Artificial Paradises Research Articles

Thomas Hettche Pfaueninsel (2014): powieść historyczna jako współczesna refleksja o Innym

The paper deals with Thomas Hettche’s novel Pfaueninsel, which is interpreted as a story about the Other. The category of otherness refers to the main character, Marie Strakon, a dwarf in the service of the King of Prussia in the 19th century, and to the place of action, Peacock Island near Berlin. Hettche’s historiographical metafiction is a fictional biography of a woman whose physical otherness places her in opposition to the orders established by humans: social, cultural, aesthetic, and historical. Peacock Island, in turn, transformed into an artificial paradise, is a heterotopic sphere of otherness contrasting with Berlin, an urban space of civilisation, progress, and the Industrial Revolution. The story of the Peacock Island biotope illustrates the emergence and evolution of ecological consciousness in the 19th century; it constitutes a motif of non-anthropocentric history being “the Other” of the ‘great’ history of humans. The paper shows how different dimensions of otherness are constructed in relation to the main protagonist and to the island space.

Artificial paradises: Man-made sites for the conservation of amphibians in a changing climate

Mediterranean wetlands harbour a rich freshwater biodiversity but also rank among the most-climate and human-pressure sensitive habitats. Amphibians are a taxonomic group strongly dependent on wetlands and the most threatened class of vertebrates due to habitat loss and alteration. In the Mediterranean region, amphibians breed in a large variety of artificial water sites (AWS). We used a large dataset of amphibian breeding sites to model functional connectivity, graph theory and climate niche modelling. AWS are radically different in structure compared to natural ones (NWS). Thus, we have disclosed how AWS can serve as a key piece of the ecological connectivity for amphibian populations; AWS and NWS have comparable values at the landscape scale, but in some areas AWS are pivotal. Furthermore, many AWS contribute by buffering the effect of climate change in the near future. We emphasize that conservation management strategies would be strengthened by including a specific focus on human-made aquatic habitats.

¿Por el paraíso perdido?

As in Baudelaire's essays, artificial paradises, well-used drugs such as opium can stimulate a sense of well-being and absence of pain. Although with the risks of dependence, intoxication and even death, the need for powerful painkillers has led to the production of synthetic drugs of easy manufacture and low cost such as fentanyl that in the wrong hands, for illicit purposes and without specialized medical supervision, are a deadly weapon. Is it worth taking the risks looking for paradise lost?

“An Artificial Paradise as the Healer of Pain in the Poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Chun-su Kim.”

“An Artificial Paradise as the Healer of Pain in the Poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Chun-su Kim.”

순수시(純粹詩) 시론을 넘어: 김춘수 시론에서의 폴 발레리 시론의 전유

Chun-su Kim understood the essence of French symbolism as Platonism. The concept of Platonism’s Idea is inherited by Baudelaire’s poetics of artificial paradise and Mallarmé and Valéry’s metaphysical exploration of the self. The concept of pure poetry as poetry that is composed of only musical elements excluding all elements other than poetry was artistically realized in Baudelaire’s poetry, starting with Poe. The first use of the phrase “la poésie pure” in Valéry’s poetics was found in “Avant-propos à la Connaissance de la Déesse”. Next, in Valéry’s prose “Situation de Baudelaire”, he thought that Mallarmé developed Baudelaire’s poetry with perfection and poetic purity. In Valéry’s prose “Propos sur la Poésie”, he pointed out that the expression of excitement was incidentally pure. In Valéry’s prose “Nécessité de la Poésie”, he emphasized the importance of intellect in poetizing and the importance of abstract thinking. Furthermore, he asserted that poetry should be inevitably narcissism. Finally, in Valéry’s prose “Poésie Pure”, it was emphasized that pure poetry should be an inaccessible ideal. Chun-su Kim described in detail the pure poetry that built up abstract thoughts into the poet’s inner world through the musical language in Poetics. Chun-su Kim analyzed Valéry’s poetry in Sense and Nonsense, and criticized Valéry’s poetry for failing to reach the ideal of pure poetry in that it was speculative. Valéry’s poetics of pure poetry was adopted in Chun-su Kim’s poetry. When Chun-su Kim created the works of the musical and philosophical pure poetry, it was same as Valéry’s. On the other hand, Valéry’s poetics of pure poetry was criticized in Chun-su Kim’s poetics, when Chun-su Kim wrote an autobiographical epic that embraced Korean tradition and history. In conclusion, Chun-su Kim created a new poetics beyond poetics of pure poetry by appropriating Valéry’s poetics.

Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature. Christopher Abram. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. vii+240.

<i>Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature</i>. Christopher Abram. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. vii+240.

¿Una Transición mágica? Entre la alegoría política y el discurso marginal

En este artículo se abordan una serie de obras adscritas a lo que he denominado “una Transición mágica”, pues todas ellas privilegian una aproximación simbólica a la realidad, en contraste con la poesía figurativa que predominará en la década de los ochenta. En concreto, se analizan la alegoría (intra)histórica contenida en Primer y último oficio (1979), de Carlos Sahagún; la épica coral desarrollada en Un país como este no es el mío (1978), de José Antonio Gabriel y Galán; la taumaturgia lírica mostrada en Taller del hechicero (1979), de Aníbal Núñez, y Teoría y práctica del círculo (1979), de Juan Luis Ramos; y, finalmente, los paraísos artificiales desplegados en Primavera soluble ([1978] 1992), de Aníbal Núñez, y De una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagall (1981), de Blanca Andreu. Entre la parábola política y el discurso marginal, los títulos anteriores reflejan la personalidad creativa de unos autores que se alejan de sus respectivos paradigmas generacionales y que ofrecen una perspectiva disidente sobre un país en transición desde el posfranquismo hacia la democracia.

Los partidos cosmopolíticos del paraíso artificial y de la infancia de las maquinas

A partir de una concepción de cosmopolítica informada por Tim Ingold, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille y Isabelle Stenders considero las confabulaciones que orientan dos partidos en la batalla cosmopolítica. Los edenistas ”“ en favor de la construccion de un paraíso artificial ”“ y los que cuidan de la infancia de las máquinas.

Gottfried Benn: “uma vez mais antes do fenecer...”

Jacques Derrida define disseminação como “errância do semântico”. Disseminação significa transtorno na comunicação tal qual o efeito de drogas. Mas, apesar de equivalentes ao processo da escrita, eles se distinguem dela por serem um estado real de usuários de tóxicos. Haveria, na literatura, afinidades entre “a experiência da ficção e a dependência das drogas, mesmo que os poetas não frequentem os paraísos artificiais”? Minha pesquisa centra-se na premissa “contaminação linguística” como experiência do uso de drogas na poesia do poeta Gottfried Benn. Analiso a “escrita drogada” que leva ao transtorno da comunicação, simbolizando, ademais, o desejo de fuga da existência.

Wolfram’s Soltâne and its Literary Traditions — on the Impossibility of an Artificial Paradise

Perceval grows up in the woodland solitude isolated from the courtly world and — at least so his mother intends — protected from the dangers of chivalry; this undertaking fails, however, for Perceval’s predestination to be a courtly knight through his noble birth wins out in the end. This article shows how the motif of the woodland solitude develops thematically: from an idyll disconnected from time and space in Chrétien de Troyes (Conte du Graal) and from a place which must be created and cultivated in the course of strategic settlement (Bliocadran) into Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Soltâne, an artificial paradise undermined by the acts of the characters living within it (Parzival), and into a fleeting episode in Ulrich Fuetrer’s text which the young man suddenly leaves, ‘after he became bored with his stay there’ (Buch der Abenteuer).

Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken

Reviewed by: Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken Miryam Sas Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken, translated by Francesca Simkin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pp. vi + 248. $60.00 cloth, $59.99 e-book. During the early 1990s, when I used to attend “the seminar,” as it was fondly called, run by Professor Edwin McClellan at Yale on the topic of modern Japanese literature, every once in a while Professor McClellan would sum up at the end of a complex three-hour conversation by saying something along these lines: “So you see, Author X [say, Mori Ōgai] was a genius.” This way of seeing the works never particularly bothered me: mired in deconstruction as I was, I effected an internal translation that made perfect sense to me, framing exactly what I thought he meant in my own critical terminology of the day: “This text by Mori Ōgai is an amazing work.” Lucken, in Imitation and Creativity, is concerned with the myth of genius and original creativity, as well as their history and vicissitudes in Japanese arts. He is equally concerned with creativity’s contrast—imitation—and the denigration of imitation, which is summed up in the original French title of one of the book’s chapters: “Japon singe” (lit. Japan the monkey, translated into English as “copycat Japan”). Lucken ultimately traces a “double dialectic,” or a “two-stage dialectic” (p. 199), process of creativity along various axes, leading to a “third and final phase” (p. 200), a sort of synthesis as it were, that does not stay stably on one or the other pole of this creativity-imitation binary. The [End Page 268] term “plastic” and the related quality of “plasticity”—whose uses and history, from Eisenstein writing about Disney to early anime theory, interest me deeply—come to represent Lucken’s reluctance to polarize the two terms. One of the key contributions of Lucken’s book and of some of his recent scholarly activity consists in his efforts to open a conversation between francophone and nonfrancophone scholars of Japanese studies in America, Europe, and Asia. Based at Inalco (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) in Paris, Lucken co-edited the volume Japan’s Postwar.1 Imitation and Creativity, translated smoothly by Francesca Simkin, continues his labor of bringing works of Japanese studies from French to English and thus providing the potential for a broader series of international dialogues. Since one would like to visit Paris as often as possible, even if only in imagination, these volumes offer the gift of a virtual tour around one corner of Inalco. Reading Imitation and Creativity raised for me questions about methodological differences between American and French studies of Japan—the implicit expectations we hold, without perhaps realizing it, and the subtle differences in emphasis, style, and approach these fields practice on different sides of the Atlantic. The French-language, Inalco publication of Imitation and Creativity is available from within an institutional library for PDF download under a different title, with some additional illustrations and hypertext footnotes: Les fleurs artificielles: Création, imitation et logique de domination (Artificial flowers: Creation, imitation and the logic of domination).2 The French title resonates somewhere between Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of evil) and Les paradis artificiels (Artificial paradises), hence implying a more complex relation to problems of artifice and origin than the English title. Not to criticize the change, but just to ask: Are we in Japanese studies in America expected to be more direct, less elliptical or literary? The title of part 1 is similarly transformed from “Le Paradigme Mimetique” (The mimetic paradigm), in my French version, to “A Historical Construction.”3 The history of the valuation and [End Page 269] devaluation of the varying definitions of the mimetic—from the concept of Schein (appearance) through Brecht to recent feminist performance studies—makes the topic truly complex and multivalent and well worthy of inquiry. Are American readers of Japan studies expected to require an emphasis on the historical rather than the theoretical vicissitudes of mimesis? It seems so, and...

