it would be only the second time I had drawn blood). Mrs. S.'s patience began to wear thin as I fumbled through several phlebotomy attempts. It was past midnight. She was tired and growing uncomfortable. I began to wonder: if I resume my examination, am I serving her needs or my own? ... Probably every seasoned clinical clerk, through either firsthand experience or secondhand anecdote, could recognize the outlines of this case--its protagonist combining an earnest desire to help and to learn, but beset by conflicting feelings of self-doubt and frustration. During the 1991-92 academic year, as fourth-year student preceptors of an ethics minicourse that all students took during their first clinical rotation in internal medicine, we listened to dozens of similar accounts as we explored with 150 third-year medical students the nature of the ethical world in which they worked. …

The Language of the Canek Manuscript

AbstractThe Canek manuscript is written in a distinctive linguistic style, probably a local variant of Spanish influenced by Yucatec Maya and archaic forms of Spanish. It also reflects a curiously ambivalent perspective on the Itza king Canek, at once aligning him with the pagan Indians and suggesting an affinity with Saint Francis. Like many other colonial texts, the four extant folia of this manuscript show a blending of verbal genres. This paper presents a discourse analysis of the manuscript, demonstrating that it is organized according to a systematic rhetorical structure based on syntactic foregrounding, poetic parallelism and thematic development. Placed in the context of other colonial documents, this one displays the cultural and linguistic ambivalence of its author.

Fashion, Postmodernity and Personal Appearance: A Symbolic Interactionist Formulation

A theoretical explanation of fashion change is offered, drawing upon symbolic‐interactionist insights on fashion and appearance, and developing macro‐micro connections between cultural ambivalence and the negotiation of meaning as inspired by symbolic ambiguity in appearances. The postmodern condition, connected with advanced capitalism, spawns cultural ambivalence and a plethora of clothing styles that emerge, in part, to clarify and lend expression to ambivalence. A broad variety of clothing styles, however, coupled with tendencies toward production of self, contribute to a high degree of ambiguity in individually constructed appearances, the meaning of which must then be collectively negotiated in social interaction. Failure of clothing styles to resolve cultural ambivalence results in fashion change in an ongoing dialectic.

Images and Archetypes in Kamala Markandaya's Novels: A Study in Cultural Ambivalence

Images and Archetypes in Kamala Markandaya's Novels: A Study in Cultural Ambivalence

Australian Cultural History

Preface F. B. Smith and S. L. Goldberg 1. The cultural ambivalence of Australian Religion Partick O'Farrell 2. Anglicanism David Hillard 3. The roots of Australian anti-suburbanism Alan Gilbert 4. 'Countrymindedness': the spread of an idea Don Aitkin 5. Egalitarianism John Hirst 6. State education and culture R. J. W. Selleck 7. Intellectuals for export: Australia in the 1920s Helen Bourke 8. Men of wealth W. D. Rubinstein 9. Modern nerves, nervous moderns David Walker 10. Royal progress: the Queen and her Australian subjects Peter Spearitt 11. Festivals of nationhood: the international exhibitions Graeme Davison 12. Cultural history: the 'high' and the 'popular' John Rickard 13. Populism and privilege in Australian painting Terry Smith 14. Body politics Robin Grove 15. Self-levelling tall poppies: the authorial self in (male) Australian literature Dirk den Hartog 16. Louise Hanson-Dyer: the emergence of a patron Jim Davidson Index.

Cultural Marginality and Ambivalence Among Arabs

This paper explores the opportunities available to international marketers to tap the potentially lucrative market created by the presence of a large number of Arab students in the U.S.A. The findings, based on questionnaire responses and interviews with 118 Arab students, indicate that cultural marginality and ambivalence among students are prevalent. These phenomena represent a love-hate relationship aimed at the culture of origin and that of the United States, and offers the Western marketer new opportunities in the Arab market. Some suggestions are made on increasing the utilization of international students in the planning of marketing strategies for their respective countries.

