Line Of Beauty Research Articles

"No remoinho da tendência-espiral": questões de estética, literatura e ciências naturais na obra de Goethe

Em seus últimos anos de vida, Goethe esteve obcecado pela assim chamada "tendência-espiral". Essa questão, contudo, de modo algum constituía algo novo para ele, como demonstram claramente suas formulações anteriores em torno de linhas curvas e espirais. De fato, essas formas encontram-se nas zonas de intersecção entre literatura, artes visuais (em especial, as ornamentais) e estudos científicos. Uma referência crucial para as estéticas do final do século XVIII foi a famosa concepção de William Hogarth sobre a "linha da beleza" (1753), a qual também deixou vestígios nos escritos de Goethe, até mesmo em sua fase tardia. O presente trabalho examina sua elegia "Amynthas" (1799), o ensaio "Touro fossilizado" (1822), assim como textos sobre a metamorfose das plantas e a tendência-espiral da vegetação. Formas espirais parecem ter exercido fascínio tão intenso sobre Goethe porque elas possibilitam, com seus múltiplos significados e funções, extrapolar fronteiras entre diferentes gêneros e disciplinas e estabelecer conexões entre diferentes pensamentos. Essa atividade intelectual transgressora, a que chamaríamos de "interdisciplinaridade", continuou sendo modelar para importantes pensadores do século XX, tais como Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin ou Aby Warburg.

On cover-structure graphs

Motivated by a problem in communication complexity, we study cover-structure graphs (cs-graphs), defined as intersection graphs of maximal monochromatic rectangles in a matrix. We show that not every graph is a cs-graph. Especially, squares and odd holes are not cs-graphs. It is natural to look at graphs ( beautiful graphs) having the property that each induced subgraph is a cs-graph. They form a new class of Berge graphs. We make progress towards their characterization by showing that every square-free bipartite graph is beautiful, and that beautiful line graphs of square-free bipartite graphs are just Path-or-Even-Cycle-of-Cliques graphs.

Perplexed Skin by Patrick Cotter

poems. Yearn Hong Choi landed in Seattle in 1968, a poor, young Korean man who came to town with only seventy dollars and ambition in his pocket. His autobiographical verse serves to remind us that we can't go home again and expect to find itunchanged. Yearn Hong Choi tells us about himselfin dealing with the vagaries of life, and his poems illuminatehuman experiences by their connectedness to those questions: who we are, where we are, and where we should be. A gentleness of spiritpervades thewistful memories of family in a series of poems: "Name," "Photo Album," "Departing," and "Mother and Dove." This same gentleness of spirit sees the sublimity and beau ty in the natural world. He loves the woods in all seasons. The trees give comfort even while human kind interrupts their space. There is frequent reference to the sea, and it is both a cause of uncertainty and a path to a new life,yet he yearns for the solidity of land. This land becomes palpable in poems of the Arizona and New Mexico desert. This same western landscape, from which he sees the expansiveness of the universe, at times overwhelms the poet and leaves him speechless. The only thing the readermay not be sure of is the rationale for the order inwhich the poems are presented. There may be a chrono logical order inwhich he has revis ited the places and scenes. Yearn Hong Choi uses language that is simple and direct inpoems thatare accessible to the general reader. His metaphors come from the eye and the ear. What holds thisbook togetheris its collection of images and memories thatgivemeaning to life. He asks the big questions on the mysteries of life onwhich we all reflectfromtime to time.Yearn Hong Choi tellsus about himself indealing with thevagaries of life, and his poems illuminate human experiences by their con nectedness to those questions: who we are, where we are, and where we should be. He keeps returningtohis homeland and memories of family, to the familyhome, his grandmother in thepotato fieldsof Idaho, his chil dren, retirement, and always back to Korea, as in the beautiful lines of "To Koh Choong-suk," where he remembers: "Li Po drank alone by themoonlight / but I drank all night long next to you. /We were twohappy drunkards in the world." As thispoet navigates the regions of our feelings and emotions, he stops to look while the rest of us drive on by. /. Glenn Evans Seattle, Washington Patrick Cotter. Perplexed Skin. Gal way, Ireland. Arlen House. (Syracuse University Press, distr.). 2008. 96 pages. $19.95. isbn978-1-903631-54-6 Often sexually frank, and sometimes incomprehensible, Patrick Cotter's poems have great aspirations but don't surrender easily. The best of Cotter's writing is solid poetry, intensely imagist,and speaks deeply and sincerely to real and universal human concerns. In a poem called "Such Things Do Happen," he sketches people as glimpsed on passing trains in an intense second-person narrative. As trains come and go, so the pas sengers live inparallel but divorced lives. At a fleeting station break, "a solitarywoman / ofdefinitivebeau ty" shares an intimate, sympathetic gaze with "you." Then gone, the transient trains resume their lone ly courses, and the transcendence shared for a moment is lost for ever. This and other gems are subtle and beautiful chamber plays, rich vignettes scattered throughout the realworld, which, as he eloquently puts it, are "operas, narratives we shall never know." But theworst bits of this collec tion are a series of trite sex scenes, offering an indulgent view of the poet's experience. The young female speaker of "Ovid's Elegy No. 5, 2: Corinna's Take" offers not-so-veiled descriptions of the poet lying next to her in bed, saying she "wanted to run [her] tongue / over his con toured, downy outline," and to "feel hands used to spinning / rhymes, spin my brain." The aesthetics con juredby these lines are vivid indeed, but the subtler themes to which these poems aspire are muddled in the gratuitousness. And Cotter's fauvist broad strokes here serve to smear the mature and frankly more interesting observations he offers. Like Cotter's speaker in...

