Aesthetic Grounds Research Articles

Tara, the O'Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind

Tara, the O'Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind Geraldine Higgins (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Margaret Mitchell's attitudes towards slavery and the book and film's nostalgia for the Lost Cause have occasioned a repudiation of Gone With the Wind on both political and aesthetic grounds. Margaret Mitchell, 1941, photographed by Al Aumuller, courtesy of the New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress [End Page 30] Perhaps one of the most frustrating things for fans of Gone With the Wind is arriving in Atlanta, Georgia, only to discover that they have come to the wrong place. If they want to see the white columns and the wraparound porch of Tara, they need to go to Burbank, California, and take a tour of the MGM movie lot. Because Tara does not exist. Perhaps this is fortuitous, given the many anxieties about Mitchell's representation of plantation life in antebellum Georgia. Mitchell's attitudes towards slavery, and the book and film's nostalgia for the Lost Cause, have occasioned a repudiation of Gone With the Wind on both political and aesthetic grounds. Tourists in Atlanta are directed instead to the Margaret Mitchell House at 990 Peachtree Street to view the apartment where Peggy Mitchell lived with her husband John Marsh until 1925. It was here, in the place she called "the Dump," that Mitchell wrote most of Gone With the Wind on the Remington typewriter that one fanciful reviewer has called "her harp." The Dump is itself problematic as a locus for the worshippers of Gone With the Wind, as Mitchell did not want "any place where she ate, slept, brushed her teeth or wrote her book stripped naked to sightseers." But for Mary Rose Taylor, its passionate preservationist, the house has become a symbol of Atlanta, a place where the old and new South can come together. The German motor company Daimler-Benz, seeking to advertise its presence in America, sponsored the restoration of the house in the 1990s. It was due to open in 1996, the year in which Atlanta hosted the Olympics; instead, it was attacked by arsonists—twice.1 What do these anecdotes tell us about the phenomenon that is Gone With the Wind? The book (1936), the film (1939), and the Margaret Mitchell House (1997) articulate the difficult relationship between blockbuster status and situational politics. It is impossible to read anything about Gone With the Wind without being bombarded by statistics—it sold over 1 million copies in its first year of publication, has been translated into twenty-five languages, and 90 percent of Americans claim to have seen the movie. Yet, despite its 1,000-page length and four-hour running time as a movie, Gone With the Wind is most often interpreted as shorthand—for moonlight and magnolias, plantation mythology, Confederate nationalism, or, to be very short, racism. Exhaustive examinations of race in the novel have focused primarily on the white-black binary, although there are also interesting discussions of its racial politics from other ethnic perspectives.2 However, into the debate about place, race, and the second-best-selling book of all time, we can also bring Irishness. There are many ways to approach the Irish elements of Gone With the Wind—from Mitchell's Irish genealogy to the historical references to Irish history in the text to the representation of Irish characters in the novel and film. Here, we will focus on the way in which Irishness underwrites the history presented in the text. [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution In the Margaret Mitchell House (here), the place she called "the Dump," Mitchell wrote most of Gone With the Wind on the Remington typewriter that one fanciful reviewer has called "her harp." The Dump is itself problematic as a locus for the worshippers of Gone With the Wind, as Mitchell did not want "any place where she ate, slept, brushed her teeth or wrote her book stripped naked to sightseers." Photograph courtesy of Rolf Mueller, courtesy of a GNU Free Documentation License Is it the mere boutique Irishness that allowed Vivien Leigh to be promoted both...

