Innocent Pleasures Research Articles

“The Rain It Takes to Learn the Limits of the Self”

Andrew McMillan’s poetics dissects the physical minutiae of love and desire, enacting ex post facto a sexual and sexualized innocent pleasure. The scenes play out places such as classrooms, trains, locker-rooms, phone booths, and attic bedrooms, and often reference liquids. Tears, sweat, rain, rivers, blood, and sperm are associated with loss and mourning, a wet erotic (childhood) innocence remembered from a dry(er) perspective of experience and awareness of masculinity. In a post-Thatcher neoliberal framework, McMillan explores scenes of masculinity. Playtime is divided into two parts; if these two parts can be provisionally labeled “before” and “after”—a facile distinction between innocence and experience—McMillan’s style and form break down this narrative and open up to fluidity, questioning the possibilities of pleasure (in)formed by neoliberal ideals.

Bleeding Puppets: Transmediating Genre in Pili Puppetry

Bleeding Puppets: Transmediating Genre in Pili Puppetry

Love and dance as transformative powers

ABSTRACTThis essay attempts to show how thinking about dance furthers our understanding of Renaissance love. It explores visions of dancing at court, manifestations both of innocent pleasure and of the desire to provoke love. An important focus is the dance – la volta – which brought male and female dancers into close physical proximity allowing the poet who recreates its lively movement to transmit feelings of desire, of transport and transformation such that dance seems to stand for love. While Latin and French poets – Dorat, Jamyn and Desportes – provide evidence of choreographic and amorous performance, the love sonnets and other poems of Pierre de Ronsard are studied in detail to show how dance and love are integrated into poetic rhythms which capture and extend the range of their transformative power.

The regard of the first man: on Joseph Addison’s aesthetic categories

ABSTRACTThis study examines the sources that could inspire Joseph Addison’s influential ‘aesthetic’ triad of ‘great’, ‘uncommon’, and ‘beautiful’, as elaborated in his essay-series The Pleasures of the Imagination in 1712. After identifying a philological problem in the interpretative tradition which gives rise to Addison’s triad from a section of Ps Longinus’ Peri Hypsous, further three seventeenth-century texts – Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra, Dominique Bouhours’ Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, and Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón – are presented in order to reconstruct a ‘reading glass’ through which Addison could peruse and understand the Longinian section, and then could create his ‘aesthetic’ triad. As a result of this reconstruction, the possible connection between Gracián’s allegorical novel and Addison’s essay can cast more light on the complex and insufficiently discussed relationship between theology or devotional literature and the emerging modern aesthetic discourse. From this angle, Addison’s ‘man of polite imagination’, that is, the homo aestheticus in the modern sense of the adjective, seems to be the heir of Gracián’s ‘first man’ who has the privilege of regarding the created world in a new light, and, as Addison’s aesthete, of discovering its greatness, novelty and beauty in ‘innocent pleasures’.

Ross on Self and Others

Ross suggests a trilemma: (i)Innocent pleasure is good as an end.(ii)I have a prima facie duty to produce what is good as an end.(iii)I have no prima facie duty to produce innocent pleasure for myself. In The Right and the Good, he denies (iii). In Foundations of Ethics, he denies (i). Neither of these solutions is satisfactory. One ought instead to deny (ii). I close by considering a similar trilemma concerning justice.

Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema Antoinette F. Winstead Wheeler Winston Dixon . Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema. Rutgers University Press, 2006. 220 pages; $22.95. Daily Existence Timely and brilliantly written, Wheeler Winston Dixon's Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema explores the relationship between images of paradisial escape in film and the realities of daily existence and the constant assault of digital technology, an assault that forces many to physically escape by vacationing to the "Eden paradises" presented on the silver screen. However, as he points out through numerous examples, the escape to Eden, though liberating, can never be permanent as there are always real life needs—such as earning a living—that supplant the fantasy. The same is true of "Edenic cinema," which provides a momentary escape from the "betrayal, illness, cupidity, and misfortune" of one's daily life. Like the vacation, however, the film too will end, forcing one to leave the theater and step out into the real world. Divided into five deftly crafted chapters, Dixon begins with "The Great Escape," which explores various examples of escapism found in films such as The Enchanted Forest (1945), The Enchanted Cottage (1945), and Portrait of Jennie (1948). He points out how reality is exorcised from the filmic world of the characters and replaced by an idealized vision of the world where "happily-ever-after" is the norm. He also compares how video games operate in the same manner, if not more so, by offering a point of escape for the player through the acquisition of a new identity. However, like film, the trip into the world of pixels is transitory, and, at some point, the player must return to reality. Likewise, he explores variations on the theme of escapism, noting the role Westerns and "stories situated on a tropical island paradise" have played in expounding on the idea of "Eden." From "The Great Escape" he moves to the "Eternal Summer," which examines the films produced in the early 1960s that "promised an endless world of sun, surf and innocent pleasure" using American International Pictures' "beach party" films and Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer (1966) as primary examples of this era. In [End Page 65] contrast, he also studies British cinema of the 1960s and "their casual treatment of sexual activity, lack of responsibility, and thoroughgoing hedonism," which, like their tamer sun and fun American counterparts, collapsed under the invasion of the reality of the period—Vietnam, drugs, and general civil unrest. As with all the chapters in this text, "Eternal Summer" is divided into subsections that provide historical information on filmmakers and photodramas. In this chapter Dixon devotes sections to Andy Warhol and Performance (1968), which work to expound on the post-Edenic period of the 1960s. He explores how the commerce of art destroys its "Edenic" aspects and uses Jean-Marie Straub's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach as an example of a film that speaks to this subject. Keeping to the subject of commerce as a corrupting force in the arts, "Paradise Now," the third chapter, presents a historical smorgasbord of the who's who of 1960s experimental filmmakers, labeled "Edenic cineastes." It analyzes and then compares the radical Living Theater, founded by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, to the experimental cinema of the 1960s', comprised of radical filmmakers wishing to break free of the formulaic restrictions of mainstream cinema. This chapter serves as a lament to a time past—a pseudo Eden in the midst of commercial productions—when film was a "cheap" medium in which any director could afford to work. Chapter four takes an abrupt, albeit well-executed, turn to examine "The Uses of Heaven." He dissects the various ways film utilizes Heaven and/or Heavenly bodies, noting The Sixth Sense (1999) and Gabriel Over the White House (1933) as examples of celestial intervention. He also boldly explores the sexist and racist nature of the "Heaven" films produced in Hollywood where white males dominate, making special note of films that break the stereotype like Alice Guy Blache's The Birth, Life, and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1906...

INNOCENT Pleasures? Children and Sexual Politics

Book Review| October 01 2004 INNOCENT Pleasures? Children and Sexual Politics Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex Judith Levine Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. xxxv + 299 pp. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting James R. Kincaid Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. xii + 352 pp. Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America Philip Jenkins New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xii + 302 pp. Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet Philip Jenkins New York: New York University Press, 2001. xii + 260 pp. A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Crè Lynley Hood Dunedin: Longacre, 2001. 672 pp. che Case Neil Miller Los Angeles: Alyson, 2002. xvii + 313 pp. Patrick McCreery Patrick McCreery Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2004) 10 (4): 617–630. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-10-4-617 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Patrick McCreery; INNOCENT Pleasures? Children and Sexual Politics. GLQ 1 October 2004; 10 (4): 617–630. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-10-4-617 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Aestheticization of the Politics of Landscape Preservation

This article examines the aestheticization of the politics of exclusion in a suburban American community. The research for this study focuses on the relationships among landscapes, social identity, exclusion, and the aesthetic attitudes of residents of Bedford, New York. By being thoroughly aestheticized, class relations are mystified and reduced to questions of lifestyle, consumption patterns, taste, and visual pleasure. Landscapes become possessions that play an active role in the performance of elite social identities. As such, social distinction is achieved and maintained by preserving and enhancing the beauty of places such as Bedford. This aestheticizing of place is managed through highly restrictive zoning policies for residential land and by “protecting” hundreds of acres of undeveloped land as nature preserves. This article explores the role of romantic ideology, localism, antiurbanism, antimodernism, and a class-based aesthetic in the construction of “wild” nature in these preserves. We argue that, in places such as Bedford, the celebration of localism, environmental beauty, and preservation mask the interrelatedness of issues of aesthetics and class identity on the one hand and residential land shortages in the New York metropolitan region on the other. The seemingly innocent pleasure in the aesthetic appreciation of landscapes and the desire to protect nature can act as a subtle but highly effective mechanism of social exclusion and the reaffirmation of elite class identities.

