Scenes Of Seduction Research Articles

A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston

Reviewed by: A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston Donald A. Daiker A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Edited by Michael Thurston. New York: Norton, 2022. 348 pp. Paper. $14.38. The Norton Critical Edition of The Sun Also Rises, edited by Michael Thurston, is welcome because of its illuminating textual annotations but disappointing because of its one-sided approach to the novel’s meanings and value. [End Page 116] In addition to the full, magnificently annotated text of Ernest Hemingway’s first and arguably finest novel, the Norton Critical Edition (hereafter NCE) includes biographical and autobiographical material, background pieces on postwar Paris, bullfighting, and literary influences, and a brief selection of letters. For criticism, the NCE provides contemporaneous reviews by Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, and others followed by ten essays of “Modern Criticism.” The volume concludes with a useful Hemingway chronology and an uneven selected bibliography. If you are reading The Sun Also Rises for the first or fourteenth time, your best bet is the annotated NCE text. That’s because this 1926 Hemingway novel includes references and even whole conversations that are difficult and even impossible for twenty-first-century readers to comprehend. The competing editions, like the Hemingway Library Edition and trade paperbacks, offer no annotations at all. The Library of America edition edited by Robert W. Trogdon provides helpful annotations not as footnotes but hundreds of pages away in a section labeled “Notes.” Besides, the NCE notes are far more extensive and helpful. Whereas Trogdon says nothing about Robert Cohn’s “feeling of inferiority and shyness . . . on being treated as a Jew at Princeton” (5),1 Thurston tells us that “Princeton had the lowest number of Jewish students among the Ivy League universities” (5). Trogdon does not gloss the passage when young men arrive at the dancing club, but Thurston’s note would have been appreciated by my students: “Hemingway’s description suggests that the young men are homosexual. Jake’s subsequent reaction confirms this” (17). Trogdon ignores Jake’s reference to the “n***** drummer” at Zelli’s restaurant in Montmartre, but Thurston responds with an informative and nuanced mini essay (47). Following the exemplary model of the Hemingway Letters Project, the annotated NCE enlarges our experience and deepens our understanding of The Sun Also Rises. The NCE aptly includes what is perhaps the most famous letter from one American writer to another: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to Hemingway praising the novel he had read in manuscript but urging that its original opening be deleted because of its “sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings” (195). Thurston also includes several relevant Hemingway letters but not some of the most significant: Hemingway’s letter to Fitzgerald cautioning that Sun is “not . . . at all for a child to read” (Letters vol. 3, 75); his letter to Canadian writer Morley Callaghan asserting that Sun “is not about sex” (Letters vol. 3, 112); and his letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins explaining why he cannot further reduce the book’s “profanity” (Letters vol. 3, 107), why it “is a great mistake to put real [End Page 117] people in a book” (Letters vol. 3, 110), why Sun is not “a jazz superficial story” (Letters vol. 3, 148), and why Gertrude Stein’s epigraph, “splendid bombast,” should not be taken seriously (Letters vol. 3, 158). Thurston’s well-written, informative, and lucid “Introduction” helps explain his choices of critical essays. For Thurston, Sun lacks anything like a moral code or set of values. Instead, he writes, readers “are invited to find meaning in the arduous achievement of technique” (xxi). Thus, it is Hemingway’s “stylistic achievement”—his “mastery of the sentence”—and not “moral behavior” (xx] that is central to the novel and best accounts for our enjoyment of it. If you had read only the ten chosen “Modern Criticism” essays, you would scarcely have known that the novel’s central relationship is between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley. You would be largely unaware of the novel’s most important dramatic scenes—the bedroom scene in Paris, the seduction scene in Pamplona, and the scenes in a bedroom, bar...