The Talented Ripley Hitchcock

The Talented Ripley Hitchcock Hershel Parker It is sad to admit that several of my very best modest proposals for the period of American literary realism fell flat. I am most disappointed that no one rushed to follow up my suggestion that definitions of American naturalism current in my time were all invalid insofar as they were derived from study of American novels published between around 1890 and 1920. Such a definition could be valid for defining editorial tastes but would say nothing of what the novelists were trying to say, since all or almost all the greatest works published during that time were known to the mid-twentieth century critics constructing the definitions only in more or less seriously maimed texts heavily altered by editors with a sharp eye to what could be published and what would be popular. That made me saddest, but I have to confess that I am more than a little dashed to see that in American Literary Realism Donald Pizer, having defended all these years what Ripley Hitchcock did to The Red Badge of Courage, in the joint-article with Robert M. Dowling is still looking for aesthetic grounds for what Crane did to poor Maggie Johnson and the fat man when all the time it was Hitchcock who did it.1 I hope that neither I nor my student Henry Binder (now dead, all too unfairly) ever said that Hitchcock was a bad editor, although I may have hinted at doubts about his character. What I argued first, and then what Binder demonstrated in the classic article "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows," was that Hitchcock made the book saleable and popular by removing what Crane called, in another case of expurgating editors, the anarchy—the originality of it, and also the coherence of it.2 Brian Higgins and I argued much the same thing about Maggie: just as Hitchcock was concerned not to let Red Badge mean what it had meant in the manuscript, he [End Page 175] was concerned not to let Maggie mean what it had meant in the first edition.3 Hitchcock had almost no concern at all with making either book coherent in a new way, just a concern not to let either one mean what they had very clearly meant as Crane wrote them. Hitchcock was not a monster out to destroy masterpieces. He was a practical working editor who was betting that he could make Red Badge not only publishable but popular, especially if he pitched it hard to the veterans of the war, as he did on the "order blank."4 The next year he was a practical working editor who was frustrated at just how hard it would be to make Maggie anywhere near as popular as the previous Appleton book by Crane, the subject being distasteful and there being no streetwalkers' guild with purchasing power and eccentric taste to rival the power and taste of Civil War veterans. In his reprinting of "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows" in the Norton hardback and the Avon paperback edition of Red Badge, Binder added a section on Hitchcock as "a skillful entrepreneur, more ready than other editors of his time to accept stories that were troublesome or that other houses had rejected and then make them publishable by calling for alterations."5 Binder observed that "it is clear that the editor had suggested the excision of some thirty thousand words" from Edward Noyes Westcott's David Harum "in addition to a reordering of sections of the story." The changes Hitchcock "engineered" resulted in the book's becoming "an astonishing success for decades." Binder also cited Hitchcock's insisting on extensive cuts and revisions in Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt. He concluded that "there is consistency in Hitchcock's calling for cuts in Crane's Maggie, in Westcott's David Harum, and in Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt" as well as in Red Badge and (still later) The Third Violet.6 I am sorry to see that in their exchange in ALR on Maggie Dowling and Pizer do not mention my "Getting Used to the 'Original Form' of The Red Badge of Courage."7 There...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollowness: A Narratological and Ideological Critique of J. K. Rowling's Magical System

Despite its phenomenal success, and in some cases because of it, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series has provoked unease in some readers on both aesthetic and ideological grounds. This essay seeks to supplement the important contribution of scholars like John Pennington, Suman Gupta, Elizabeth Teare, Jack Zipes, Elaine Ostry and Michael Ostling by foregrounding what I see as a still under-examined issue: Rowling's decision not to install her wizards and witches in a distinct secondary world. I argue for a systematic connection between this key narratological option and Rowling's conflicted ideological commitments across the seven books. The lack of a self-coherent fantasy realm, I suggest, leads Rowling into severe pragmatic confusion on several fronts, with a host of ideological as well as narrative anomalies arising symptomatically to trouble her text.

Un Carnaval des Dieux à L'épreuve de la Modernité: Parodies et Jeux Avec la Mythologie dans L'œuvre Poétique de Banville

The considerable contribution which Banville made to the nineteenth century's rediscovery of ancient Greece has not received the critical attention it deserves, and yet it is not only in Les Exilés, one of the monuments of the Parnassian movement, that mythology and Greek antiquity play a role. Indeed, in satirical verse such as the Odes funambulesques, Banville plays with a burlesque or melancholic mythology as a means of explaining the modern world. Thus his poetry offers the spectacle of an eccentric, heroi-comic Paris where ordinary characters are transfigured by the use of myth, the vices of the Second Empire are derided, and fallen gods appear as drunkards and rag-pickers. The constant dialogue between myth and modernity provides the aesthetic foundation of Banville's oeuvre, with its surprising, clownish and anachronistic associations of ideas, where the clash between the mythological ideal and the trivialities of contemporary Paris proves an instrument of socio-political satire.