일제강점기 창경원의 이미지와 유원지 문화

창경원은 일제강점기 창경궁에 박물관과 동 식물원이 계획되면서 조성된 유원지다. 오락거리를 갖추고 즐거움을 주는 공간인 유원지는 현실에서 벗어난 낙원의 이미지를 재현해왔다. 본 연구는 창경원의 조성 과정과 공간 변화를 고찰하고, 그 결과 조성된 낙원으로서 유원지의 경관과 문화적 특성을 도출했다. 창경원의 조성 의도와 과정을 문헌으로 고찰한 결과, 창경원은 조선의 식민지화 과정에서 순종의 즐거움을 위한 '어원'이자, '대중을 위한 오락장'으로 조성되었으며, 개원과 동시에 일반인들에게 개방되면서 누구나 입장료만 지불하면 이용할 수 있는 공중을 위한 공간이 되었다. 창경원의 공간 구성은 근대 도면과 사진을 비교 분석해 파악했다. 창경원의 배치를 살펴보면, 중앙에는 박물관 영역, 북쪽에는 식물원 영역, 남쪽에는 동물원 영역으로 구성되었다. 식물원 지구에는 대온실을 중심으로 한 식물배양실 등 열대 식물의 전시 및 관리 기능이 집약되었으며, 동물원 영역의 연못은 수금방양소로 만들고, 이 주변으로 각종 동물사와 동물 온실을 신축했다. 박물관 시설은 본관 건물뿐만 아니라, 기존의 전각들을 전시 시설로 흡수했으며, 전각 사이에는 서양식 정원을 조성해 꽃을 계획적으로 재배하기도 했다. 1930년대에 이르면 아동운동장이나 말운동장과 같이 어린이들을 위한 놀이 공간이 만들어졌다. 다음으로 창경원의 낙원 이미지와 유원지 문화를 고찰했다. 그 결과, 첫째, 창경원은 동 식물원을 통해 희귀한 동물과 식물들을 대중적으로 접할 수 있는 낙원의 이미지를 가지게 되었다. 이는 꽃관상이나 동물 구경과 같은 새로운 대중오락을 만들어냈다. 둘째, 창경원은 도시의 일상에서 탈출할 수 있는 '도시 안에서 도시 밖 자연을 간직한 낙원'을 상징하며, 도시민의 여가 공간이 되었다. 셋째, 벚꽃의 개화기에 야간 개방이 시작되면서 창경원에서는 조명 효과를 중심으로 '환상적인 밤 경관'이 연출되었다. 이러한 밤벚꽃놀이는 각종 공연, 음주 등과 결합되면서 선정적으로 변해갔고, 그 결과 창경원은 일탈의 낙원이라는 이미지를 가지게 되었다. 창경원은 다양한 성격의 시설이 혼재되면서 유원지라는 새로운 유형의 공간을 만들어내는데 기여했으며, 사람들은 유원지에서의 경험을 통해 새로운 오락 문화를 수용했다. Changgyeongwon emerged as pleasure grounds following the creation of a museum, zoo and botanical garden in Changgyeonggung Palace during the Japanese colonial period. Pleasure grounds offer space for entertainment and have maintained the image of a paradise apart from reality. This study examined the creation process of pleasure grounds within a royal palace and the following spatial changes. By analyzing the image of Changgyeongwon as an artificial paradise, this study explored its landscape and cultural aspects. Literature reviews on the intention and process showed that the Changgyeongwon pleasure grounds were created as a 'royal garden' for the amusement of Sunjong, as well as 'public pleasure grounds' in the process of colonization. It was one of the first public spaces open to everyone who could afford the entrance fee. The layout of Changgyeongwon was studied by a comparison and analyzation of modern plans and photographs. It was composed of the central museum zone, northern botanical garden zone, and southern zoological garden zone. A conservatory and greenhouse to exhibit and maintain tropical plants were intensively built in the botanical garden zone while an aviary was created on the zoo pond. In the vicinity of the aviary a vivarium was constructed. Museum exhibition facilities included a main building as well as existing buildings, and a western flower garden was created between the buildings. Space for children including a playground and horse-riding course were created in the 1930's. The paradisiacal image and pleasure grounds culture of Changgyeongwon were studied as follows. Firstly, it shows that Changgyeongwon's paradisiacal image where rare animals and exotic plants were open to the public was promoted by the zoo and botanical garden. This led to the creation of new popular leisure activities such as flower appreciation and animal watching. Secondly, Changgyeongwon offered an urban leisure space, symbolizing the 'non-urban nature within the city' where the urban residents could escape from the daily routine. Thirdly, Changgyeongwon was known for its 'fantastic night landscape' by its night opening during the cherry blossom season. This cherry blossom viewing at night sadly degenerated by various shows and drinking, and as a result, an image of a deviant paradise was given to Changgyeongwon. Changgyeongwon contributed to creating a new space with its diverse facilities, and the public embraced the urban culture through experiences of pleasure and entertainment.