The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas

Reviewed by: The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas Elizabeth Allen alfred thomas, The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 225. isbn: 978-1-8438-4566-9. $105. Over more than two decades, Alfred Thomas has brought to light for an English readership the international court culture of medieval Bohemia and its influence in England. Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) took Anne's marriage to Richard II as the justification for a masterful survey of Czech literature with an eye to inviting comparisons with English literature. Thomas's subsequent work on Czech and English literature, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 2007), cemented this essential scholarly project of making known in English a thoroughly cosmopolitan eastern European literary history; a deeper dive into the Bohemian connections to Chaucer's works came in Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). From Thomas' erudite and meticulous body of work, scholars of late-medieval English literature have gained crucial insight into the cultural relations between [End Page 158] England and Bohemia. Thomas' work is essential to an important twenty-first century scholarly undertaking—spearheaded by David Wallace (Europe: A Literary History) and taken further by scholars like Candace Barrington (Global Chaucers) and Marion Turner (Chaucer: A European Life)—to widen the context of English literary culture to include all of Europe and indeed, the rest of the globe. In his present monograph on the subject, Thomas details Bohemian art, literature, and statecraft in order to pursue readings of late fourteenth-century works by Chaucer, Gower, the writer of the Alliterative Morte Darthur, and the Pearl poet. The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture is a handsome volume: printed on clay-covered paper, it contains 40 high-resolution, full color in-line illustrations. These visual materials draw a particularly vivid picture of the ties between Bohemia and England: the shared materials, styles, and themes which, Thomas argues, emphasize not so much national identities as 'familial and dynastic affiliations that transcended the west-east European divide' (p. xvi). This book consists of four chapters and a conclusion. In Chapter One, Thomas establishes that Richard II's court found creative inspiration in the multilingualism of Anne's Bohemian relatives, especially her father, Emperor Charles VI, and her half brother, King Wenceslas IV. This political link creates occasions for reading the English poetry of the late fourteenth century in an international context. In Chapter Two, Thomas treats Anne as the real-life corollary to Venus in Gower's Confessio Amantis and to Alceste in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, where the 'collaboration' with the patron 'is clearly not working out' (p. 71). In a series of short sections, Thomas explores the literary culture of female patronage in other works by Chaucer and by other authors including Dante, Petrarch, and Machaut. Chapter Three turns to more sustained readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Darthur, arguing that both poems, far from provincial, register the international court culture he describes. In Gawain's seduction scenes, he finds a reflection of Robert de Vere's scandalous affair with Anne's lady in waiting, Agnes Lancecrona; in the Morte, he finds in King Arthur's grief a reflection of Richard II's grief for de Vere upon his death. In both poems Thomas finds an ambivalence about the moral and political values that international court culture seems to embrace. Chapter Four finds that Pearl's 'curious blend of consolatio and courtly love motifs' (p. 167) registers links to Bohemian architectural, visual, and poetic texts: Karlstein Castle outside Prague, and the Czech Legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria. Here and in the book's conclusion, Thomas describes Richard's political ambition and his investment in the ideology of sacral kingship as thoroughly embedded in an international court culture shared by England and Bohemia—an international culture that, after Richard's death, gave way to the comparative insularity of the Lancastrians. Thomas' work proceeds by testing associations (as opposed...

The Rhetoric of Seduction; or Materiality under Erasure

Operatic versions of the femme fatale, the preeminent figure of European modernist aesthetics, compel and allure because we witness her coming into material presence through the course of her opera. Through vocalizing, the femme fatale manifests her corporeality under imminent threats of erasure by coopting and manipulating the offstage world as represented by the orchestra. The Seguidilla seduction scene in George Bizet's Carmen and the “Dance of the Seven Veils” in Richard Strauss's Salome raise the question of how subjectivity and material presence, especially of the femme fatale character, are depicted sonically, dramaturgically, and metaphysically.

Amorous Constitutions: Bodies and the Affect of Amatory Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Lasselia