Sweat: A Memory of Waste

Sweat: A Memory of Waste

New Directions for Research and the Tradition of Yeonhaengrok

The tradition of yeonhaengrok is enmeshed with the tradition of Korean missions to China. Korean literati from the late Goryeo wrote of their experiences in Ming China using the titles Jocheonrok and Gwangwangrok. It is well-known that the term jocheon has a connotation of experiencing the land of the son of heaven. Gwanwang, which has an equally strong connotation of experiencing the superior culture of the Ming, was also widely used in early Joseon as the title of such records. After establishing the involuntary diplomatic relationship with the Manchu Qing after the fall of the Ming, such records were titled yeonhaeng (going to Beijing) in order to erase the connotation of sadae (serving the great). Out of the approximately 380 extant records from Korean missions to China, approximately 280 were written during the Qing period. Approximately 120 were written during the eighteenth century, making the eighteenth century the “peak” of yeonhaengrok. Among the eighteenthcentury yeonhaengrok, Kim Changeob’s Nogajae yeonhaeng ilgi, Hong Daeyong’s Yeongi, and Bak Jiwon’s Yeolha ilgi have been extensively researched as paragons of yeonhaengrok literature. Yi Giji’s Ilam yeongi, recently discovered to have great significance, includes extensive descriptions of the cultures, institutions, and technologies of China and the West. It also deserves a multifaceted examination and analysis as one of the representative yeonhaengrok works of the eighteenth century. From the yeonhaengrok writings that have been collected and compiled so far, works of translation and annotation have centered around the works of Bak Jiwon, Hong Daeyong, and Kim Changeob. Academic research from disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy and arts on yeonhaengrok have also centered around the aforementioned works. There is a clear need for translation and research activities to expand and cover other yeonhaengrok writings. From here, I believe systematic and collaborative research on the yeonhaengrok-specific system of discourse, specific modes of production and circulation of knowledge, culture, and information in premodern East Asia, and the significance of yeonhaengrok written in vernacular Korean vis-a-vis pieces written in classical Chinese, would allow a systematic understanding of the common aesthetic foundation of the yeonhaengrok writings in their entirety.

Comparison of orthodontic treatment need by professionals and parents with different socio-demographic characteristics

The aim of this study was to compare the socio-demographic features and self-perception of parents concerning the malocclusion of their children with the orthodontist's opinion of normative orthodontic treatment need. The parents of 208 children (101 girls and 107 boys, between 9 and 18 years: mean 12.8 ± 2.5), who sought orthodontic treatment were asked to score the dental attractiveness of their children using the aesthetic component (AC) of the Index of Orthodontic Treatment Need (IOTN). These scores were then compared with those of the orthodontist, who also scored the Dental Health Component (DHC) of the IOTN. The influence of the socio-demographic features of the parents on both the orthodontist- and parent-rated IOTN scores was assessed. The AC grade of the IOTN and patient characteristics were tested with the Spearman's correlation coefficient (rho). The difference between the two dependent variables (orthodontists' and parents' AC grade) was compared using Wilcoxon's test. A high need for orthodontic treatment was recorded in 74.0 per cent of the subjects. Although orthodontists rated 51.4 per cent of the patients as having a severe malocclusion on aesthetic grounds, only 33.6 per cent of parents rated their child malocclusion as severe. Although socio-demographic factors were not related to the parents' perception of malocclusion, they had an influence on orthodontic treatment need as assessed by the orthodontist. Parents, in this study population, rated their children's orthodontic treatment need less severely than the orthodontist regardless of their socio-demographic characteristics. Thus, orthodontists should involve parents in the orthodontic treatment decision-making process.

Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature Yolanda Padilla Keywords Yolanda Padilla, Anna Marie Sandoval, Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature, Feminism, Latin America, chicano, chicana, Latina/Latino Studies, Mexicana Literature, Chicana Literature Sandoval, Anna Marie. Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 2008. xvi + 129 pp. Anna Marie Sandoval’s Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas appears at a timely moment in Chicana/o and Latina/o studies. To an important extent, these [End Page 289] fields of inquiry have led the current hemispheric/transnational turn that is gaining prominence in American studies. Sandoval contributes to such transnational work through a feminist analysis of Chicana and Mexicana literature, one that highlights the similarities in the discursive strategies and political commitments of each in an effort to “braid Chicana and Mexicana subjectivities” (the subtitle of her first chapter). Few scholars have studied these literatures together, and, to my knowledge, none have devoted an entire book to such a project. There are at least two suggestive antecedents for Sandoval’s work. Debra A. Castillo’s Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) includes chapters on the Chicana writers Helena María Viramontes and Denise Chávez alongside those on Latin Americans such as Luisa Valenzuela and Rosario Castellanos. Castillo does not explicitly make the case for why she includes Chicanas in her study of Latin American women’s writings, but her readings suggest an affinity in these writers’ narrative strategies (such as the use of silence in the work of Viramontes), strategies that foreground issues of gender in their engagements with cultural and political contexts in a Latin America broadly conceived to include Latinas in the United States. In light of her resistance to developing an “overarching theory” to discuss Latin American literary feminisms (1), her decision not to provide a critical framework that accounts for the inclusion of Chicanas was probably a conscious one. Yet even when they deal with similar cultural coordinates, Chicana and Latin American women’s writings are shaped by and respond to very different contexts. Castillo’s readings and juxtapositions are generative while dispensing with an explicit unifying framework, but the inclusion of a rigorous rationale would be necessary in a monograph devoted to transnational analysis such as Sandoval’s. Like Talking Back, Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) does not take as its central focus a transnational study of Chicana and Latin American women’s writings; it attends much more to the links between U.S. Third World and Chicana feminisms. She ends, however, by suggesting confluences between the genre of testimonio and its enabling of the “previously unheard-of self-representation by subaltern women” and similar kinds of narrative expression employed by Chicana border feminists (161). Asserting a connection between Chicana literature and a significant strain of Latin American women’s expressive culture, Saldívar-Hull argues that these women “articulate a feminist consciousness that cannot be separated from its connection to race and class” (164). As a result, gender politics become inseparable from geopolitics. I start with a brief discussion of these two works in order to convey a sense of what has been done on this kind of critical project and to suggest something of what remains to be done. Given that Sandoval’s central focus in Toward a Latina [End Page 290] Feminism of the Americas is precisely the joint study of Mexicana and Chicana writers, it is much more incumbent on her than on Castillo or Saldívar-Hull to provide a rigorous rationale, whether on historical, cultural, political, or aesthetic grounds. To this end, Sandoval identifies and examines a number of common cultural and thematic touchstones, including redefinitions of family, the influence of the Catholic Church, and, most importantly, the writers’ “re-visionings of traditional cultural symbols” such as La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Malinche (9). Along with the “reshaping of cultural symbols...

Insights on Sight

An emphasis on the biological foundations of vision, visual perception and aesthetics is a recent development in art history. At the 2009 meeting of the British Association of Art History in Manchester several sessions took inspiration from the biological sciences, or more precisely, the cognitive neurosciences. At the spearhead of this movement calling on the humanities to accept the brain’s ‘material realities’ are well-established scholars such Barbara Stafford and David Freedberg.1 Both urge their peers to seize on the new and, as they regard it, exciting neuroscientific discoveries that illuminate the cognitive underpinnings of all sorts of cultural objects, including the visual perception of art in history. Stafford and Freedberg understand the exchange between the humanities and neuroscience as one in which these fields fruitfully learn from one another. However, most of their neuroscientist colleagues engaged in the study of vision are far less keen to engage in time-consuming interdisciplinary debates. The reluctance of Semir Zeki and Vilajanur S. Ramachandran, the two most prominent champions of the newly-founded discipline of neuro-aesthetics, to take historical expertise seriously is easy to understand: they believe they have found the key that unlocks all the mysteries of visual perception in the past and present.2 Our apparatus for vision is lodged in the brain, they argue, as proven by investigations into the evolutionary development of this wondrous organ. Unlike the vague and nebulous explanations of philosophers and historians about vision, their scientific work has the advantage (so Ramachandran claims) that it can be experimentally tested. Ergo, knowledge of the neurosciences and its experimental methods (mainly on rats!) is the basic tool for all those working on the history of art, vision and visual perception. From cave art to Damien Hirst, the story of how the brain’s deep structures developed to support human survival will provide the definitive answer to artistic creativity and its perception throughout history.

Arte como ética. Por uma estética da produção. Breve reflexão spinozista.