Contribution à l’histoire de la notion de secret pathogène : à propos de Moriz Benedikt

ObjectivesThe concept of “pathogenic secret” was assigned by H. Ellenberger to an Austrian physician, Moriz Benedikt (1835–1920), who would have perfected the moral treatment. Whereas the notion of pathogenic secrets was then seen as relevant to hysterical conditions and their treatments, its relevance and scope have by now been widened to such other fields as medically assisted reproduction with gamete donation, HIV and transgenerational family therapies. Since the two articles published by Ellenberger over 40 years, there was no new contribution on the issue. Our research aims to update the data and to complement them. Materials and methodWe resumed the sources cited by H. Ellenberger and we also relied on the direct sources, such as conference proceedings, contemporary journals, inventory of his work by Moriz Benedikt, books published by other authors of his time, to replace the notion of secret in the overall approach of the Viennese physician, particularly in connection with his research on crime and his taste for poetry and dramas. ResultsContrary to what French readers can usually read, Moriz Benedikt was not an obscure doctor in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was an important physician of the “Belle Époque” of criminal anthropology whose works were referring. His research on “secret” aims to a global approach to the individual and to better prevent the criminal mind. As a doctor, he was opposed to moral treatment he considered as trickery. He advocated by common sense, after removal of an organic cause, to seek what the patient could meet as annoyance or what could have caused him to fear. While H. Ellenberger sought to register Moriz Benedikt as a precursor of dynamic psychiatry and separate his work on the crime from his work on the secret, it appears that these works form a coherent whole. Moreover, reading a Benedikt conference, “Second Life” allowed us to show that his contribution must be seen in the light of the then prevailing preoccupation for the “for intérieur” and he is connected with the researches of these times on it. Contrary to the interpretation by Ellenberger, Benedikt saw the second inner life as a refuge of modern man facing the adversity of the world. Benedikt called it “artificial paradise” in which the creativity refused by the outside world can be accommodated. In this context, it is the world which is pathogenic and not secret. ConclusionsUpdating our perception of the link between Moriz Benedikt and pathogenic secret is timely. It reveals two new perspectives: the link between crime and secret, also explored by many scholars in the late nineteenth century; and the innovative proposal by Benedikt of an inner psychic area, an area of secrecy constitutive of the psyche and being of vital importance to the individual – in an approach not unsimilar to that of practicing clinicians, such as Masud Khan or D.W. Winicott. Finally, we ask the question of the relation of Ellenberger with C.-G. Jung who, more significantly than Benedikt, stated that the prior for care was the confession of his secret by the patient.

Training, hypnosis, and drugs: artificial synaesthesia, or artificial paradises?

The last few years have seen the publication of a number of studies by researchers claiming to have induced “synaesthesia,” “pseudo-synaesthesia,” or “synaesthesia-like” phenomena in non-synaesthetic participants. Although the intention of these studies has been to try and shed light on the way in which synaesthesia might have been acquired in developmental synaesthestes, we argue that they may only have documented a phenomenon that has elsewhere been accounted for in terms of the acquisition of sensory associations and is not evidently linked to synaesthesia. As synaesthesia remains largely defined in terms of the involuntary elicitation of conscious concurrents, we suggest that the theoretical rapprochement with synaesthesia (in any of its guises) is unnecessary, and potentially distracting. It might therefore, be less confusing if researchers were to avoid referring to synaesthesia when characterizing cases that lack robust evidence of a conscious manifestation. Even in the case of those other conditions for which conscious experiences are better evidenced, when training has been occurred during hypnotic suggestion, or when it has been combined with drugs, we argue that not every conscious manifestation should necessarily be counted as synaesthetic. Finally, we stress that cases of associative learning are unlikely to shed light on two highly specific characteristic of the majority of cases of developmental synaesthesia in terms of learning patterns: First, their resistance to change through exposure once the synaesthetic repertoire has been fixed; Second, the transfer of conditioned responses between concurrents and inducers after training. We conclude by questioning whether, in adulthood, it is ever possible to acquire the kind of synaesthesia that is typically documented in the developmental form of the condition. The available evidence instead seems to point to there being a critical period for the development of synaesthesia, probably only in those with a genetic predisposition to develop the condition.

