Artistic Commitment Research Articles

Rebuilding Ethical Desire in the Era of Narcissistic Jouissance: The Reinvention of Fatherhood in Antonio Scurati’s Il padre infedele

This article argues that in Il padre infedele, Antonio Scurati deals with the loss of social responsibility that characterises the current era of hyperhedonism, forging a post-metaphysical form of parenthood that, similarly to Massimo Recalcati’s ‘father-witness’, transforms narcissistic jouissance into ethical desire without resurrecting the Law of the Father. Furthermore, it contends that Scurati’s ‘father-witness’ is an embodiment of the ‘writer-witness’ as storyteller who is a recurring presence both in the author’s works and in other works of contemporary literature, and can be viewed as a strategy to combat ethical inertia without reinstating an ‘organic’ discourse of artistic commitment, which may hinder individual engagement.

“Through a Bending Light”: Ben Okri’s Poetic Commitment

Ben Okri’s relation to commitment is complex, for he rejects any direct association between writers and specific causes (although he has spoken out when necessary, as in his defense of Ken Saro-Wiwa). This article examines Okri’s poetry, in particular the poems collected in Wild, in the light of a vision of artistic commitment which owes much to his interest in the Greek and Roman classics and which suggests a comparison with other poets like W. B. Yeats who have treated worldly commitment in terms of the paradoxical relation between political engagement and aesthetic distance.

Hands-On Heritage! Establishing Soft Authority over Heritage through Architectural Experiment: A Case Study from Jordan

This study identifies ‘heritage as practice’ as an alternative to ‘authorized’ heritage engagement. Heritage, in this sense, is perceived as a source of inspiration and creativity rather than just an asset to be preserved. ‘Heritage as practice’ is informed by the conventional identification and evaluation of heritage, coupled with the architectural and artistic instincts, capacities, creativity, and commitment found in the field of architecture, to interpret heritage. We label the work produced out of this practice as ‘creative material’ that is subjected to further re-creation when it is used as a platform for community engagement. We examine the mechanisms of these engagements through an academic experiment in which architecture students were asked to analyze the representations of the local heritage site of Umm el-Jimal, Jordan. We argue that shifting from ‘authorized’ engagement to informed ‘instinctual’ one gives the students a soft authority over heritage. However, it is the capacity to creatively engage with and about heritage, and use this to continuously and creatively interpret heritage, that makes this authority valid and just.

Contextualizing the contours of subjugation: dramatizing conflicted image of the military in Wole Soyinka's The Beatification of Area Boy and Esiaba Irobi's Cemetery Road

This article examines the ways in which two prominent Nigerian playwrights, Wole Soyinka and Esiaba Irobi, re-envision common perceptions of the Nigerian armed forces as portrayed in literature. Despite nearly two decades of often-tumultuous democratic rule, Nigeria is yet to attain full membership of the league of democratic nations. In The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road, Soyinka and Irobi respectively look at the ways in which authoritarian regimes have sought to repress and subjugate hapless indigenous populations. The country increasingly finds itself between two psychological dispositions: the traumatized psyche occasioned by the military in the past, and the democratic dispensation which represents the present. Soyinka’s artistic commitment is ostensibly demonstrated in constant questioning and an accusatory historicization of the role of the military in the tragedy of Nigeria’s decadence in his play, The Beatification of Area Boy, while Irobi dramatizes the weaving together of the historical massacre of the peasants of Bakolori by the army in Northern Nigeria. The important question raised by this article is: How does the Nigerian nation-state atone for the evils of brutality, torture, forceful evacuation and displacement perpetrated by the military on its citizens, especially the Ilaje ‘Maroko evacuees’ and the Fulani victims of the ‘Bakolori massacre’? The article concludes that Soyinka’s and Irobi’s deft appropriations of historiography have been utilized to explore the inherent complexity of the interplay of Nigeria’s political anomie for the interrogation of military dehumanization of defenceless Nigerians in The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road.

Landscapes of Lesbian Desire

A review essay of Lisa L. Moore’s Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (2011).