Este ensaio propõe que haveria em Spinoza elementos para pensar uma estética da produção e questiona o privilégio quase absoluto das estéticas da recepção na atualidade. O texto defende que um retorno ao spinozismo, portanto a um momento anterior ao da fundação da estética como disciplina filosófica autônoma, pode ajudar a superar algumas das aporias da estética na contemporaneidade, tais como a que envolve a definição de arte e os limites e tarefas da crítica.

Network Musics: Play, Engagement and the Democratization of Performance

The rapid development of networking technologies has allowed composers to explore new ways of directly engaging participants in the exploration of musical environments and realization of new forms of musical expression. Several distinctive approaches to the musical application of networks will be outlined, each of which is mediated and conditioned by the technical and aesthetic foundations of the network technologies themselves. Recent work in the field by artists such as Atau Tanaka and Metraform will be examined in this context, as will some of the pioneering work in the genre by Max Neuhaus. While recognizing the historical context of collaborative work, the author will examine how the strategies employed in the work of these artists have helped redefine a new aesthetics of engagement in which play, spatial and temporal dislocation are amongst the genre's defining characteristics.

Towards an Ideal Paradigm

Byline: T. Asokan A great deal has changed in the 200 years since Reil coined the term 'Psychiatry' into medicine. The concept of custodial asylum prevailed in the initial period of Psychiatric history during which biological concepts held sway. Then the doctrine of Psychoanalysis came increasingly to the fore. The period between 1970 and the present time is witnessing the emergence of Biological psychiatry again with a vengeance and psychodynamic explanations have largely been unhorsed. The history of Psychiatry reveals jolting changes and discontinuities that are less common in other specialities. This is because, certain details with reference to underlying causes were unidentifiable and un-understandable. With the lack of solid pathophysiology or understanding of the mechanisms of disease, it cannot delineate disease entities on the basis of anatomical pathology. Thus the discipline is subject to faddism-anything could be true and nothing can be disproven. Thomas Kuhn coined the term 'Paradigm' to denote conceptual structure within which scientific work occurs. It is the sum of underlying assumptions. Theories and models which are specific become hypotheses and function within a paradigm. In Psychiatry, no single paradigm is able to explain fully the nature of mental illness, relation of mind to brain, definitions of cause, course and treatment of specific pathologies, guidance on how to cope with mental illness. The medical Philosopher Lawrie Reznek (1987) said, Concepts carry consequences-classifying one way rather than another has important implications for the way we share towards such things Kraepelin was committed to a biological ontology. Neo Kraepelinians gave up this biological ontology, at least overtly but extended Kraepelin's nosology beyond the major psychoses. In the Victorian period there was a challenge to construct knowledge base to underpin a form of medical authority over lunacy. There was an editorial in the Journal of Mental Disease (the former title of British Journal of Psychiatry) in 1858 which in two sentences captures the essence Insanity is purely a disease of Brain; The Physician is now the responsible guardian of the lunatic and must ever remain so For over fifty years, this concept remained in the ascendency about lunacy. The asylum system was taken over by Biodeterminism and contributed to the Zetgeist of eugenic thought of western intellectual culture. There was a fundamental incompatibility between the eugenic view harboured by the Victorian asylum doctors and the grim reality of the fine officers and Gentlmen breaking down with predictable regularity in the trenches of great war. To offer an eugenic view for the neurotic reactions among the traumatised soldiers was tantamount to reason. At this point the monopoly of biodeterminism was broken and neurosis and psychosis came within the ambit of Psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Between world wars a compromise was worked out with medical Psychotherapy and Biological Psychiatry and Eclecticism provided a middle position. Eclectic Psychiatrist is one who practises a moderate type of Psychiatry, using whatever seems likely to work, while deliberately avoiding the more extreme schools. In an Eclectic department of Psychiatry, it is possible to hear the staff talking about one patient in behaviourist terms, about the next from a strictly biological point of view and the third wholly in psychodynamic terms. Practitioners try to fit the theory to the patient, rather than vice versa. Eclecticism became a mark of moderation in an intellectually unstable world. It leads the Clinical Psychiatrist into a good deal of tightrope walking. An eclectic Psychiatry mirrors the diverse world wracked with uncertainty and overloaded with information. Eclecticism means borrowing freely from styles which suffer only in aesthetic grounds. Adolf Meyer's views were stemmed out of British Clinical Psychiatry as a form of psychiatric orthodoxy. …

A música em Schelling

O presente artigo conta mostrar o papel exercido pela música no interior do pensamento de Schelling. Para tanto, espera-se indicar a maneira pela qual o filósofo alemão redimensiona as bases que até então davam sustentação à estética tradicional para, a partir de uma ponderação inovadora, caracterizar a arte dos sons como uma forma original de saber.