Amorous Constitutions:Bodies and the Affect of Amatory Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Lasselia Aleksondra Hultquist In the dedicatory epistle of Eliza Haywood's 1723 novel Lasselia: or, The Self-Abandon'd, the author claims that she is writing detailed scenes of seductive encounters only for the "unthinking Part of the World, [to know] how dangerous it is to give way to Passion."1 And yet the seduced female body is one of the hallmarks of Eliza Haywood's writings. The following passage from Lasselia is an exemplar of the many seduction scenes in Haywood's early amatory works: [In] the strange Disorder of her fluttering Heart, depriving the Blood of its usual Circulation, all her Limbs forgot their Function, and she sunk fainting on the Bank…He threw off his upper Garment…and flinging himself down by her, with a thousand Kisses and Embraces, at once restor'd her to that Sense she had so lately lost…It was in vain she struggled to rise—in vain that she endeavour'd to repel the soft Endearments of his Lips and Arms; her Eyes confess'd the unwilling Transport of her Soul, and told him all he wish'd to ask: nor was he scrupulous of letting her know how well he was acquainted with his Happiness…Trembling and panting, 'twixt Desire and Fear, at last she lay resistless in his Arms,[and] with faultering Accents confesse'd a mutual Ardour; and if he did not obtain the highest Favour she cou'd grant, he had too much to boast of, to fear she cou'd deny him any thing.2 [End Page 105] There is at least one such scene of this kind of seduction in each of Haywood's amatory fictions, the repetition of which has tended, in the past, to be understood as a mark of her poor literary craftsmanship.3 However, recent scholarship argues that such scenes are emotionally significant. Stephen Ahern has reasoned that repetitive affective events in literature, such as seduction, are driven by an overarching imperative: to get at something profound but not quite reachable—hence the need to repeat, to rehearse as if obsessively, and without resolution, scenes of affective contagion.4 Earla Wilputte contends that the stylistic expressions in repetitions of love scenes indicate Haywood's "dissatisfaction with the conventional literary discourse for love."5 Such studies allow that there is more at stake in these scenes than titillation, moral convention, or marketability. Affect provides a vocabulary to read the recurring seduction scene as an important space for knowledge through the amatory constitution. This article argues that the recurring amatory encounter can be better unpacked by using affect theory. By focusing on the body in affective seduction events in Lasselia, I use affect theory to uncover the ontological and phenomenological work accomplished in her description of the amatory constitution. My aim here is to read the affective body in the seduction scene as a site of emotion work that teaches characters how they feel about each other through the experience of love. Focusing on the amatory constitution—that is, the seduced body overcome by love—helps us recognize the significance of the passions in eighteenth-century texts, a significance that I believe Haywood's readers understood implicitly. The amatory form tries to work out those indescribable moments of feeling between desire, seduction, and propriety. The sign of such feeling is the amorous constitution, which implies a body that is not only prone to the affective contagion of physical love and sexual desire, but also what Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard have called a site of creative potentiality.6 The amorous constitution provides important information for characters' accrued knowledge about how they feel. Exploring the meaning of bodies in Haywood's amatory scenes is not a new endeavor. Early feminist critical configurations of women and desire insisted upon the ignorance of physical craving in females, reading the amatory body as a site of desirability as opposed to a craving entity in and of itself. Criticism by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ros Ballaster, and Toni Bowers on the amatory body tends to argue that, in the amatory seduction scene, women want one thing (sex...

La apáti di Mirrine : Omero nella Lisistrata di Aristofane

This paper aims at remarking the numerous existing correspondences between Hera’s seduction of Zeus in the Iliad (XIV 153-353), and Myrrhine’s seduction of Kinesias in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Ar. Lys. 829- 951). A close reading of both passages will help understanding Aristophanes’ poetics of allusion towards his model: in particular, the double use of ἠπeροπeύeιν to convey the theme of seduction at 840 and 843, as well as his choice to place a seduction scene in a turning point of the plot, clearly reveal Aristophanes’ reminiscence of the Homeric Διὸς ἀπάτη.

Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Trans-architecture

Starting from the intense experience of the gay club, this paper asks whether that experience or event can be acknowledged by architectural theory. Via a reading of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Jacques Derrida’s Before the Law, it posits that the transing of gender can be a clue as to the transing of architecture away from essentialising ontologies. It then uses Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of an assemblage to show how this can be done, making reference to the assemblage of the gay seduction scene in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and the image of the interplay of orchid and wasp that is inspired by it. The paper concludes by showing how this ontology relates to a specific instance of transing architecture in the gay and SM clubs of Vauxhall, South London.

Show and Tell: Negotiating Self and Seeing in Les Photos d'Alix by Jean Eustache

Narrative identity transactions predicated on acts of seeing and telling take place everyday: we hand someone a photograph and observe casually as we pass it over ‘That's me!’ However, occasionally we find ourselves unable to participate in such exchanges: ‘That's me?’ we ask incredulously, as a photograph is shown us on which we apparently appear. Distanced from both the image and the person who smilingly hands it over, we suddenly understand that our sense of self is bound up with acts of seeing, and that the negotiation of the relationship between the two is necessarily social in nature.This essay will investigate the complexity of such acts of show and tell by focussing on a short film by Jean Eustache in which the photographer Alix Roubaud shows 19 of her photographs to Boris, the young son of the filmmaker. Alix specialised in self-portraiture. In the course of the film, Boris is called upon to perform acts of identification four times. However, it is not merely Alix's identity that is up for grabs here. The age difference between Roubaud and Boris, Alix's flirtatious glances and assured gestures, cast this as a scene of seduction: the boy is being turned into a man through an apparent initiation into the arts of seeing and looking. As she points and poses, Alix recounts stories about each of the photographs: technical details here, anecdotes concerning the mise en scène there. The making of the man is mediated by stories of the making of the photographs and vice versa: sexual identity and photographic meaning are being simultaneously negotiated. However, as the film progresses, what we see and what we hear bear an increasingly erratic relationship to each other. Distanced from the narrative relationship formed by Alix and the hapless Boris, we come to focus on the film itself as another expository instance.