Speaking denunciation: satire as confrontation language in contemporary Nigerian poetry

Contemporary Nigerian poets have had to contend with the social and political problems besetting Nigeria’s landscape by using satire as a suitable medium, to distil the presentation and portrayal of these social malaises in their linguistic disposition. Arguably, contemporary Nigerian poets, in an attempt to criticize social ills, have unobtrusively evinced a mastery of language patterns that have made their poetry not only inviting but easy to read. This epochal approach in the crafting of poetry has significantly evoked an inimitable sense of humour which endears these poems to the readers. In this regard, the selected poems in this paper are crowded with anecdotes, the effusive use of humour, suspense and curiosity. The over-arching argument of the paper is that satire is grounded in the poetics of contemporary Nigerian poetry in order to criticize certain aspects of the social ills plaguing Nigerian society. The paper will further examine how satire articulates social issues in the works of contemporary Nigerian poets, including Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Chinweizu, Femi Fatoba, Odia Ofeimun, Ezenwa Ohaeto, Obiora Udechukwu and Ogaga Ifowodo. Viewed in the light of artistic commitment, the paper will demonstrate how satire accentuates the role of these poets as the synthesizers/conduits of social and cultural concerns of Nigerian society for which they claim to speak. As representatively exemplified in the selected poems, the paper will essentially focus on the mediation of satire for the impassioned criticism of social and moral vices, militating against Nigeria’s socio-political development.

Speaking denunciation: satire as confrontation language in contemporary Nigerian poetry

Contemporary Nigerian poets have had to contend with the social and political problems besetting Nigeria’s landscape by using satire as a suitable medium, to distil the presentation and portrayal of these social malaises in their linguistic disposition. Arguably, contemporary Nigerian poets, in an attempt to criticize social ills, have unobtrusively evinced a mastery of language patterns that have made their poetry not only inviting but easy to read. This epochal approach in the crafting of poetry has significantly evoked an inimitable sense of humour which endears these poems to the readers. In this regard, the selected poems in this paper are crowded with anecdotes, the effusive use of humour, suspense and curiosity. The over-arching argument of the paper is that satire is grounded in the poetics of contemporary Nigerian poetry in order to criticize certain aspects of the social ills plaguing Nigerian society. The paper will further examine how satire articulates so- cial issues in the works of contemporary Nigerian poets, including Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Chinweizu, Femi Fatoba, Odia Ofeimun, Ezenwa Ohaeto, Obiora Udechukwu and Ogaga Ifowodo. Viewed in the light of artistic commitment, the paper will demonstrate how satire accentuates the role of these poets as the synthesizers/conduits of social and cultural concerns of Nigerian society for which they claim to speak. As representatively exemplified in the selected poems, the paper will essentially focus on the mediation of satire for the impassioned criticism of social and moral vices, militating against Nigeria’s socio-political development. Key words: speaking denunciation, contemporary Nigerian poets, satire, mediation, confrontation language

The De-centered Humanism and Cosmic Engagement of J.M. G. Le Clézio. Posing Questions in an Age of Suspicion.

Bearing in mind the author’s numerous public dismissals and pervasive scepticism concerning the ‘engaged’ literature of his predecessors, such as Sartre and Camus, the purpose of this study is to explore J.M.G. Le Clezio’s committed prose which extends to all disenfranchised individuals across the globe and the entire biotic community. In contrast to an earlier generation of engaged writers, Le Clezio tends to avoid the limelight and any direct association with divisive, polemical subjects that might polarize a given society. This study will elucidate how the writer’s fiction, public discourses, and his recent interventions in support of social causes address themselves to the literary community; it will delve further into his engagement in an effort to delineate the nature of this artistic commitment and what it might encompass.

Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism by Jonathan Flatley (review)

Reviewed by: Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism by Jonathan Flatley Denise Ginfray Jonathan Flatley. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. 263pp. In this brilliant contribution to the studies of modernism, concerned with “a particular mode of modernist melancholizing” (2), the author [End Page 857] investigates the concept of loss central to Freud’s theory developed in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), choosing to combine individual histories of melancholia and loss, collective consciousness, ideology, culture, and the different predicaments of modernity. Jonathan Flat-ley’s “historical-aesthetic methodology” (3), with its many references to prominent theoretical works, is grounded on his dynamic concept of “Affective mapping,” namely “the aesthetic technology—in the older, more basic sense of a techne—that represents the historicity of one’s affective experience” (4). This book convincingly articulates theory and practice: in addition to a very useful glossary devoted to the key concepts of this essay (“Affect, Emotion, Mood [Stimmung], Structure of Feeling” [11–24]), two chapters describe the complex theoretical framework in detail, and the last three chapters offer a critical reading of three major literary narratives: Henry James’s The Turn of The Screw (1898), W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur (1926–1930). In his introduction, where he posits that the modern subject is shaped by the social and historical forces of collective experience through emotions, Flatley claims the necessity to regard the mapping process as experimental and “revisable” (7), and “the map” in relation to the Deleuzean concept of “rhizome.” The reader will certainly appreciate how carefully the author delineates his critical tools in his glossary, insisting on the similarities and differences between “emotion” (“something that happens inside and tends toward outward expression” [12]), “affects” (“always experienced in relation to an object or objects” [16]), “mood” (“a kind of affective atmosphere” [19]), and “structure of feeling” (“the ways social forces shape or structure our affective lives” [24]). Flatley develops his critical perspective in chapter 1 “Modernism and Melancholia”, and in chapter 2 “Affective Mapping”: borrowing mainly from Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Adorno, and Jameson, he suggests that the modern relation to time and temporality, the overwhelming influence of science and technology, the many discourses of normalization, have all created the melancholic subject. But, the critic insists, the aesthetic enterprise offers a response to depression: by distancing both the creative stance and his receptor from the entropic zone of loss and mourning, the imaginary scene of literature, among other forms of artistic experiences, may become a site where affects are rearticulated and recontextualized in a positive way, following a logic similar to the transferential logic of psychoanalysis. In chapter 3, “Reading into Henry James: Allegories of the Will to Know in The Turn of the Screw,” Flatley examines how “the ghosts from our past” (89) shape the reader’s experience and how the subtle dialectic between possession and dispossession affects [End Page 858] audiences. The critic considers Freud’s concept of tranference to be an essential component of James’s aesthetic venture in this novella. In addition, with reference to Michel Foucault and to the will to know that underlies the politics of modern sexuality, he argues that the embedded narratives of James’s work provide an emotional pattern of interpretation dominated by libidinal desire turned into textual energy. It is also relevant to relate the publication of The Turn of the Screw to its historical context, for the latter radically shaped the nature and function of creative imagination and altered the tenets of artistic commitment. Flatley insists on the historicity of James’s aesthetic, and he notes how, at the moment when epistemological doubt ushered the Western world into modernity, the novelist’s theory of reading responded to the collective sense of despondency by mapping individual affects and emotions into a shared experience of defamiliarization. James was genuinely convinced that “mimesis, possession, confusions of self and other and past and present—in a word ghosts—are necessary for life” (102). It is precisely this dominant mode of spectrality that combines pleasure, desire for the narrative, and imaginary identifications that so strongly appeals to most of us...

Masscheroen ou trois messieurs nus. L'engagement artistique de Hugo Claus dans les années soixante

In the spring of 1968 Hugo Claus was officially charged with public indecency. The fact that he had staged three naked men in his play Masscheroen, could not be tolerated by to the conservative judiciary in Flanders. The lawsuit caused a great fuss within the artistic milieu : art and literature had regularly been censored and something had to be done. Inspired by the activist élan of May’68, Claus and his colleagues chose to act upon their artistic commitment. Through cheerful happenings and poetic protest evenings they fought for the autonomy of art and literature.

Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project by Margaret S. Key (review)

Reviewed by: Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project by Margaret S. Key Richard F. Calichman (bio) Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project. By Margaret S. Key. Lexington Books, Lanham, Md., 2011. x, 197 pages. $63.00, cloth; $59.99, E-book. Margaret Key is to be congratulated for writing an extremely intelligent book, one that is thoroughly researched and endowed with an understanding of Abe Kōbō that is both broad (in the sense of the scale of information provided) and deep (in the sense of theoretical acuity). Japanese literary scholarship in the United States frequently suffers from an imbalance in offering up great reams of empirical data that are held together by frameworks and methodological assumptions that remain disproportionately slight and underexamined. Key’s work is quite unusual in this regard, and it is clear that she attains this depth by thinking not only of Abe but of literature in general. Specifically, she commits herself to the difficult task of engaging with Abe’s engagement with literature in its relation to reality. The title of her book, directly taken from Abe’s 1963 essay “Uso kara deta makoto,” points to this elusive bond between fictional and factual, and in this way gets to the very core of Abe’s project. Profoundly dissatisfied with the representational logic undergirding naturalist realism, Abe sought to probe the limits of both subjectivism, which he dismissed for its indifference to the question of materiality, and objectivism, which he criticized for its naïveté in believing itself capable of accessing external reality as such. If the former is guilty of effacing the object, overestimating the power of the imagination while ignoring the concrete conditions upon which artistic (and indeed all human) activity necessarily takes place, the latter proves no less negligent in its failure to take into account the problematic of mediation, for textual representations of external reality are enabled by a subject through whom the transition from the real to the represented real is invariably effected. [End Page 507] One of the great virtues of Key’s work is her understanding that this grappling with the question of reality and its literary representation was for Abe an aesthetic concern with immense epistemological and ethical implications. Abe’s artistic commitment to the avant-garde is often misunderstood by critics as signaling a suspension of the real, but the fact is that Abe viewed his work as primarily realist in nature. This realism, however, grounded itself upon an awareness of the difference between, or more accurately the impossibility of collapsing, subjective reality and objective reality. The repeated motif of walls or barriers throughout Abe’s work attests to his recognition of the need to think this difference in all of its deceptive complexity. For this difference is in no way straightforward: at no point can the subject ever present the object in the bareness of its existence, apart from the traces of his own intervention. This does not mean that the object owes its existence to the subject but rather that the task of repeating the object in the project of representation irrevocably alters it. The encounter between subject and object in representation ends by compromising the integrity of each, such that the one comes to some degree to be infected or contaminated by the other. Hence the difference between these two entities is simultaneously a putting into relation, and Abe envisioned the role of art as openly revealing the various tricks, false steps, and artifices involved in this conjoining. As Key points out, Abe’s project bears important similarities with great twentieth-century artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Luis Buñuel, and Alain Robbe-Grillet (whose work he knew and admired) in emphasizing that art succeeds on the basis of neither its entertainment value nor its opportunity for emotional catharsis, as these function strictly to maintain the status quo in its aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions. Rather, the goal of art must be to shock readers and spectators in such a way as to encourage them to critically and self-consciously challenge those modes of acting and...

Rancière against the Cuts

This article seeks to challenge and in so doing recalibrate Jacques Rancière's political aesthetics, the motivation to do so springing from the recognition that his theory has disciplinary effects. The author objects specifically to the way that artistic commitment is traduced and, ultimately, excluded from his formula of art-politics, and attempts to stretch Rancière's definition of aesthetic experience so as to accommodate the art practice of Agitprop. His claim is that any of the materials or actions produced by a genuinely egalitarian activist group can be strategically read as exhibiting aesthetic properties. Perhaps counter-intuitively the definition of egalitarian politics is also drawn from Rancière. The author therefore uses one part of his philosophical system to expose the unnecessary restrictiveness of another. Examples are drawn from the collective practice of Arts against Cuts which formed part of the broad UK anti-austerity activism of winter and spring 2010/2011.