The Private Life, the Public Stage:Henry James in Recent Fiction

This essay links the recent wave of interest in Henry James's private life as material for fiction—specifically, in Colm Toibin's The Master, David Lodge's Author, Author and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty—to James's conflicted, often queer responses to the private and the public. Toibin and Lodge, in divergent ways, trace through James, the failed dramatist, their own ambivalences about biographical fiction's private-public play. For Toibin, James's life and writing offer figures for the queer author's efforts to probe, complicate, and even conceal homoerotic desire. Lodge's novel remains haunted by a queer specter of James even as it places disembodied devotion at the centre of James's and the fictional biographer's art. While Hollinghurst's novel invokes James as a background presence, James's vexed attitudes toward publicity and privacy and his stylistic excess illuminate the novel's attention to the guest status of gay aesthetics in the heteronormative public sphere of Thatcherite Britain.

The Line of Beauty

ABSTRACT The BBC TV adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning 2004 novel of Aids and Thatcherism was undertaken by Andrew Davies, best known for his version of Pride and Prejudice. Directed by Saul Dibb, The Line of Beauty's depiction of 1980s London is appropriate to both to its source and costume-drama conventions.

The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism

The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism Rachel Zuckert In the "critique of aesthetic judgment," Kant claims that when we find an object beautiful, we are appreciating its "purposive form." Many of Kant's readers have found this claim one of his least interesting and most easily criticized claims about aesthetic experience. Detractors hold up his aesthetics as a paradigmatic case of narrow formalism; 1 and even many admirers of Kant's aesthetics take Kant's claims about form to be problematic, but argue that they are inessential to his aesthetics (which includes more interesting, defensible claims). 2 Though these critics come to differing evaluations of Kant's aesthetics as a whole, they agree on two points. First, interpretively: that when Kant claims that it is the "form" of an object we find beautiful, he means that in aesthetic appreciation, we find certain spatial and/or temporal properties (such as proportion, line, shape) aesthetically pleasing—and that such properties are exclusively responsible for an object's beauty. Second, evaluatively: that Kant is wrong, at least about this. In this paper, I shall propose that we need not endorse either claim. I shall argue that one may interpret Kant's formalism as a claim that in aesthetic experience 3 [End Page 599] we appreciate the object as an individual, as comprising all (or indeterminately many) of its sensible properties as inextricably interrelated or unified to make the object what it is; in other words, we appreciate what has been called an object's 'individual form.' This reading, I shall suggest, allows us not only to understand Kant's aesthetics as intimately connected to his project in the Critique of Judgment (hereafter, CJ) as a whole, but also to see Kant's aesthetics, in general, as providing a richer, more plausible description of our aesthetic engagement with an object, or as less narrowly subjectivist than is frequently believed. I shall proceed by presenting Kant's claims about form, and the standard criticisms thereof, and then turn to defend this alternative reading. Before I do so, however, I wish to make some preliminary remarks about aesthetic formalism in general. Contemporary discussion of formalism often takes aesthetic formalism to be instantiated by the views of the twentieth-century art critics, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, 4 and Kant's formalism is often implicitly equated with theirs (or the kind of position attributed to them). I wish to resist that equation in this essay; to that end, I start here by giving a wider sense of what formalism might be, drawing especially on historical positions that were available to Kant. 5 Broadly speaking, "formalism" is the view that, in aesthetic appreciation of an object (usually a work of art), we do and ought to pay attention not to the object's representational content, emotional expressiveness, historical, institutional, or social context (whether conditions for the production of the object or its effects), but only to its form. Formalism is characterized in some sense, then, by what it excludes, viz. considerations taken to be external to the object. But it does specify positively (if vaguely) that the form of an object is what makes it beautiful. 6 'Form,' however, can mean a number of different things, all of which (in some sense) are the design or arrangement of an object's parts, often of its sensible properties. I wish to draw attention to three somewhat distinct ways in which one may understand such form or arrangement of properties, which I shall call 'property-formalism,' 'kind-formalism,' and 'whole-formalism.' Property-formalism is the view that the form of an object can be described in terms of a set of specific spatial or temporal properties that characterize the relations that hold among different parts of the object, and that these properties are responsible for the beauty of the object. Hogarth's view that the serpentine line is the most beautiful line, responsible...