Negotiating Seduction: Archilochus’ Cologne Epode and the Transformation of Epic

This article offers a new interpretation of Archilochus’ First Cologne Epode (fr. 196a W) by reading it as a sustained travesty of an epic seduction scene. The article begins by setting out the flexibility of the epic type-scene, with an analysis of the Dios Apate in Iliad 14, Aphrodite’s seduction of Anchises in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and Odysseus’ encounter with Nausicaa in Odyssey 6. The second part of the article demonstrates that the Cologne Epode is structured around the same core elements, but at every stage Archilochus subverts expectations by offering something that parodies epic convention. Reading the Epode as a vulgar iambic reworking of an epic tradition not only gives us insight into its sophistication but also helps resolve some of the interpretative difficulties which have long plagued scholars working on the poem, and in particular helps us see what is achieved by the poem’s surprising ending.

Español

This article analyzes the use of the phrase «cuidadoso descuido» in seduction scenes of some picaresque narratives. The origin of this phrase is dual: «descuido» is the Spanish translation of sprezzatura , a key concept in Renaissance courtly manuals; and «cuidadoso descuido» is a concept that expresses the naturalness of a performance in theater. The picaresque narratives subvert that courtly and theatrical origin and employ «cuidadoso descuido» as a problematic euphemism to talk about a crime that includes lying and dissimulation.

Othello on the Rack

Othello appeared at time in England 's history when had come to fore in country's homeland security politics, legal debates, and popular culture.1 At pivotal moment in play's famous seduction scene, Othello twice says that Iago tortures him: hast set me on rack! (3.3.335); If thou dost slander her and me, / Never pray (3.3.368- 69). This essay scrutinizes these declarations by assessing them not only on basis of what happens in play, but also through Shakespeare's adaptations of his sources and through lens of play's historical moment. Notably, in Giraldi Cinthio's Un Capitano Moro, source of Othello's plot, Venetians physically Moor: Signoria . . . with many tortures . . . sought to draw him truth about why he murdered his wife, a lady of their city (388). In this version of story, no confession could be drawn from (388) Moor, who is exiled, and then killed, by lady's family. Shakespeare transforms source insofar as play stages an assault on mind rather than body; Iago pledges to practi[ce] upon [Othello's] peace and quiet / Even to madness (2.1.310-11), and general bids Farewell tranquil mind! (3.3.348).2 Whereas Cinthio portrays man who withstands physical torture, Othello shows man broken by insidious psychological methods that he himself describes as torture. A second source, Lewes Lewkenor's 1599 translation of Gasparo Contarini's The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, provides play's mise en scene and certain verbal echoes, but Shakespeare drew on this text more than has generally been recognized. In its preface, Lewkenor extols moderation . . . wherewith [the Venetians] governe such subjected provinces as are under their dominion, binding them thereby in faster bonde of (Contarini A2r). Othello stages an exercise of nonviolent domination insofar as Iago appears as an unweaponed Venetian (A3r), one who commands obedience without using violence.3 His use of such methods may in fact identify him as typical Venetian, perhaps even super-subtle one (1.3.356).Although Othello does not contain an episode of physical such as one found in Cinthio or Shakespeare's own King Lear (the blinding of Gloucester), absence of such violence is itself notable. This essay argues that Othello examines effectiveness of different kind of coercion, described here as psychological assault that enables torturer, Iago, to break his victim without using physical force. The play's signature accomplishment lies in its portrayal of Iago's ability to refashion Othello's mind and, by extension, general 's sense of himself as person. In an early modern culture of pervasive, public, and brutal forms of corporal punishment, such as branding, drawing and quartering, or burning at stake, usually remained invisible, hidden away in secret chambers. Othello, by contrast, vividly stages power of these coercive mechanisms to convert their victims, who then choose suffering, exclusion, and death. This essay examines Iago's transformation of Othello in light of such methods and in relation to legal and political associations that allusion to practice itself might have produced for early modern audiences. Othello's references to the rack and to may well have called to mind, at time of play's appearance in midst of England's century of torture (Langbein 71), complex range of meanings associated with practice at this historical moment. In short, Othello seems to draw on two crucial aspects of this cultural phenomenon: in way text suggests that Iago's coercive methodology amounts to form of psychological torture, and in way it situates his exercise of this power in extralegal context of military outpost at Cyprus.Writing in nineteenth century, David Jardine described torture's application under Elizabeth as manifestation of sovereign prerogative, monarch's ability to exercise an absolute power, which does not mean turning massive state apparatus to do her bidding at any time, but rather, occasionally operating outside (or against) law. …