Inward and Outward with the Modern Self

The modern self, with its inwardness, its freedom and its individuality (p. ix), suffers, Taylor tells us, from disenchantment (p. 500, cf. pp. 17-18, 186). Moreover, disenchantment has come in spite of the advance, to which Taylor wishes to give full credit, that modernity has made in giving great value to ordinary life at work and in the family (p. 211). For religion, though still present as one layer of sentiment among many in the historical deposits that compose modern culture, has given ground to “disengaged instrumentalism” or to its antagonist, romantic “expressivism” (p. 498). Taylor, a philosopher of uncommonly generous spirit, is willing to find good in each of these orientations: the first, for example, has with utilitarianism put the relief of needless suffering at the top of the moral agenda (p. 331), along with redeeming from superstitious repression a number of innocent pleasures; the second has deepened human capacity, on the one hand by deepening emotions (both in the sense of oneself and in concern for others), on the other hand by gaining for them intellectual respect (pp. 294, 372, 419).

The restoration of historic technological artefacts, scientific instruments and tools

An increasing number of museums and private persons are today collecting ‘bygone’ technological objects, ranging from scientific instruments to machines and vehicles. The primary consideration of public collections is usually the information function—the technological, historical, economic and perhaps even sociological significance embodied in these objects. To varying degrees, these are the same aspects that interest the private collector, for whom, however, the outdated object also represents a source of innocent pleasure, its age being expressed in its exotic form and function, in traces of wear, in its altered surface, etc., indeed in its overall appearance and feel.

Permanents and Transients

Permanents and Transients by Marian Motley-Carcache As an only child growing up in rural Alabama, I especially looked forward to accompanying my mother on her trips to town to the beauty shop. Beauty parlors were not only my source for movie magazines , which Mama would not buy for me, but they also provided me with my only first-hand contact with cosmetics. I could paint my fingernails ten times in the hours it took to give Mama a permanent, and since the only nail polish at our house was the clear that we used on bedbug bites and to stop runs in stockings, I delighted in painting my nails every colorfromcopper tocotton candy. Unfortunately, trips to the beauty shop, like most other innocent pleasures ofchildhood, soon proved to be neither innocent nor pleasurable. One particular visit looms in my mind to this day in nightmare proportions-and after that visit, fifteen years passed before I again could be coaxed to set foot inside a beauty parlor. Mamapickedme up from school, delivered me from an afternoon of "circling what's wrong with this picture" in those thick-pink "Think and Do" books, to take meto Voncille'sKutandKurl. My mind was filled with visions of Screen Secrets magazines andrainbows ofnail polish, of intriguing bottles of dye and tubes of conditioner. Little did I realize what was actually in store for me. It never crossed my mind that a permanent was just what it said it was-permanent. Neither did it fully register that this time I was to be the victim of the pins and the rods and the solutions and the machines. This time I would notbe free to collectmagazines and play with cosmetics. I would be confined and curled. Voncille's beauty shop was inherhome, an old house that must have been a Victorian showplace in its day, but beingrental property now, was far from grand. A wooden shingle hung out front, a pink silhouette of a woman's head with "Voncille 's Kut and Kurl" painted on it in powder blue. Several cars were parked in the front yard, probably because of a sign that read, "Please Do Not Block Drive" that stood by the driveway. A string of bells and seashells that hung around the door knob jangled as Mama opened the 27 door and we stepped into the parlor. Voncille fascinated me from the start. I had heard Mama and some of her friends say that Voncille had just moved to Alabama from Florida, and that she had tried to commit suicide for the third time just a few weeks before settling here. The idea of her slit wrists intrigued me even more than the bottles of nail polish that I had already spotted lined up on a two-tier plastic cart in the corner of the room. Another interesting thing about Voncille was that she had either plucked or shaven away all of her eyebrows and had drawn on anewpairaboutahalf-inch higherthan where the real ones had been. Soon I found myself placed on top of a stack of magazines topped with a cushion to make me sit higher in a big vinyl chair. Then the backofthe chairwasdropped from behind me and my neck was fitted into a guillotine of a crevice on the front of ablack sink. As a deluge ofwater soakedmy head, I foughtimages ofa Baptist baptism by wondering if Voncille s real eyebrows would have grown back if her suicide attempt had been successful, and if eventually she would have lain in her coffin with two sets of eyebrows. After the shampoo, the real torture began. With the aid ofa metal rattail comb and some pink liquid in a pump, Voncille began to tear tangles from my hair, tangles that she had caused in the first place when she scrubbed my hair like she was washing away the sins ofthe world. From my perch, I began to observe all the horrors of a beauty shop that I had never noticed before: the unpleasant sight of tortured women with wire curlers in their hair and Coca-Colas in their hands; the dissonant sounds of dryers roaring, the phone ringing, a TV blaring the...