Inoperative ironies: Jamesian aestheticism and post-modern culture in Alan Hollinghurst's the line of beauty

Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004) is set in 1980s Britain, but its vision of the aristocracy, consumerism and the emerging culture of post-modernism is continuously informed by a deep i...

Out of Line: Illness & Aesthetics in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove

Out of Line: Illness & Aesthetics in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove

Writing the Gay '80s with Henry James: David Leavitt's A Place I've Never Been and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty

What does it mean for the contemporary gay male writer when Henry James is made available as a gay precursor, a literary father, a model for emulation, appropriation, or something else? The versions of gay writing James has enabled take a complex and historically differentiated variety of forms. My project here is to consider two works by contemporary gay male writers who draw on James to write about a watershed decade in gay life, the 1980s. Although these two works—David Leavitt's A Place I've Never Been (1990) and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004)—paint very different portraits of the decade in question, their common reliance on James and their common attention to specificities of gay life argue for a utility in placing their works in conjunction.

The Powers of Apostrophe and the Boundaries of Mourning: Henry James, Alan Hollinghurst, and Toby Litt

This paper looks at the occurrence of the figure of apostrophe—definable as the direct address of an absent, dead or inanimate figure—in some of the novels published since 2002 which are either about or responsive to Henry James. With particular emphasis on Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and Toby Litt's Ghost Story it considers the extent to which the occurrence of this figure relates to the way in which mourning is reimagined and strained in this fiction. It also considers the debt such fiction owes to James's own representations of silences, unlived lives and unactualized potential.

The English Short-Title Catalogue: Past, Present, Future ed. by Henry L. Snyder and Michael S. Smith