Interior Space and Description in Keats's Narrative Poetry

IntroductionIn Keats's narrative poetry, an acute awareness of the spaces that characters occupy and in which the action unfolds gives particular symbolic significance to various interior spaces (such castles and houses, living rooms, ballrooms, bedrooms, tombs, etc.) with windows and doors or no openings. In this article, I account for Keats's employment of the descriptive method with a specific focus on his creation of interior space. How does he craft these interior spaces? Which means are used to achieve which ends? How do they function within the narratives? are they mainly performed by or focalized through characters?To address these issues, I turn to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's book Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, published in 1766. Lessing theorizes what he deems the proper subjects for painting and poetry, respectively. Although he concludes that depicting in space belongs to painting whereas depicting a sequence of events falls under the domain of poetry, he investigates how poetry and painting can use each other's resources. In a similar vein, Georg Lukacs has theorized about literature's means of evoking space in his 1936 essay Narrate or Describe? Skeptical towards extensive descriptions mere fillers, Lukacs instead advocates that description should be thematically integrated in a central action.In dialogue with Lessing's and Lukacs's theories, I analyze Keats's use of description and interior space in his narrative poetry. I apply three ideas from Lessing to Keats: first of all, his notion of an economy of descriptive adjectives (functioning epithets); secondly, his notion of narrativized description; and finally, the notion that poetry literally organizes language spatially. In relation to the latter, I supplement Lessing with Brian McHale's notion that poetry spaces language, proposed in Unnaturalness of Poetry (2013). Though I argue that Keats's rendition of space is mainly aperspectival, I employ Lessing's three ideas to probe the way his description of interior space can have multiple functions: serving deliberate interruptions; being thematized, semanticized and narrativized; offering a poetic vision; and occasionally reflecting character psychology.The interpretation of Keats focuses on Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil (1818) and Eve of Agnes ( 1820). In I explore the image of the tomb and the spatial entities of the pot and the forest, which according to Keats's extended understanding of space function interior spaces (with the ability to contain living or dead people within them). In St. I focus on the symbolic significance of Madeline's chamber space for the scene of seduction, the climax of the story.Descriptive Stasis versus Plot ProgressionIn Sleep and Poetry (1817) Keats bids farewell to delightful poetry in order to write in an epic and more narrative mode, with these often-quoted lines: And can I ever bid these joys farewell? / Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, / Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts ( 122-125). Yet if we assess what Keats went on to write, the narrative poetry of his last volume of poetry Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of Agnes, and Other Poems ( 1820) does not really conform to these epic aspirations. For one thing, he continues to write lyric poetry (not least, the critically-acclaimed great odes) and, for another, he composes his narrative poems, which are lyric-narrative hybrids.Keats indulges in elaborate descriptions of various items in both his lyric and in his lyric-narrative poetry. Scholars have stressed how Keatsian narrators often present various figures as though they were art objects (Kelley 170). Keats's Fragment of Castle-Builder typifies his interest in description. The speaker in the poem indulges in imagining-or performatively inventing-a specific room in a castle. Theresa Kelley writes about how the title and the repeated use of the modal 'should' (26, 28, 59, 63, 65) recognize this room a rich poetic 'phantasy' (47), created out of thin air and that [tjhe features and appointments seem both substantial and yet patently invented (Kelley 175). …

Eroticism—Politics—Identity: The Case of Richard III

Richard III’s courtship of Lady Anne in William Shakespeare’s King Richard III is a blend of courtly speech and sexual extravaganza. His sexual energy and power of seduction were invented by Shakespeare to enhance the theatrical effect of this figure and, at the same time, to present Richard as a tragic character. Richard’s eroticism in Act 1 Scene 2 makes him a complicated individual. Playing a seducer is one of the guises he uses to achieve his political aims on the one hand, and, on the other, the pose of a sexually attractive lover enables him to put his masculinity to the test. Throughout the scene Richard is haunted by his deformity that, together with his villainy, makes him a stranger to the world and an enemy to his family and the court. In order to overcome his self-image of a disproportional cripple he manifests his sexuality towards Anne to boost his self-esteem and to confirm that the lady will accept him despite his obvious physical shortcomings. This article uses Georges Bataille’s theory of eroticism and erotic desire to characterize Richard as a tragic individual and to explain the reasons behind his unexpected sexual behaviour in the seduction scene.

Leadership and charisma: A desire that cannot speak its name?