A Consuming Conundrum

Woman Made Gallery Chicago May 4-June 21, 2012 saw Consumer Culture at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago on an eerily hot day in mid-June, a reminder that global warming has robbed us of the loveliness of an early summer day. The urgent question is how, in the face of such a huge crisis, can we continue to drown ourselves in big-box store consumer goods so clearly responsible for much of the problem? Curator M. E. Ware explored this issue from a variety of conceptual and material angles stemming from her own deep artistic commitment to the issue surrounding consumption, particularly as it relate to women. The show was full of wonderful pieces, ranging from Mary Ellen Croteau's Endless columns 2011 12, an assemblage of plastic that looked like a twisted child's LEGO tower of pill bottles and Tide detergent tops, to Ifeoma Anyaeji's wonderful Mkpu Mkpu Oche (Small Stool) 2012 made from plastic bags and crates, an exploration of alternative visions of beauty and utility. A selection of media works made some of the strongest statements. Lauri Burrier's video 5 Days Plastic 2011 pairs a visual catalog of five days of her plastic refuse the volume is surprising with collected images of its devastating impact on the environment and its inhabitants. A soundtrack reminiscent of a dance club adds another layer to the mindless consumer aspect, creating an ambiance of trance-like devotion,. The video is posted on You Tube: watching it there is a bit like participating in an instant symposium, with other hits for important works on the same topic. Further online research revealed a wealth of information about the artists and works thematic exhibitions benefit tremendously from descriptive texts: some at the gallery were more helpful than others). Katie Kapuza's animated video ID Don't Want to be Wholesome (2011) features images of women's consumer goods from junk mail overlaid with strange, but powerful, spoken word excerpts like, I was not of a brilliant mind, nor of beautiful face. It turns out the audio is Gertrude Behanna, a bizarre religious zealot and supposed former heroin addict who made vinyl recordings about her ways and coming to Christ. The work presents an interesting twist on religion as a different kind of consumerism. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In an ongoing video and performance project. Homing 2011, Michelle Acuff walks through both natural and urban landscapes such as the Art Institute of Chicago museum campus with a life-sized plastic duet lawn ornament on her back and dressed like a lumberjack. It has a nice taste of hunting lodge hipster irony, in which the embrace of nature is nothing more than a consumer costume in flannel and Timberlands. …

The Internationale of Automobile Salons and the Hagiography of Revolution. Mieczysław Szczuka at the Crossroads of New Art

Czekalski analyzes the oeuvre of the Polish avant-garde artist and leader of Polish Constructivism Mieczysław Szczuka (1898-1927) within the artistic and ideological contexts of the time. The essay outlines the progress of Szczuka’s short career, which is divided into three parts: (I) 1920–23, (II) 1924–25, and (III) 1926–27. The central theme is the tension between artistic commitment to the ideology of communist revolution and the idea of reorganization of social life according to the principles of economic efficiency. It is shown how Szczuka was torn between the communist party and Western corporations, between political campaigns and automotive commercials.

Theatre of Images: Record of a Process

Theatre of Images: Record of a Process Brian C. Russo In the summer of 2008, I traveled to Universidad Javeriana, Cali, Colombia, to take part in the E.F.E. (Español Funcional para Extranjeros) program. This is a Spanish language course offered as part of The Twinning Agreement, a faculty exchange arrangement between Gonzaga and Seattle Universities in the US, and Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. US faculty travel to Javeriana, study Spanish for six weeks, and are asked to initiate a project with faculty counterparts from Javeriana. Projects reflect the interest of faculty and have ranged from water treatment to ministry or, in my case, theatre. I was paired with Juan Palencia (English) and John Alex Castillo (Media) who both assisted me in carrying out my project, which was to locate a group of actors, theatre enthusiasts, and acting students, and hold a workshop on basic acting technique. I hoped that from this workshop, the group might develop a performance that could be presented to an audience from Javeriana and the surrounding community. As my time was short, my expectations were modest. Happily, seven participants committed to the work, and we presented a short, original folk play, La maldición de Doña Luz, based on a story about a witch, a magical bird, and a proud boy that one of our group brought in. An audience attended and enjoyed the performance; the actors too were satisfied with the experience. Ultimately, the project was considered a success. I hoped that if I ever had the opportunity to return, I could work on a piece of more depth, hopefully with more experienced actors. I had just that opportunity in the summer of 2010. Gonzaga University, being a Catholic and Jesuit institution, concerns itself with social justice issues and service learning. So when, at a planning session for Colombia, a colleague spoke of his work on forgiveness and reconciliation, I was interested—perhaps [End Page 157] this could be the focus of my theatre work. He encouraged me, citing the example of South Africa, where theatre has served as a vehicle to explore this theme. I emailed my counterpart, John Alex Castillo, told him of my proposed theme (forgiveness and reconciliation), and I was happy to hear that he wanted to work on this project; fortunately, he would be free of artistic commitments during the weeks of my stay. My fantasy of the project went something like this: actors would gather stories from Colombia’s recent troubled past and we would dramatize them. The reality turned out differently. When I met with John Alex in Colombia, we decided that we did want to work with stories of forgiveness and reconciliation, perhaps in a form of documentary theatre. Also, members of the experimental troupe Altergesto (Other Gesture) he founded over ten years ago would also be available. This was great news because it fulfilled my hope of working with experienced artists, as opposed to newcomers; new actor resistance and self-consciousness would not be a barrier. We also decided that we wished to involve the audience, making them true participants in the work. John Alex suggested that to aid audience participation, we present in a non-traditional or “found space.” This all sounded great, but there was a tension in our process before we even began: how to present stories while also actively involving the audience in a non-traditional space? Stories suggest plot and character, the stuff of traditional acting and directing, which also implies the traditional role of the audience as passive spectators, consumers of stories. This style of presentation would not produce the outcome we sought in terms of our audience or space. We would work through this contradiction in the first weeks of our meetings. By the end of the first week and a half, we had gathered material of two forms: 1. Five stories around ideas of forgiveness and reconciliation brought back by our actors. 2. Three extended improvisations around our theme: a. negative space explorations, b. finding gestures to express forgiveness and reconciliation, c. repetition exercises around our theme. The gathering of stories and improvisations were attempts to try and find a language to express what...