108 misachievous reference to ‘‘the Egyptian Hieroglyphic for the reverend Tristram Shandy ’s Tertragrammaton, the four favourite ****’’ should not be used by Mr. Paulson to distract readers from Uncle Toby’s explanation for Mrs. Shandy’s midwife preferences. ‘‘Hogarth’s Line of Beauty (his tetragrammaton) and its female equivalent...ofVenus’’ notwithstanding, it is possible she simply does not want a man near her ****.’’ Mr. Paulson knows his Hogarth, but his church history is at best shaky. Martha F. Bowden Kennesaw State University The English Short-Title Catalogue: Past, Present, Future, ed. Henry L. Snyder and Michael S. Smith. New York: AMS, 2003. Pp. xvi ⫹ 290. $97.50. The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, the greatest bibliography ever compiled , was proposed in 1975 by the late Paul J. Korshin, then ASECS’s Executive Secretary, who wrote the initial NEH grants (1976–1978), and led with dedicated industry by RobinAlstonandthenMichaelCrumpinLondonand,since1978,inAmerica, by its chief salesman, Mr. Snyder. Here the ESTC is overshadowed by the ‘‘English STC’’ that it became in 1988, after which pre-1700 publications were added, including thousands of Wing2 entries dumped in without book-in-hand examinations. The first third of this volume, after Mr. Snyder’s Preface and G. Thomas Tanselle’s Introduction, containseightessays.Groupedinfours,thefirstbeginswithMr.Tanselle’s concise recounting of project developments; thereafter Mr. Snydercontinuesthehistory into present and future spin-offs, reflecting on technological and scholarly needs; John W. Haeger of the Research Library Group generalizes about funds underwriting the project and laments the disappearance of public largesse that made it possible; and Mr. Crump, for a decade head of BL’s ESTC operations, thoughtfully recounts the project’s significance to the BL and British libraries in general—a necessary balance to all the American perspectives. Thereafter come four accounts grouped as ‘‘The ESTC in Practice ’’: David Vander Meulen and Michael S. Smith exemplify research made possible by the database; J. Paul Hunter relates how research was once more difficult; and J. Michael Smethurst records ‘‘the influence that the ESTC has had upon the . . . [database of hand-printed books created by] the Consortium of European Research Libraries.’’ Reliance on the conference’s papers here injures the volume’s intent: the first three essays should have been revised with lengthier, more detailed demonstrations of the ESTC’s utility (Mr. Korshin’s essay later offers in passing nearly equal attention to applications), and Mr. Smethurst’s reflections belong in the first grouping. The book’s middle-third contains three histories: of the English STC/NA by Mr. Snyder; the NAIP by Marcus McCorison; and the Eighteenth-Century STC by Mr. Korshin. The final third principally contains four reports to Mr. Snyder on the 1988 canvassing of the PRO by Alastair Massie and Martin Saunders. Here too the editing was insufficient, for these journals on groups and classes checked contain promises of details to be looked into. Onereviewer remarksthatthesePROreportsseemtackedontofillthevolume;however, they provide a useful introduction to materials at the National Archives. Before a spotty 109 name index, follow four appendices: ‘‘ESTC/NA Board Members’’; ‘‘International Committee Members’’; ‘‘Grants Awarded’’; and attendees in 1998. The volume somewhat fails to bend contributions into a coherent, concise unity. Mr. Snyder’s conference speculations about digitizing texts were obsolete when the book appeared—no surprise after a publication delay of five years. If only by footnotes, the editors might have ensured uniformity about the numbers of catalogued records or contributing libraries. The Index reveals big efforts overlooked, as J. L. Wood’s editing of Factotum or Karen Kloth’s editing at Göttingen. A bibliography should offer documents and publications never cited, such as the main status-report prior to thisvolume, Bloomberg-Rissman’s ‘‘Short-Title Catalogs: The Current State of Play,’’ RBML, 13 (1999), 121–128. I would have demonstrated utility by listing studies crunching ESTC data, like Don-John Dugas’s in PBSA, March 2001. Most of what else is missing cannot be expected from a celebration arguing future funding for the electronic catalogue. It is left to reviewers to complain about RLIN’s $200 annual fee for the product of public funds, and to deny the claim that the catalogue is ‘‘substantially complete’’ when— not to speak of many errors...

What comes first: the structure or the egg? Ross Granville Harrison on the origin of embryonic polarity.

Ross Granville Harrison’s paper ‘‘ On relations of symmetry in transplanted limbs,’’ published in JEZ in 1921 investigated the mechanism governing the development of embryonic axes through systematic transplantation experiments on the forelimb of the salamander, Amblystoma punctatum. The questions these experiments addressed remain as fundamental, and largely unanswered, today as they were over 80 years ago: how does an embryo establish its three axes, and how is this positional information conveyed to developing organs? The experiments themselves exemplified the transition from embryology as a purely descriptive field, to modern experimental embryology. Harrison’s interest in embryology began while he was working towards his Ph.D., when he visited Germany and studied the development of fins in teleost fishes with Nussbaum. At that time in Germany, Wihelm Roux established a new journal ‘‘Archiv fur Entwicklungsmechanik,’’ designed for the study of mechanisms of development, as opposed to mere description of developmental processes. It is highly likely that this shift in approach to problems in developmental biology had a significant impact on Harrison also. Harrison was clearly an outstanding observer, and the care which he applied to the descriptive aspects of embryology becomes apparent in the JEZ paper. The experiments are systematic, and the documentation of the experimental results is detailed and totally objective. The beautiful line drawings along with the detailed experimental histories convey the actual experimental results more accurately than many multicolor photoshop images in the current scientific literature. The data is presented exactly as Harrison saw it, not as he predicted it to be. For example, in figure 37, the transplanted limb is incidentally covered by the gills, and Harrison does not alter the drawing to ‘‘move’’ the gills and make his observation more obvious. It would be possible for a reader to do an independent analysis of Harrison’s experiments just based on the raw data in the manuscript, and for that reader to form independent conclusions not influenced by those Harrison himself presented later in the paper. The conclusions that Harrison did draw from his experiments far outlasted the experiments themselves, however. The experiments were sparked by a discrepancy in observations between two notable embryologists of that time, Streeter and Spemann, regarding the equipotentiality of the ear placode. Although the discrepancy turned