Leadership has proved impossible to define, despite decades of research and a huge number of publications. This article explores managers’ accounts of leadership, and shows that they find it difficult to talk about the topic, offering brief definitions but very little narrative. That which was said/sayable provides insights into what was unsaid/ unsayable. Queer theory facilitates exploration of that which is difficult to talk about, and applying it to the managers’ talk allows articulation of their lay theory of leadership. This is that leaders evoke a homoerotic desire in followers such that followers are seduced into achieving organizational goals. The leader’s body, however, is absent from the scene of seduction, so organizational heteronormativity remains unchallenged. The article concludes by arguing that queer and critical leadership theorists together could turn leadership into a reverse discourse and towards a politics of pleasure at work.

Notes on <i>Daddy</i>, 1973

These notes were written in June 1973. They are published here for the first time. The Daddy received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in April 1973. I had made the in total collaboration with the French sculptress Niki de St. Phalle, and the general subject of the appeared to most people to be about Niki, her work and much more importantly her sexual fantasies: most of which seem to be about a total overthrow of patriarchy as we know it. The ninety minutes of the were divided into three parts. In the first part, Niki is played as a little girl by the eight year old daughter of one of Niki's former lovers, Clarice Rivers.1 In part two, Niki appeared as herself, I'm a big girl now, enacting a series of sexual rites and fantasies in front of the dead father, tied to a wheelchair, to whom Niki reveals the ecstasies she enjoys while seducing her girlfriends, the somewhat dubious experiences she puts up with while being seduced by her long suffering male lovers and numerous fantasies of revenge against men. In part three she indirectly reveals, and admits, that she is still trapped by her need to be in love with Daddy, or the memory of him and she accepts he will be [with her] forever, despite herself. The had started as a light- hearted exploration of Niki's sculpture and paintings. But gradually, by filming she came to understand the meaning of many of the symbols in her work ... huge, voluptuous sexy dancing Nanas as she called them, winsome little girls and birds, crosses and altars and other paraphernalia of Catholicism ... And the dragged us both into a harrowing ritual of mutual psychoanalysis, as further and further we plunged together in a journey through her unconscious (murky in the extreme) and my unconscious (even murkier) until the became much more a confession about our catastrophic sado- masochistic love affair, our mutual fantasies about power and castration, and our living out her primal scene of seduction, or imagined seduction by her father. As I was the camera and the rational, the director and the editor of the film, I was already cast as the seeing eye of Daddy anyway, morbidly peering into the most secret parts of her soul and sexuality. I had met Niki a week before she married the sculptor Jean Tinguely, with whom she had lived for the previous ten years.2 A month after the marriage she left Jean and came to live with me, outwardly for us to make a together, inwardly ... for us to see (perhaps) just how far we would take each other into that ecstatic madness we sensed we had to explore together. After a week or so, Jean- who was fascinated by all my falcons, which ended up perched on blocks in the back garden of Niki's house- and I became the best of friends and he was probably quite relieved I would be taking Niki off his hands for a couple of years, as she had made his life as difficult, at times, as she would make mine. Eigh teen months later, the child of our psychic, alchemical marriage, Daddy, was revealed to the world at the New York Film Festival, the premiere being held in the cinema attached to the Museum of Modern Art. Considering the nakedness of the film, the amateurish acting by all the non- professionals who played the various parts in the film, the raw anguish and bitterness that Niki revealed in the towards men at large, (or otherwise), and the complexity of the symbols and images derived from her work, the was well received and reviewed. The audience that night were mostly there to see an art film anyway, in [the] Art Museum, and the avant- garde ambience in the style and form of the was a language recognised and accepted. We probably never received such a sympathetic audience again; even though the was shown widely in Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland and France. In November of the same year, the was shown at the London Film Festival with disastrous results- several critics refused to review any further festival entries after seeing it. …

Recasting the Primal Scene of Seduction: Envisioning a Potential Encounter of “Otherness” in Jean Laplanche and Sudhir Kakar

Recasting the Primal Scene of Seduction: Envisioning a Potential Encounter of “Otherness” in Jean Laplanche and Sudhir Kakar

Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market

The last few years have seen renewed fascination with tulip, expressed in form of series of popular histories of flower. For these books, key in tulip's history is so-called Dutch mania of 1630s, when-we are told-a frenzied speculation in bulbs inflated their prices to unbelievable sums. Tulips, which could normally only be sold between June and September when bulbs were lifted from ground to be stored over summer, began to be exchanged in something like an unregulated futures market: promissory notes for future delivery of bulb were exchanged for promissory notes for future payment. The same bulb-buried somewhere in ground-could be exchanged ten times in day. When this speculative bubble burst in winter of 1637, traders were left holding fistfuls of worthless paper.1At least, this is story as it is usually told-and there are good reasons to doubt some aspects of it.2 I do not in fact want to focus on mania, but I do want to draw attention to these books and their accounts of it, not for historical truth of those accounts but for way they use flower to raise questions central to developing global market, whether in early modern period or in our own moment. The modern tulip histories appear as part of broader phenomenon of commodity histories, which Bruce Robbins has recently identified as a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular nonfiction (454). According to Robbins's account, these commodity histories seek to narrate emergence of global capitalism as scene of seduction in which Europe is invaded, penetrated, conquered, rescued, seduced, and dominated by foreign goods. These stories invite us to witness the birth of European desire-that is, birth of demand (456). But tulip histories- left out of Robbins's account-also have their own particular logic. In them, we are invited to discover the birth of demand in of madness, mania: Michael Pollan calls it a brief, perverse moment (xxiv), collective (62); Zbigniew Herbert refers to collective, uncontrollable passions (41) and psychosis (47).3 These books endlessly recycle anecdotes about tulip bulbs becoming more valuable than houses or land. Such stories exert double fascination: they invite sense that world of stable values, in which land should be worth more than tulips, has been stood on its head; and they turn this reversal of values into an index of secret attractive power supposedly hidden in tulip itself but in fact belonging to operation of market and dimension of human fantasy that constitutes it. Describing madness of tulip market, these books solicit our recognition of market's power to assign fantastic values to what might seem to be trivial or ephemeral objects. After all, it is naive to be shocked at high prices tulip bulbs could command, since exchange value is function of market, that is, of desire: value represented by commodity, as Marx famously wrote, is purely social (139).The tulip histories focus attention on dimension of fantasy that underwrites operations of market, demonstrating that determination of value is always fraught process, perhaps even mad one. This is clearly an issue with powerful resonance now, in wake of series of booms, bubbles, or extending from cyberspace to seemingly more sober and solid ground of realty market. This emphasis might seem to trouble celebratory relationship to market that Robbins discovers in most popular commodity histories; to speak of bubbles and manias is to speak of market regulation, need for oversight, and irrationality to which judgments about value are subject.4 But seen from another angle, tulip books fall very much in line with other commodity histories, as Robbins analyzes them, and it is here that they begin to open up reality of tulip as it was constituted in early modern period as well. …

Out of an Old Toy Chest

Out of an Old Toy Chest Marina Warner (bio) The Soul of the Toy In Baudelaire’s essay “La Morale du joujou,” written in l853, he remembers how the toyshop owner Madame Pancoucke, all wrapped in velvet and furs, beckoned the young Charles to choose something from her “treasure store for children.” Looking back down the years, the poet still sees in his mind’s eye the magic room overflowing with toys from floor to ceiling that this “Fée du joujou” (Toy Fairy) opened to him. Without a second thought, he picked out “the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most garish, the freshest and the most bizarre of the playthings.” But his horrified mother insisted he choose another, less extravagant present, and the little Baudelaire had to resign himself and relinquish his toy. The word joujou (not jouet, the usual word for toy) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a “teddy” or a “dolly”; its repetition hints at baby talk and hence at playing, as when a child exchanges endearments and questions with a toy in imaginary conversations and elaborate scenarios. The toy in so many children’s games becomes part of an ongoing story and in this way initiates the first invented narratives in the child’s life. That scene of seduction, pleasure, and frustration with Mme. Pancoucke and his own mother catches Baudelaire’s lasting affection and reasoned admiration for toys. He called them “cette statuaire singulière” (this singular statuary); he was first a poet and then an art critic rather than a novelist, and as a flâneur of the boulevards and the galleries, he adopted a language of aesthetics, treating toys as an unusual form of sculpture. He recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play—from tiny “diligences” or mail coaches to detailed model furniture. But above all he muses in wonder at children’s ability to play without props or models, creating narratives, dialogue, and dramas [End Page 3] through fantasy alone: “All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings.”1 Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to make the connection to creativity in general: “[The child’s] facility to satisfy the imagination shows the spirituality of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The plaything is the first initiation of a child to art.” Nothing will ever attain again, he says, the same degree of liveliness, or, crucially, the same intensity of presence or belief. For Baudelaire, the realization of childish make-believe cannot be regained: “Isn’t all of life found there in miniature, and much more vivid in colour, cleaner and shinier than real life?”2 Yet Baudelaire’s essay lingers on the frustration that dims these vivid, shiny colors, for children, he says, also want to see the soul of a toy. He describes how they will turn about their playthings and shake them, hurl them to the ground, and often break them in their bafflement and even rage at their stubborn refusal to awaken into life. His meditation hints that at the point when make-believe fails, the vitality of toys vanishes and produces a primal encounter with mortality: “But where is the soul? It’s here that bewilderment and sadness begin.”3 The beginning of imagining stories brings with it frustration that the story is not powerful enough—it is not the real thing. In a connected prose poem entitled “Le Joujou du pauvre,” published nine years later, Baudelaire pursues this thought, as he observes an exchange between a beautiful, pampered child inside the exclusive railed park of a chateau. He has “a splendid toy, as fresh as its master, varnished, gilded, clothed in a purple dress and covered with plumes and glitter.”4 But the rich child is not interested in his doll, for on the other side of the railings a ragged street urchin shows him, in a little cage which he shakes about, a living rat—”drawn...