Professional versus academic values: cultural ambivalence in university professional school in Australia

University staff who teach and research in professional schools inhabit an ambivalent cultural world. Their dual mandate requires commitment to traditional academic norms and scholarship through the disciplines on the one hand, and commitment to the transmission of distinctly vocational skills and attitudes on the other. Tensions created by these two intersecting roles both within professional schools and between professional school staff and their colleagues in non-professional fields, and the implications of these for the functioning of a university are explored. Findings suggest that university leaders who understand more fully the bases of tension between the two and develop strategies to minimise symbolic separation, are more likely to ensure the survival and growth of both the academic-scholarly and practice-oriented cultures.

Demonic Disturbances of Sexual Identity: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr/s Hyde

In Victorian cultural myth, as Nina Auerbach has argued brilliantly in and the Demon, woman is insistently imagined as a source of powerful and threatening metamorphic energies. Auerbach contrasts these heroic female demons with diminished male counterparts such as Robert Louis Stevenson's dwarfish Mr. Hyde: Demonic man does not include divinity in his nature, and is thus a poor stunted counterpart to grandly demonic womanhood.' Yet if Victorian womanhood is indeed connected with transformation itself, then sexuality and identity are unlikely to remain the fixed categories that Auerbach's analysis insists upon-nor can Mr. Hyde be directly opposed to a specifically female demon of the Victorian imagination. Stevenson's story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is about a collaboration between the masculine and feminine that subverts the identity of each. Written at a time when gender roles were shifting, the story lacks coherent representations of sexuality despite its seeming emphasis on an emphatically male society. Both Stevenson's marriage to a New Woman and his collaborative writing provide dramatic examples of cultural ambivalence about sexual difference and its representation.

Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation

In a letter to the nineteenth-century violinist Joseph Joachim, Clara Schumann declares, "Bin ich auch nicht producierend, so doch reproducierend" (Even if I am not a creative artist, still I am recreating).' While she played an enormously important role reproducing her husband's works, both in concert and later in preparing editions of his work, she was also a composer in her own right; yet until recently, historians have focused on only one composer in this family. Indeed, as feminist scholarship has amply demonstrated, conventional representations of women-whether artistic, social, economic, or political-have been guided by a cultural ambivalence about the possibility of a woman artist and about the status of woman's "work." In the case of Clara Schumann, it is ironic that one of

Cultural Ambivalence: Ngaio Marsh's New Zealand Detective Fiction

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 19, Issue 2 p. 159-174 In-depth Section: New Zealand Literature and Culture Cultural Ambivalence: Ngaio Marsh's New Zealand Detective Fiction Carole Acheson, Carole Acheson Carole Acheson is a freelance writer in Christchurch.Search for more papers by this author Carole Acheson, Carole Acheson Carole Acheson is a freelance writer in Christchurch.Search for more papers by this author First published: Fall 1985 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1985.00159.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume19, Issue2Fall 1985Pages 159-174 RelatedInformation

The British “Pacification” of Burma: Order Without Meaning

One of the most frequently made remarks concerning British colonialism, both in print and in informal settings, has been the British role in bringing “law and order” to the colonies. Although serious scholarship has successfully questioned this assertion for some areas of the world, particularly India, for Burma, very little has been done. The reasons for proposing that Britain brought law, and especially order to Burma seem to stem from at least two factors. First, the study of Burmese law in the West is at best in its infancy, despite recent efforts by Burmese historians. Second, and more importantly, historians by and large have tended to ignore Burmese criteria for defining order, and have therefore misinterpreted as simple lawlessness what were on many important occasions traditional forms of expressing dissent and symptoms of social dysfunction, as well as cultural and psychological ambivalence of identity, especially amongst certain new classes created by colonialism itself. Thus what often appeared on the surface as order after so-called “pacification” and in general throughout the colonial period is an incomplete picture, for it was almost certainly as well, if not more so, the political, military, and psychological inability of the Burmese to present a united front against a technologically superior power. But because the entire colonial period cannot be dealt with here—although I suspect it would only further support the major thesis of this essay—and because the British concept of “pacification” (and as a result the literature on the subject) had established the intellectual framework and parameters for evaluating the subsequent colonial and post-independence periods, I feel it is adequate to have centered my arguments around the so-called period of “pacification” only. I intend to approach this topic by first describing briefly what we might call indigenous methods of pacification, contrast it to the general pacification policies and methods pursued by the British, observe the significance of the differences, and then conclude by showing how the coup of 1962 could be interpreted more as a resurrection than a true revolution.