Technological features of ‘gnathia’ pottery

Abstract‘Gnathia’ pottery samples, dating back to the mid‐fourth and third century BC, from the archaeological site of Egnazia (Fasano, Brindisi, Italy) have been characterised from the physical‐chemical, mineralogical and morphological points of view. Optical and scanning electron microscopy, X‐ray energy‐dispersive spectroscopy and X‐ray diffraction analyses have been carried out on the ceramic body, black gloss, white, yellow and red over‐paintings of fragments, with the aim of outlining technological features and defining the nature of coatings and decorations. Analytical results confirm from both a technological and morphological/decorative point of view the close relationship between ‘Gnathia’ pottery and red figured pottery, particularly with the Apulian red figured from which it takes its inspiration. At the same time the experimental results highlight shared characteristics and differences with both Attic and Apulian red figured productions. The biggest difference is in the utilisation of the ‘ingobbio rosso’ layer that covers the ceramic body. This does not seem to be based on aesthetic grounds, as in the case of Apulian red figured pottery, but on application of acquired production processes, since ‘Gnathia’ pottery was made in the same workshops as red figured pottery. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Gulf in the imagination

This article, taking up for analysis the three-decade-long relationship between the economy influenced by the Gulf and Malayalam cinema, in its industrial and narrative context, argues that the Gulf has been a significant point of reference for the imagining of a cultural identity in Kerala. It attempts to weave together three aspects—the development models that are in place, the economic conditions within which the film industry operates and the textual aspects of the films produced—to foreground the links between the economy, aesthetics and the imagining of regional identity. I argue that the contestation over regional identity was played out on aesthetic grounds, where the wealth and objects associated with the Gulf economy were deployed both at the formal and thematic levels, to produce claims about the legitimacy and desirability of the changes that become visible in the economic and social hierarchies within the region. The article examines the representations of the Gulf within the region, using select films from the commercial and art house cinemas of the 1970s, and middlebrow cinema of the 1980s and the turn of the century. These are read along with the economic changes within the film industry and the discourse of development in the region to mark the shifts that have happened to the desires and despairs associated with the Gulf dream.

Bertolt Brecht? „Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”

With his theory of the epic theatre and its most important category V-Effekt, Bertolt Brecht can be included within precursors of the current of modern reflection on discourse, crisis of representation and transitivity of that which is literary with that which is theatrical, the stage character of the text and textuality of the stage. Disproving of the role of mimesis, the importance of quotation and repetition as rudimentary acting strategy, replacement of great narrations with a fragment, joining a work and a commentary, intertextual games, metatextuality and metatheatricality as a foundation of stage aesthetics encourage us to locate Brecht’s theatrical output in the context of reflection of Deridda, Foucault and Barthes.

Towards an Aesthetic Foundation of the Medieval Imagery: the Bestiary

With reference to the study of the aesthetics of animals in Medium Aevum, the bestiary is perhaps the most typical and accessible collection of sources. Bestiaries, along with encyclopedias, provide the best means of ascertaining both what was known and what was believed about animals in the Middle Ages. The methods, vocabulary and conceptual frameworks employed by medieval writers who touched on the world of nature, were shaped by a plan loftier than the empirical study of animals, plants and minerals. As a result, medieval natural history might be compared to a scrapbook. In the Middle Ages, animal stories were immensely popular throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The people of the time were, of course, dependent on wild and domestic animals for their survival, and so had an obvious interest in the animals around them. But there is more to it than just a requirement for knowledge of the animals they knew and used; there is a distinctly spiritual and even mystical aspect to the animal lore of the Middle Ages.

Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period by Adrian Grafe

848 Reviews to which I wish he had said more about its realism, and Lilith and Phantastes. Because the book traces the presence of folklore and folk tales in such literature, it is prevented from being as interesting as it could be about what is distinctive in this fiction: the account of Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a JustifiedSinner being a casualty of this approach, so that the reader not knowing Hogg might not suspect what an extraordinary psychic analysis takes place within it and so might not even read it.The book does not set itself targetswhich are either exciting or challenging to itself, as here: 'The question remains: what are some of the ways in which nineteenth century British writers of the fantastic who use supernatural folklore represent "the marvellous within everyday life"?' (p. 101). The latter is, of course, a reference to 'magic realism'. This is hardly T. S. Eliot's 'overwhelming question'; nor ismore originality signalled by the declaration of intent, to show 'how the tension between folkmetaphysics and rationalism produces the literaryfantastic, and [todemonstrate how] narrative and ideological negotiation with folklorewas central to the canon, aswell as popular in themargins of British literature' (p. viii). There is little here to surprise, and the knowledge that such folklore is somewhere inmuch nineteenth-century writing demands, to justify furtherwork, more of a sense of how itmakes a difference. Alas, when it comes to justification, Harris rather flails out: 'through their attention to the supernatural folklore of rural regions in particular, Carleton and Sharp challenge the cultural dominance of English industrialism, the complacency of mundane rationality and the narrative totalitarianism of realism' (p. 165). The book isnice in having footnotes, not endnotes, and useful in suggesting that Scottmay have helped block the reception ofHoffmann in Britain (p. 38), so limiting the psychoanalytic power of his work, so influential on Freud's 'The Uncanny', a text needed on page 183. But refusal of Jack Zipes's Marxism means a serious downplaying of his work (p. 48) in favour ofmuch lesser secondary literature,while neglect of Freud means that Jacqueline Rose's decisive study The Case ofPeter Pan; or, The Impossibility ofChildren's Fiction (London: Macmillan, rev. edn 1994) gets a bare mention, and does notmake it to the index. University of Manchester Jeremy Tambling Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period. Ed. byAdrian Gr?fe. London: Continuum. 2008. xi+183 pp. ?60. ISBN 978-0-8264-9864-9. No consistent party line can be expected from a volume of fourteen essays by different authors. Adrian Gr?fe, in his introduction, does, however, set his own agenda, ranking Geoffrey Hill along with Hopkins and Eliot as arguably the three greatest poets' of the period (p. 2). The notion thatHill's work is superior to that ofHardy, Housman, Owen, Auden, Larkin, or Plath will seem risible to those who clearly distinguish poetry from theology. Eliot held that the testof religious poetry is that it should excite and hold the interest of readers who are not religious. The MLR, 104.3, 2009 849 question haunting religious poetry isposed byDaniel Szabo, one of the contributors here, in relation to R. S. Thomas's prayers to a silent God: 'And yet who is really convinced? Is the poet himself convinced?' (p. 127). Grafe's own essay assumes that it is natural for art to embody theology. Simone Weil restsher religious belief neither on reason nor on any pre-established disposi tion or passion tobelieve, but ratheron aesthetic grounds'. The perfect beauty of the accounts of thePassion', she says, 'forces'her tobelieve inChristianity (p. 164). How convincing is this?Those brought up on theQuran know that the story ofChrist's incarnation, however beautiful, isblasphemous; while atheists will struggle to find 'beauty' in a God who requires a blood sacrifice for the 'sins' of those he has created. Some essays in thevolume followGr?fe in eliding poetry and Christian theology. Catherine Phillips argues that the borrowing of images fromHopkins by Geoffrey Hill, George Mackay Brown, and Edwin Muir ensures a continuity of 'religious sensibility'. Maureen Moran writes: 'Luxurious material artefacts and dramatic gestures are...