&lt;b&gt;A comunicação cinematográfica como dispositivo de produção de Saúde no cotidiano&lt;/b&gt;

In the last decade, the box office success of “City of God” (2002), followed by “Elite Squad” (2007) and its 2010 sequel (“Elite Squad: The Enemy Within”), has led Brazilian cinema to approach the subject of drug use as a social, economic, political, and cultural problem. A few weeks ago, two new movies portraying thematic alcohol and drug use opened in theaters across the country. The drama “Artificial Paradises”, by director Marcos Prado, and the comedy “So, Have You Eaten?” (2011), by Felipe Joffily, exemplify Brazilian cinema’s role as a medium for debating drug use—a medium that nevertheless avoids discussing drug use’s concomitant health concerns.

A melancolia, o discurso melancólico e suas relações com a mídia e com o consumo

Starting from the strutural revision of the melancholy in Freud, Lacan and their readers, we intend to point out the stylistic echoes of mania in the melancholic speech of Louis-Ferdinand Celine. For this, we confronted the celiniana obligation to cover the emptiness of the real with the entire truth, a peculiar from its maniac style with the shandiana form assumed by Machado maduro, where the melancholic fiction produces paradoxically a know-how/self-satisfaction with the life based in a nonentire truth. In the sequency, we examined the effects of melancholic speech from the invention of the significant depression, abducted by the science speech and articulated by the media over the auspicious from the capitalist speech. That is what confront us with the depression’s ideology, antecipated by the poetic melancholy from the Artificial paradises. However, this civilization’s illusion without discomfort through the hapiness’ policies is able to produce certain narcotics consequences in the social link, that go from the medically toxicomania, compatible with the society’s consume, until the desegregation appetite of the illicit drugs.

Alchemies of Modern Experimentation in Writing: Leopardi, Baudelaire, and the Distillation of Wine Symbolism

BEFORE nineteenth-century realism and naturalism exposed it as an instrument of social and economic destruction, wine--at the center of table culture, social decorum, and religious symbolism--was a recognized and lauded of transcendence. This alchemical converter furnished poets and philosophers with an image to designate a rite of passage, from sickness to health, from consciousness to dream, from the tangibly human to the spiritually divine. Early nineteenth-century Italian and French poets embraced this tradition. Giacomo Leopardi praised wine for its ability to heal the body and spirit, to inspire unprecedented poetic articulacy and God-like omniscience (Zibaldone di Pensieri). Charles Baudelaire celebrated wine's capacity to reverse situations, changer la taupe en aigle, with all the metaphorical implications of blindness giving way to sight (Le Vin, Oeuvres 214). Given the equally important influence of each poet on his respective national literature, Leopardi's fragments on wine in the Zibaldone di Pensieri make a relevant comparison with Baudelaire, whose poems are perhaps more readily associated with theories of intoxication. (1) Although both poets assimilate traditional alcohol mythologies and connect them with an experimental writing process that we might call modern, a closer look at the ways in which Baudelaire goes beyond these myths reveals a significant historical shift in the literary treatment of wine. For Leopardi, wine is a of vitality and rejuvenation, and the Zibaldone emphasize wine's effectiveness for restoring bodily and physical health to the sick poet. More than just an antidote to pain and melancholy, wine is an elixir, an alchemical potion capable of inducing elevated mental states, augmenting human vision, and increasing understanding of universals--all this without severing the human connection to reason and language. Combining magic with an element of rational control, wine becomes instrumental to poetic vision, invention, and expression. For the French poet, too, wine is a substance de conversion, to borrow Roland Barthes' expression (Mythologies 74). Although Baudelaire never understates wine's transformative and inspirational potential in either the prose poem, Du Vin et du haschich, or in the wine poems of Les Fleurs du Mal, he nonetheless relegates wine, along with other stupefiants, to the realm of artificial paradises, and the later poems mark his shift in thinking about alcohol. Not only do they anticipate surrealism in a tableau of oneiric images that border on hallucination, testifying to the poetic avant-gardism that many have discussed. (2) They more importantly disclose the century's changing attitudes about alcohol, and announce naturalism by distilling (taken here in the double senses of purifying and extracting essential or true meanings) a critique of modern urban society. Let us now turn to this distillation of wine symbolism. The example of Leopardi shows wine to be a transmutative capable of generating creative, visionary impulses. In the Zibaldone, wine is also a of transcendence, which for Leopardi is first and foremost a physical matter: Il vino e il piU certo, e (senza paragone) il piU efficace consolatore. Dunque il vigore; dunque la natura (Zibaldone 324-5: 127).3 More than a mere consolation, wine offers a means of getting beyond the invalid body and back to bodily vigor and nature. It is widely accepted that Leopardi's ill-health and physical deformities exercised an influence on his writing. According to Benedetto Croce, favorite expressions in the fragments, such as Enemy Nature illustrate this link between the biography and the verse. Abandoning the earlier, eighteenth-century pastoral images of nature, Leopardi describes the menacing cloud which Enemy Nature casts over life, reminding the poet of his infinite smallness in a harsh and dangerous universe, as if the infiniment petit of Pascalian Jansenism had returned to haunt nineteenth-century Italy. …

SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (review)

Reviewed by: SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film Patrick Meanor Robert Beuka . SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film. New York: Palgrave, 2004. ix + 284 pp. SuburbiaNation provides a unique analysis and examination of the relationship between landscape and culture. Though that topic has been discussed in literally hundreds of essays and books, the majority of these studies are sociological and psychological dissections of the origins and effects of the rise of the suburbs after World War II. They concentrate on the dislocating effects that the newly emerging suburban culture had—and continues to have—on the emotional and spiritual lives of their inhabitants. And Beuka's news is not encouraging. What makes SuburbiaNation's findings so compelling, and disturbing, is Beuka's highly imaginative and comprehensive treatment of this complex topic as it is manifested in literature, films, and classic historical and sociological texts on the rise of the suburbs. Nothing that this reader has encountered comes close to Beuka's comprehensive handling of this troubling topic. The textual loom that he weaves so elegantly is utterly convincing and justifies a fresh reinvestigation of the entire issue: How is it that suburbia has fallen from its utopian glory into a dystopian wasteland, with no spiritual or geographical center? Beuka never loses sight that landscape is his central subject: "Ultimately, the value of studying fictional treatments of life in the suburbs lies in working toward discovering the cultural significance of a place that over the course of a half century has evolved from a revolutionary and emergent terrain to become the dominant landscape of the United States" (21). Beuka never stops reminding the reader that the major proposal of his book is, in the words of geographer, David Harvey: "Place in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct. . . . The only interesting question that can then be asked is: by what social process(es) is place constructed?" (22). Each chapter interweaves examples from fiction, film, and sociological/geographical texts to support Beuka's consistent thesis that suburbia has failed to regenerate a fresh Edenic condition but has, rather, devolved into a highly technological wasteland that suffocates mothers and children and emasculates men. Chapter One discusses two masterful novels from the Twenties, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Both are early critiques of the empty values of suburbia and establish a secure thematic grounding of the writers treated in this book: John Cheever, John Updike, Ann Beattie, and Gloria Naylor. The author parallels the works of these writers with selected filmmakers who treat the perils of suburbia: Frank Perry, Mike Nichols, Gary Ross, and Sam [End Page 728] Mendes. "Gatsby himself embodies this sense of being caught in an insupportable present—situated, as [Richard] Legan argues, 'between a dead past and an implausible future.'" Fitzgerald always presents Gatsby's romantic quest in terms of geographical landscape, but it is a highly troubled relationship that Gatsby has with his spiritual yearnings and his elegant estate: "Gatsby seems hardly inpossession of his own home at all, and he is consistently portrayed throughout the novel as dislocated from place" (33). Chapter Two explores John Cheever's sense of the banality of suburban life in eight stories, though Cheever traces, in depth, suburban discontents in "The Enormous Radio," "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," and, most prominently, "The Swimmer." The chapter also sheds valuable insights on Cheever's complex postmodernist treatment of Neddy Merrill's tragic ending. Beuka compares the film version of "The Swimmer"—Eleanor Perry's screenplay—with the original version and discovers a major theme—the emasculating power of a centerless suburban, artificial paradise—a theme that the author develops throughout the remainder of the book. Neddy becomes a genuine tragic hero when he is depicted as "the stranger at the gate" at the conclusion of the story. Chapter Three, "Rabbit Redux: The Perils of Suburban Masculinity," extends Beuka's investigation into suburbia's symbolic castration of the American male. Updike brutally demonstrates just how suburbia renders Rabbit impotent on a number of levels, but he presents Rabbit's dilemma in unmistakably Freudian terms: "Updike tracks...