Twisty Little Passages: The Several Editions of Lady Caroline Lamb's "Glenarvon"

Glenarvon was published in 1816 by Henry Colburn, who advanced Lady Caroline Lamb [pounds sterling]200 an agreement pay [pounds sterling]300 upon publication. He must have anticipated decent sales, for he had recently paid an established writer, Lady Morgan, about the same amount for her novel O'Donnel (Erickson 156). Glenarvon is an interesting case study in the winding paths of revision, which began as soon as Lamb detected editorial changes in the proofs: shall be seriously angry if any alteration is made whatever either in punctuation or orthography & I entreat you send me the proof sheets. Remember and send the remainder of the 1st vol. - for I have been obliged alter it all back again ... (2) was also vex'd when Colburn left two musical settings by Isaac Nathan out of the galleys. (3) perhaps felt Nathan's music would be selling point, because the second volume of Byron and Nathan's successful Hebrew Melodies, had just appeared. Colburn put the music back in, but the proofreading continued practically up the day Glenarvon was published anonymously on May 9, 1816. There were errors, including mis-numbering of chapters, (4) but the author was proud, and sent copies of the novel her circle of associates. Her pride turned alarm, however, when her sister-in-law and others began accuse her of betraying them this kiss and tell, or as Byron put it, --and publish confessional (Byron's Letters and Journals 5: 85). When John Cam Hobhouse announced his intention counter-attack on Byron's behalf for Lamb's expropriation of his character in the novel by some of Lamb's letters. Lamb expressed nothing but astonishment (Douglass 185). spent the next period of her life revising Glenarvon for its second and third editions, adding preface, and then an introduction for fourth edition, (5) trying repair the damage. And yet, she never altered any passages that would change the novel's core message. Lamb's reputation for insanity is largely based upon the act of social suicide Glenarvon became. paid heavily for portraying Byron both as an irresistible lover and a coward and hypocrite, smooth dissembler, who smiles--but he smiles he stabs (Works 1: 342). Frustrated passion and simultaneous anger Byron motivated the writer, no doubt, but her deeper anger lay the society that excused him while condemning her for their adultery. That double standard irked, then enraged her, and she began see it as confirmation of the pervasive she had witnessed first hand for years. Of Calantha, the novel's heroine. Lady Caroline wrote, She heard folly censured till she took it be criminal; but crime she saw tolerated if well concealed (Works 1: 54). In Glenarvon, Lamb was able dramatize her own attempt defy society rife hypocrisy and deceit (Works 1: 71). Lamb had other motives besides family distress for revising her work. The press had been severe her first novel--overly so, in retrospect. Glenarvon has significant flaws, but the reaction of journals and magazines was certainly out of proportion its offenses. The British Critic described it as composed of scenes of seduction and adultery representing the morals of Paris and Vienna (i.e., Sodom and Gomorrah) by an author bent on publishing the world her own shame, who seemed to glory in her guilt. The Critic's reviewer said that the novel ought be read with mixed feeling of abhorrence and pity. (6) The Theatrical Inquisitor similarly found Glenarvon tiresome and revolting and described it as pornographic work comparable John Cleland's Fanny Hill. (7) The British Lady's Magazine bemoaned the novel as wretched production which was disgusting, immoral, and tawdry, and notwithstanding these grave charges, completely farcical. (8) The Monthly Review did not charge Glenarvon moral or religious harm, but rather inquired into the novel's oddity. …

A Possible Source for the Seduction Scene in The Waste Land

A Possible Source for the Seduction Scene in The Waste Land