Pygmalion's " Wanton Kind of Chace ": Hogarth, Rowlandson and the "Line of Beauty"

Pygmalion's " Wanton Kind of Chace ": Hogarth, Rowlandson and the "Line of Beauty"

A Wanton Chase in a Foreign Place: Hogarth and the Gendering of Exoticism

A Wanton Chase in a Foreign Place: Hogarth and the Gendering of Exoticism DAVID PORTER Popular conceptions of beauty today most clearly betray their eighteenthcentury origins in their emphatic insistence on disinterestedness as a precondition of artistic value. Theorists from Shaftesbury to Kant argued that a pure experience of the beautiful required a state of transcendent aloofness from the yearnings of the flesh and the pull of ideological attachments.1 Aesthetic experience is meant to be a chaste, strictly nonpartisan affair; the depth of pleasure it can afford is owing precisely to the freedom it offers from the merely contingent and material. The fact that for many modem viewers erotic art always teeters precariously on the edge of pornography and that patriotic art hovers dangerously close to propagandistic kitsch suggests the lasting power of this conception. We are skeptical of the aesthetic value of images suggestive of sexuality or national pride because the desires and attachments conjured up by such images would seem to preclude the disinterested experience of the formal qualities of the work. The line from Shaftesbury to Kant, however, is not without its serpentine twists and detours. Edmund Burke straggles mightily in his Philosophical Enquiry to sustain a clear distinction between a pure aesthetic love for beauty and an animal lust for the attractive women in whom he found beauty most frequently incarnate. One reason, however, that we hear so 399 400 / PORTER much less about his account of the beautiful in the Enquiry than about his theory of the sublime is that he is embarrassingly unsuccessful at sustaining this distinction. Whereas Kant has the good sense to limit his examples of beauty to such unproblematic objects as flowers and arabesque designs, Burke severely compromises his credibility as an impartial arbiter of aesthetic value by basing his catalog of the empirical attributes of beauty on his close observation of sexually attractive young women, invoking their lisps, tottering steps, and even feigned distresses as emblems of a universal aesthetic ideal. In his discussion of the importance of "gradual variation" as a formal quality of beauty, for example, he writes with the air of a seasoned connoisseur, "Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried."2 To corroborate his argument, Burke cites the opinion of "the very ingenious Mr. Hogarth," pointing to Hogarth's famous line of beauty as if to vindicate his otherwise perhaps too obvious delectation of the female form.3 But Burke's more important debt to Hogarth goes conspicuously unacknowledged, and that is precisely the invocation of the beautiful, living woman as the cornerstone of an empiricist aesthetic theory. Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, more than any other aesthetic treatise of the period, rejects the Shaftesburian requirement of disinterestedness as a precondition of the experience of beauty, and indeed revels in the possibilities of sensuality and eroticism as components of aesthetic pleasure. According to Ronald Paulson, "Hogarth is attempting to create an aesthetics that acknowledges that if we place a beautiful woman on a pedestal we will inevitably and appropriately desire her and may discover, moreover, that she is not strictly virtuous." It is an aesthetics of "novelty, variety, intricacy, [and] curiosity" that foregrounds the pleasures of the chase and the tantalizing deferral of discovery, an "aesthetics of seeing under or into" that vindicates the natural wantonness of the wandering gaze.4 Not surprisingly, this aspect of Hogarth's theory has troubled not only adherents of the doctrine of disinterestedness, but also students of the artist's famous moral satires, which often convey a decidedly more somber tone. As Paulson points out, "an aesthetics in which sensation and pleasure replace moral judgment apparently contradicts the tenor of [Hogarth's] major works." Thus Wallace Jackson dismisses the Analysis of Beauty as "a strangely eccentric document," while other art historians have attempted to neutralize its radical eccentricity by reading it merely as a...