Dying for the fatherland: Thomas Abbt’s theory of aesthetic patriotism

This article aims to dissect Thomas Abbt’s (1738–1766) theory of aesthetic patriotism as laid out in his On Dying for the Fatherland (1761) and his prize-essay On Mathematical, Metaphysical and Moral Certainty (1763). Aesthetic idioms, such as the emphasis on the intrinsic pleasure from the order and beauty of virtue, had been invoked throughout the eighteenth century to vindicate the morally optimistic view of humanity against the sceptical vision of an exclusively utility-centred mankind. In the post-Montesquieu debates on the moral foundations of modern politics, German-speaking authors in particular, from both republics (Switzerland) and monarchies (Prussia), appropriated the aesthetic idioms in order to reject those theories which grounded patriotism in some sort of self-interest or proclaimed it redundant in modern society. Thomas Abbt was one of the most prominent representatives of this intellectual position. Combining the general emphasis of Shaftesbury on the role of aesthetic appreciation in moral and political agency with the more specific German Baumgartenian analysis of ‘beauty’ as a central principle in human ‘empirical psychology’, Abbt argued that patriotism in modern monarchies could be grounded in an aesthetic passion of enthusiasm generated through sensuous examples of great virtue. The example of a king fighting for his country on the battlefield could inspire monarchical subjects to follow his example as well as regenerate patriotism among them. Abbt was adamant that patriotism based on aesthetic foundations had to be supported and stabilised by a pervasive patriotic culture of remembrance and emulation of dead heroes through the fine arts, as well as by a system of meritocratic honour in the army.

The Special Case of Four Auschwitz Photographs

The Special Case of Four Auschwitz Photographs Susan A. Crane (bio) Review of: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Paris, 2001: an exhibition that commemorates the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust stirs up a vehement public debate. Georges Didi-Huberman, a critic and unconventional art historian of Jewish descent who has written on European painting and the depiction of hysteria in photography, contributes an essay to the exhibition catalog highlighting four particular photographs from the exhibit, which prompts further outrage.1 More outrage, one might wearily note, than information about the camps had caused at the time the photographs were made; but less, perhaps, than was caused when the first atrocity images of the liberated concentration camps appeared in Western newspapers and news reels in 1945. What is it about these photographs, after all these years of exposure and all our familiar outrage regarding their subject, that still prompts intense polemics? Didi-Huberman's contributions to this debate have now been translated into English. The translation includes the original exhibition catalog essay (Part 1: "Images in Spite of All") and Didi-Huberman's response to critics (Part 2: "In Spite of the All Image"; originally Images malgré tout, 2003). The oddly old-fashioned, elaborately detailed table of contents will make no sense to anyone who hasn't already read the book; this questionable editorial choice appears to indulge the author, as does the decision not to present the other side of the debate, which appeared in the pages of Les temps moderns (March-May 2001), in columns by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux. The book would have benefitted from a translation of these articles, since Didi-Huberman engages in frequent exegesis with them. Clearly, without these provocations, the second half of this volume would not exist. But the choice to translate Didi-Huberman is timely. While the debate has distinctively French concerns, the larger problematic of the (limits of) representation of the Holocaust remains a fraught subject for Western scholars, and Didi-Huberman's polemic takes the discussion in a new and productive direction. The controversy over the Parisian exhibition focused on four famous photographs from Auschwitz, taken at the height of the Final Solution in 1944. The photographs were taken by members of the so-called "Sonderkommandos," Jewish victims who were forced to participate in the genocide of their own people by removing the Nazis' victims from the gas chambers and destroying the corpses through fire or mass burial (sometimes, in response to wartime stringencies, both). The identity of the photographer/s is uncertain; surviving records left by members of the Sonderkommandos indicate the names of those involved in making the images. These records also show that they were able to smuggle the camera into the camp and the film out again, in a toothpaste tube, with the assistance of the Polish Underground (10-11). These are the only surviving images that show any aspect of the gas chamber operations, and because they represent an act of resistance by victims of genocide, they have retained an exceptional status among Holocaust sources. However, their exhibition in Paris was considered by some to be a provocation-either to Holocaust deniers, who would challenge the veracity of these admittedly poor images, or to more sophisticated viewers who expressed affinities with Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker, whose remarkable documentary "Shoah" (1985) proscribed the use of archival images in favor of eyewitness testimony and film shot at the scenes of the crimes in the 1970s-80s. Holocaust deniers, of course, have never depended on actual evidence to promulgate their delusions. On ethical and aesthetic grounds, the second set of criticisms is more substantial and reflects a peculiarly French concern with a kind of Bilderverbot (prohibition of religious images). Wajcman accused Didi-Huberman of fetishizing these images in a perversely Christian fashion ("the passion of the image" 52). The exceptional status of the Sonderkommando photographs thus opens up debate about the memory and visual representation of the Holocaust in a nation which has not yet come to terms with its "Vichy syndrome," to apply Henry...