A Cadaver in Clothes: Autobiography and the Dandy in Baudelaire

Dandy doit vivre et dormir devant un miroir. Baudelaire Baudelaire's work is far from self-evidently autobiographical. Les Fleurs du mal, for instance, cannot be easily compared to a self-declared poetic autobiography like Hugo's Contemplations where poems are of decidedly personal inspiration, bear dates that attach them to experience, and lay out a plausible narrative of poetic development. In contrast, Baudelaire's undated poems appear impersonal and, in their emblematic character, untethered to experience. While poet does give collection status of an expressive work in one letter to Ancelle: Faut-il vous dire, a vous qui ne l'avez pas plus devine que les autres, que dans ce livre atroce, j'ai mis tout mon ceur, toute ma tendresse, toute ma religion (travestie), toute ma haine?--it is only to take it back right away: Il est vrai que j'ecrirai le contraire, que je jurerai mes grands Dieux que c'est un livre d'art pur, de singerie, de jonglerie. (1) Whatever principle of secret architecture of collection, it is not the growth of poet's mind. Nor are individual poems clearly self-expressive. It is true that Spleen poems seem to indicate mood, but mood in question is a dubious one, where poet's voice is cracked, incapable of striking anything but dissonant notes or sounding a death rattle. The enterprising reader who heads to a poem like Confession in search of a genuine autobiographical moment will be disappointed to discover that confession consists of a discourse overheard in false note of someone else's voice. Itis true that two of poems--Je n'ai pas oublie, voisine de la ville ... and La servante au grand ceur dont vous etiez jalouse ...--are by Baudelaire's own avowal retrospective. And yet even there Baudelaire insists that he has done his best to generalize and to strip away detAlls that might make intimate scenes identifiable. (2) The famous poem on memory, Cygne, starts out with a literary, not a personal reminiscence (Andromaque, je pense a vous! (3)) and moves on to recount an anecdote about an escaped swan wandering on a construction site that, although read by some critics as a literal event, has been thought by many too neat to ring true. A similar situation obtains elsewhere in work. Look to Artificial Paradises for soul-searching drug narrative of an experienced user, and you will be disappointed. Instead you find stories author, acting as a sort of scientist, purports to have collected from others. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire has eschewed anecdotal style that his friendship with painter Constantin Guys would have allowed, and has even effaced name that would anchor portrait to a referent. Baudelaire's biographers Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler will occasionally wonder whether most apparently unproblematical of autobiographical texts, Baudelaire's letters to his mother, are not those of a mountebank who poses even in his most intimate moments. (4) In Baudelaire's texts, personal stylenot all but dispensed with. (5) The Intimate Journals is a more promising place to look for an autobiographical subject. Indeed, main piece, Mon cceur mis a nu, was projected as an autobiography perhaps unusual in tone, but not in structure--it was to tell story of education of an angry man. (6) But in project as we have it, Baudelaire has avoided narrative mode that Lejeune makes a crucial trait of genre. (7) We don't find a story of past events of a life, and usual accouterments of journal entry--names, dates, places that might somehow affix fragmentary reflections to happenings of a life--are mostly missing. Such names as do appear might as easily have been gleaned from a newspaper column as dug out of Baudelaire's own memory, so little do they tell that is personal. When, exceptionally, poet dates a diatribe against bourgeoisie, he dates from century. …

Translating the garden

Prologue Invitation to the Garden Renditions of the Garden Reflections of the Garden Artificial Paradise The Garden of the Soul The Garden in Exile Epilogue Dialogue in the Garden Notes Bibliography Index