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt

The article examines nature of Eliot's lyricism, having suggested that all lyricism is expression of desire, a reaching out for an unattainable fulfilment. It takes note of fact that although Eliot has written lyric lines of incomparable beauty, he did not produce a body of lyric poems. His lyricism seems to break out, as though stifled, rather than to constitute raison d'etre of his work. The article relates this to belief expressed by Eliot in Tradition and Individual Talent that poet escapes from rather than expresses his own personality, which, in turn, would seem to reflect two ideas of Bradley: being that all reality is and all one, and second that is of three orders, immediate, relational, and transcendent. Although much of Eliot's poetry reflects relational experience, a nostalgia for immediacy of experience permeates Eliot's work. If we examine his lyric imagery, we find reference almost always to his early life, to a past that he has left behind. The poet's first world creates his rose garden, to which he turns and returns. It was only during his last years with his marriage to Valerie, that his abiding loneliness, his hunger for lost simplicity of his early life, was seemingly assuaged by a happiness akin to that immediate The effect upon his verse was of dubious merit. ********** Many years ago, while teaching a course on Eliot, I had students read Keats' On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and then write an essay entitled On looking into Eliot's The Waste Land. Recently, teaching course again, I had occasion to revisit Eliot. I came to see that constituted for me his poetry's appeal was nostalgia to which it gave voice for an entire generation to which I belong. When all issues and allusions of The Waste Land which so preoccupy reader were all but forgotten, it was its lyricism which remained with us and echoed in our minds expressing, like all great poetry, what cannot be expressed. Perhaps all lyricism is expression of desire, a reaching out for an unattainable fulfillment, addressed for most part to someone who would seem to possess promise or at least possibility of restoring soul to fulness of being. The lyric has been defined by Mill as the utterance that is overheard, by Joyce as a cri de coeur; it has been spoken of as silent soliloquy revealing landscape of mind. However defined, recognition of its essential quality persists, which is need of poet to speak from his solitude. That Eliot felt this need and possessed great lyric power is, of course, beyond need to contend, but it is also evident that corpus of his work contains few poems that one would label in entirety lyric; no sonnet series, no pourings out of his heart to beloved, nor to reader for that matter. Instead we have lines, passages of a beauty incomparable in modern verse, but they are passages embedded in a scaffolding of allusion and reference camouflaging poet's solitude, or so ordered as to engage mind in universal questions rather than to express individual experience. There is always hidden smile or stifled cry as though lyric lines escape, break out, rather than deliberately express his feeling. The early poems provide instances: Prufrock recalling sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown and mermaids singing who, he thinks will not sing to him; young man in Portrait of a Lady who keeps his counsel, Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired Reiterates some worn-out common song With smell of hyacinths across garden Recalling things that other people have desired (20)(1) or in Preludes ... fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing (23) imprisoned in a sordid city block. …

Images of space: St. Petersburg in the visual and verbal arts

This highly original work is about the imagination as it has manifested itself in one of the most beautiful and historically important cities in the world. The subject is not the buildings, trees, and rivers of St. Petersburg, but the spaces between them: space as a conceptual interval, not as emptiness. Emptiness and space are not synonyms, the author argues. One way or another, space is formed and shaped into a structure that can be perceived, but emptiness has no distinct articulation or content. Interpreting the unique space of Petersburg since its founding in Russian and Soviet art, this richly illustrated book analyzes the changes of spatial conception that were inwardly linked with the development of Russian culture and that manifested themselves in poetry and prose, in architecture and fashion, in interior design and painting. The author's sources are not only art and belles lettres, but travelers' accounts, fashion magazines, autobiographies and memoirs, popular sketches, and newspapers. The book includes 75 illustrations. The importance of artistic use of urban space has a long history in Russia. When, during the reign of Catherine II, Russian cities and villages were subjected to complete replanning, this was done not so much to change the style of building as to create a new system of space, enforced by the beautiful lines of streets and squares. The outlines of the spaces of Petersburg would, with only a few exceptions, remain unchanged for over 200 years, while building styles changed three or four times during this period. The imaginative possibilities of Petersburg space remain: even in the dreary Soviet suburbs built in the 1960's, the poetics of Petersburg space are at play.