Review: Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of Alexander Pope by Peter Martin

Review: Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of Alexander Pope by Peter Martin

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of Alexander Pope. By PETER MARTIN. Pp. xxvi+310. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984. £31.75 net. GRAHAM MIDGLEY GRAHAM MIDGLEY St Edmund HallOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXIX, Issue 154, May 1988, Pages 299–300, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXIX.154.299 Published: 01 May 1988

Mr. Pickwick's Innocence

IN RECENT YEARS many critics have come to agree that the central action of The Pickwick Papers is best described as a quest. In this view of the novel the questing hero emerges from the naive eccentricity of the Pickwick Club and the innocent pleasures of Dingley Dell and discovers, under the guidance of the worldly Sam Weller, the real nature of the world-the deception of Jingle and Trotter, the corruption of Eatanswill, the machinations of Dodson and Fogg, and finally, the injustice of the Fleet. But in accounting for the most important aspect of Pickwick's quest, his response to the tests imposed by his journey, critics present widely divergent interpretations. Some believe that Pickwick undergoes a significant transformation.' In this interpretation Pickwick's travels educate and humanize him; his quest is an initiation. Others, however, who recognize the motif of the quest in Pickwick, find no evidence to support the view that Pickwick is changed by his experience.2

On Legislating Morals: The Symbolic Process of Designating Deviance

T IS BY NOW a commonplace of the social sciences to say that one man's moral turpitude is another man's innocent pleasure. Although policing and judicial agencies of our society designate behavior as wrong, immoral, and illegal every day, we are well aware that such designation is by no means either inherent in human nature or common to all societies in all historical periods. Official and legal judgments of deviance show all the characteristics of cultural relativity. What is crime today may well have been goodness yesterday; what is applauded in New York City is decried on the prairies. Legislatures, police agencies, and courts all operate, however, by designating some behavior as deviant, immoral, and unsanctioned. In this Article we are concerned with how such designations or norms, arise, are maintained, and undergo change. Our effort is less to understand the actions of the deviant than to shed light on those who define his behavior as punishable and prohibited. This Article focuses on one kind of deviance designation: disinterested indignation--hostility directed against a norm violator despite the absence of direct or personal damage to the norm upholder and designator. The norm upholder's righteous hostility leads him to define the deviant as immoral. Intense legal and public reactions to homosexuals, prostitutes, drug addicts, gamblers, and abortionists represent the outlawing of certain behavior despite the absence of a victim or damage to specific and direct interest of others. Political radicalism, murder, theft, and the list of usual may all be interpreted as threats to the life and property of citizens. Designation of the acts mentioned above as crimes cannot be explained on the same basis.

Shakespeare In The United States

If Shakespeare belonged to the United States by birth instead of by inheritance, the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth could not have been celebrated more widely or enthusiastically. It is not irrelevant to consider what his works have contributed to American culture, and what Americans have contributed to Shakespeare in the library and on the stage. To dispose first of some of the fringe benefits, it may be suggested that much innocent pleasure has accrued from the cultivation of Shakespeare gardens containing all the herbs, flowers, and trees named by the poet. An attempt to naturalize all the birds he mentions has had less happy results, though it must be acknowledged that the starlings imported by Eugene Schieffelin in 1880 have taken literally the injunction to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.

Sir Stamford Raffles: England in the Far East

THIS volume, which is one of a series, entitled “Builders of Greater Britain,” and edited by Mr. H. F. Wilson, does not call for much comment in a journal devoted to science. The author of the biography naturally deals mainly with Sir Stamford Raffles as an administrator in the Straits Settlements and the Malay Archipelago, and only incidentally, and that very briefly, refers to him as a zoologist. Raffles was, as everybody knows, one of the founders, and the first president, of the Zoological Society of London; and his bust adorns the lion house of that society. Mr. Egerton, in narrating this fact, is chiefly impressed by “how much innocent pleasure this distinguished child-lover has given to countless thousands of children” by his successful efforts in this direction. He mentions, however, the collections which he took care to make, and which were largely reported upon by Dr. Horsfield. In those days much that was brought back from the East in the way of zoological specimens was quite new to science, and the animals had to have names given to them; it is not such a great compliment as Mr. Egerton seems to think to name a species Gymnura rafflesii, after Sir Stamford. This compliment is usually paid to the capturer of a new form, and it is ridiculous to say that “Raffles' reputation in the scientific world is attested by the fact that the great French naturalist, M. Geoffrey St. Hilaire, described a new variety of animal under the specific name ‘Rafflesii.’”