Women Performers as Subjects in Popular Theatres

The main focus of this article is to forefront women performers as subjects in historiography. Women performers have remained on the margin of both mainstream and subaltern historiography. The article, instead of merely charting their artistic topography, tries to locate them in larger social, cultural and historical context. It tries to map their artistic aspirations and commitment to performance, their journeys and struggles, the troubled histories of their frustrations and endeavours, their strains and tensions as they travelled the varied worlds of the personal and professional. Till date class, caste and patriarchal prejudice marks the Tamasha and Nautanki women performers as vulgar and veiled ‘prostitute’ or ‘loose’ women. The article also moves beyond the paradigm of art and work binary, challenging the middle-class evocation of performance as a temple of art. Invisibilising the women performers as workers forecloses their struggles and contestations.

“To Petrus”: Coetzee, Krog, critics

Through analysis of recent Coetzee criticism and Krog's recent creative non‐fiction this review‐article invokes distinctions between ‘mimetic’ and ‘autotelic’ responses to text/context/reception interactions. If Coetzee is seen by his critics as autotelic (discourse deconstructed from within his work) Krog links imitations of the real to artistic and social commitment. Accordingly, Krog's interpretation of Petrus's story (the Petrus of Disgrace) differs from Lurie's interpretation. Despite this the conclusion is that among contemporary writers of South African interest Coetzee and Krog offer literary criticism its richest rewards. “J M Coetzee and his Doubles.” Conference, New York University (27–28 April 2007). Journal of Literary Studies 25(4), 2009. Guest Editors: Mark Sanders & Nancy Ruttenburg. 143pp. Mike Marais. 2009. Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J M Coetzee. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. 249pp. Carrol Clarkson. 2009. J M Coetzee: Countervoices. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 230pp. Antjie Krog. 2009. Begging to be Black. Cape Town: Random House Struik. 291pp.

Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass

Abstract Although Messiaen is commonly portrayed as having been disengaged from worldly affairs, his eyes fixed on heaven, many of his works can be shown to possess a subtext of political or social commentary that frames worldly issues in religious rhetoric. In a notable example, the Messe de la Pentecôte for organ (1950), Messiaen dramatizes the Cold War threat of nuclear apocalypse by contrasting a leitmotif he calls the Beast of the Apocalypse with evocations of birdsong that represent peace and freedom. Probably influenced by Picasso's use of birds as symbols of peace and by René Leibowitz's Sartrean calls for artistic commitment, the Mass ends with a chord he describes as an explosion. The work's subtext appears to warn against nuclear catastrophe and to advocate faith in the face of Cold War fear and anxiety.