W.B. Yeats: Endings and Beginnings: A Review Essay

W.B. YEATS: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS: A REVIEW ESSAY DECLAN KIBERD Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, OUP, 1997. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Volume I, The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914, OUP, 1997. W.B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats: Volume II 1896–1900, Ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey, OUP, 1997. “We were the last romantics—chose for theme Traditional sanctity and loveliness . . .” a poet’s beautiful lines may echo in the minds of his readers, rewriting themselves into the tradition of their very interpretation. Liberal analysts, beginning with Louis MacNeice (123–25), have often worried that Yeats’s poems seem to assert rather than to earn their chosen terms, and thus to invite disciples or detractors but few real critics. Criticism may properly allow us to admire this element, to reject that, and nevertheless arrive at a generally positive view of a great poet; but Yeats writes every other poem as if the only conditions for acknowledging its power are absolute (even prior) agreement with the sentiments it is about to deliver. If it is easy, it is not necessarily wise to take Yeats’s words for the true state of things. Despite the seductiveness of his view that we should believe any proposition until it has been categorically disproved, his is a program for the long-time postponement rather than the suspension of disbelief. The problem is this: The philosophers of the enlightenment had claimed that what cannot be proved doesn’t exist. And since a prejudice cannot be proven, the enlightenment liquidated all that did not have a strictly rational basis. W.B. YEATS: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS: A REVIEW ESSAY 183 It is now more than a quarter-century since Donald Davie—hardly the most politicized of critics—invited us to imagine how we should feel if, instead of “We Irish . . . thrown upon this filthy modern tide,” the poet had actually written “We Nazis”?1 The textual scruples to which this rather melodramatic moment gave rise in the critical literature of the subsequent decade were considerable. It was not long before Seamus Deane was pointing out that Yeats’s ideas of wisdom were established only in the texts, yet these ideas were the very precondition of our ability to decode the texts or make sense of them at all (“Heroic Styles” 45–60). “Pythagoras planned it”—but what? “I have met them at close of day”—who are “them”? In an utterly romantic solution to the problem of prejudice and tolerance, intimacy is assumed rather than being earned. The Yeatsian aesthetic is based on the proposition that to understand a text we must first align our readerly horizons with those of the author. Yet not even the most ardent admirer has ever managed to achieve an absolute overlap. Every reader, as much as every writer, is the product of a singular history and conscious of it as a subject. The reading of a text thus involves some sort of interpretation, for there can be no such thing as an unmediated experience. Each interpreter comes with a pre-understanding of the text, constituted of personal horizons that will be at variance with those of the greatest poet. The understanding of the text then becomes an event: Hans Georg Gadamer argues that we use a poem to test those preunderstandings while allowing it to evoke questions to which we do not as yet have answers (417 ff). In the best sense, the encounter may be dialogic , calling upon readers to examine their own prejudices and tolerances even as they interrogate the poet’s. Yeats’s poetry remains a fascinating test-case because of its power to insinuate its accompanying argument into the mind of the most resisting sort of reader. No critique of Yeats written in the past generation has been as subtle or ferocious as that of Seamus Deane, yet even he ends up recycling the “last romantics” thesis in his most compelling essay. In “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution,” Deane remarks that “Yeats had no idea or attitude which was not part of the late-Romantic stock-in-trade” (Celtic Revivals...

Blotting and the Line of Beauty: On Performances by Botho Strauss and Peter Handke

The performance of a text or the staging of a play is often and easily imagined as the representation, in another medium, of its content or meaning. On stage can be shown what the script merely says; the rehearsal process and the production itself thus appear as means towards the end of communicating to the audience what an author has set down on paper. When this picture of what goes on in performance is extended to dance or the realization of musical scores, the notion of "representation" proves too narrow, and performances are, therefore, often said to "express" a feeling, content, or intention.

Blotting and the Line of Beauty: On Performances by Botho Strauss and Peter Handke

Blotting and the Line of Beauty: On Performances by Botho Strauss and Peter Handke

Out of the Closet

The extraordinary cover of Mary Kelly's early Interim catalogue, published by the Fruitmarket Gallery, Kettle's Yard, and Riverside Studios in 1986, consists of a magnified detail of a leather jacket (fig. 1) taken from the first panel of Corpus, part 1 of an eventual four-part work titled Interim. Wrapped around the cover, the jacket becomes an “all-over fold” in the Deleuzian sense of a Baroque pli captivating art and aesthetics and microcosmically encrypting the periodization of style. Viewed at close range, the work reveals a sinuous suavity common to Mannerist painting and film noir that emanates from the leather, the effect of light mysteriously smeared across the dark furrows. And then there is the zipper with its large teeth snaking along the eastern edge of the volume in the form of a figura serpentinata, a “line of beauty,” in the words of William Hogarth, “which by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to inclose (tho' in a single line) varied contents.”2 No vagina dentata, this zipp...