Clare's Natural History Prose Elegies

On Monday October 25, 1824, Clare recorded death of Old Shepherd Newman in his journal. His description captures not only elegiac sadness of moment but also a complex reciprocity between rural inhabitant, s and their threatened natural world: old tenant of & of old are now left desolate & his old haunts look houses fading woods seem mourning in autumn wind (195). His loss includes last of old shepherds and that will be lost to agricultural enclosure. Without human beings freely circulating in landscape, the are left desolate. Desolation and abandonment work as reciprocal forces: landscape looks like houses disinhabited with passing of shepherd, and remaining wild places, the woods, are subject to fading. Many of Clare's entries in his journal reflect this confusion of human and natural subjects. His entries deaths of people he knew, and who found their individual value in relation to their neighbors and their community, echo in entries loss of trees and other features of landscape, and vice versa. To understand what Clare mourns is to discover new possibilities for elegiac voice, and to recognize depth of his social and artistic commitments. In 1824 and 1825, Clare was occupied with walking, exploring and woodlands whenever opportunity arose and his health permitted. His records of those rambles in his journal serve different purposes: assisting his friend Joseph Henderson compile a list of British ferns, gathering material for his own natural history of Helpstone, exploring Roman ruins with another friend, Edmund Tyrell Artis, rambling with his neighbor John Billings, even seeking religious solace during his illness in company of local Ranters. During these walks Clare lingered over places that had either been changed or threatened by enclosure. His notebook entries emphasize his profound sense of loss including both famous trees and people: Took a in sac,. an old woodstile taken away from a favourite spot which it had occupied all my life posts were overgrown with Ivy & it seemed so to nature & spot where it stood as it had taken a lease for an undisturbd existance it hurt me to see it was gone for my affections claim a friendship with such things but nothing is lasting in this world year Langly bush was destroyd an old white thorn that had stood for more than a century full of fame Gipseys Shepherds & Herd men all had their tales of its history & it will be long ere its memory is forgotten (September 29, 1824: 183) His intention to walk in fields was disrupted by landlord's removing woodstile, an unobtrusive device for going over a fence, which conveyed freedom to ramble. In removing stile, local improving landlord asserted his property rights and denied common custom. Clare emphasized ancientness of this right by naturalizing man-made object as a thing akin to nature, noting that ivy made posts appear to be natural objects, perhaps even converting them into nature over time. Clare's emotional response to this change reflects violation of human and natural communities, and his deeply personal attachment. In emphasizing that it was not only to nature but to the spot where it stood, Clare asserts value of local vital to his anti-enclosure poems. Furthermore, his descriptive simile--as tho stile had taken its spot on lease for an undisturbd existance--blurs boundary between naturalized object in and human inhabitants that encounter it. The stile had leased its spot, and retired to a quiet existence. As a leaseholder, it held place without owning it, in contrast to assertion of ownership that destroyed it. …

Ansel Adams: divine performance

The background research was partly funded by a British Academy Postgraduate Studentship. Written on the basis of primary research in the Ansel Adams Archive of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, Yosemite Museum, and archives of Ansel Adams Trust. The manuscript was read for Yale University Press by John Szarkowski (former head of Photography, MoMA, NY), Sandra Sammataro Phillips (curator of photographs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Mark Haworth-Booth (Professor of Photography, University of the Arts, formerly curator of photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum). The first scholarly book on Ansel Adams's work from an art historical perspective, this is a critical study of his landscape photographs, investigating the aesthetic, philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of his work in the context of the intellectual and creative influences informing his art. The book sheds light on the contributions of scientific, literary, and artistic individuals who inspired Adams, and provides a detailed interpretation of his photographs, establishing the relation between the images and his ethical and artistic commitments. Reviewed; History of Photography 27:1 (Spring 2003) (ISSN 0308-7298); Exposure 37:2 (2003) (ISSN 0098-8863). An invited lecture, Hayward Gallery, London, in conjunction with exhibition, Ansel Adams at 100. Some explorations into Adams's ink-printing of his photographs and production of his fine books (especially chapters 2, 5) led to an AHRC small grant (AH/D503329/1) May 2006-April 2007, Aesthetic Aspects of the Photomechanical Reproduction of Continuous Tone for the Photographs of Ansel Adams. An exhibition,Ansel Adams in Hawaii was also generated.