Aesthetics Of Transgression Research Articles

Limitation as excess: A reappraisal of transgressive aesthetics in Amanda Filipacchi's Love Creeps

ABSTRACT Transgressive aesthetics’ unrestrained extremity has been problematised by post-Cold War capitalism, via their shared reliance upon unregulated desire. Amanda Filipacchi’s Love Creeps reframes transgressive excess through limitation, accounting for transgression’s contradictory position within twenty-first century capitalism. The novel’s expression of transgressive aesthetics relies upon a fundamental paradox: constriction simultaneously intensifies textual depictions of sexual desire. This apparent incongruity informs the novel’s response to the contradictions of contemporary capitalist culture. Initially, the article considers Filipacchi’s depiction of desire within a transgressive aesthetic context – beginning with definitions of transgression, before considering how the novel’s innovative use of limitation reformulates perversity and extremity to respond to twenty-first century capitalism. Love Creeps’ decoupling of content from consequences, via the subversive potential it aligns with limitation, is then reconnected to twentieth century uses of transgressive aesthetics, establishing the intensity Filipacchi produces as a contemporary innovation of this legacy. I argue Filipacchi’s counterintuitive use of limitation recalibrates transgressive aesthetics in a way that accounts for the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, presenting an extremity that is furthered by the very limitation that intuitively should diminish it.

The Aesthetic of Transgression: Love and Limits in the Early Work of James Joyce

Abstract: This essay draws on Georges Bataille's notion of "transgression" to argue for a distinctive "aesthetic of transgression" in Joyce's writing. Bataille theorizes a dialectical transgression where the punishment it calls forth operates as a regulatory force, reinstituting the taboo and apparently cancelling the force of transgression. Joyce initially understands transgression non-dialectically, as the violation of a preexisting taboo punishable by the law, but his early writing gradually overcomes this by developing a dialectical transgression—an act of going beyond the limit that is simultaneously recontained within the limit. Joyce pursues this by thinking through the "allegory of love" he inherits from medieval and early modern poetry. He reconceives the allegory into scenes of incompletely disclosed erotic encounters: they represent acts of transgression and fail to represent them adequately, mystifying transgression even as it is being revealed. Joyce's transition to this more complex understanding of transgression is read into "A Portrait of the Artist," the relationship with Emma in Stephen Hero , and the incompletely disclosed erotic encounter in chapter XXV of Stephen Hero . Some examples are given of how scenes of transgressive sexuality are represented in Ulysses . The persistence of such scenes is used to argue for a distinctive aesthetics of transgression in Joyce's writing.

Aesthetic Distance

There is an unnamed crisis of aesthetic immediacy afoot in the American criminal justice system. Defendants are seen too quickly. Or rather, they are recognized too quickly. They are recognized spatially, at the defense table, surrounded by lawyers and court marshals, playing the protagonists in the court performance. For most observers, this staging and its familiarity bring about a series of untold assumptions—assumptions that, when viewed nakedly, erode the presumption of innocence. While implicit biases and prejudices similarly short-circuit judicial proceedings—procedure and proceduralism itself—nefariously permit implicit narratives to outpace evidence. Tools to interrupt the aesthetics of transgression and its aftermath will serve judicial accuracy without substantial efficiency tradeoffs. While the bifurcation of the guilt and sentencing in American courts laudably partitions the culpability inquiry from the question of deserved punishment—the former, the question of wrongdoing, can never be truly divorced from history, neither personal nor social. Nor should it be. The Anglo-American insistence on a socially ahistorical criminal trial comes at a high cost: real and textured history—the foreground, leadup, and intimate histories of what occurred is kept out, while the more depersonalized histories that undergird daily life, narrative tropes, and mythologies of crime are permitted to play an outsized role. There is no place, as it stands, for simultaneity in truth or a multiplicity of character. This article thinks of ways to render collective transgression and the complexity of truth legally cognizable and to afford individual defendants full subject status as, I argue, the Sixth Amendment demands. It turns to a source famed for disrupting perception and the study of how and why perception is to be unsettled: Russian Formalism.

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression, by Gladys M. Francis

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression, by Gladys M. Francis

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression by Gladys M. Francis

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression by Gladys M. Francis

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression by Gladys M. Francis

Reviewed by: Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression by Gladys M. Francis Frances J. Santiago Torres Gladys M. Francis. 2017. Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression. Lanham: Lexington Books. 155 pp. ISBN: 9781498543507. Francophone Caribbean women writers and artists have been creating a prolific body of work for a very long time now; yet their work continues to be, in many instances, negated the recognition it very well deserves to have, not only in academia, but also in the daily construction of paradigms that defy those imposed upon the Francophone Caribbean experience (in general) by Eurocentric discourses and perspectives. Although this is not a new issue, it continues to be urgent to put forth the incalculable contribution of Francophone Caribbean women writers throughout the 20th century to this day. Dr. Gladys M. Francis is a Caribbeanist scholar adamant in leading us to explore the body of work that [End Page 216] some of these female authors have created; in an attempt to emphasize and expose the ways in which their creativity separates them from the exoticizing paradigms established when Caribbean literary and visual productions are defined by the Western academic, historical, economic and political mainstream discourse. The author points at how diasporic performances have been denied the significance, and importance, that they have as archival materials in documenting a history that has been consigned to memory. Francis emphasizes the importance of "performance and ekphrases writing as sites of embodied knowledge that avow, as archive, mnemonic transmissions and expressive behaviors" (p. xii). Francis also revisits these important questions: What belongs in the archives? And who is deciding this? She states that: "We must shift away from such factional orthodoxies that perpetuate the invisibility of the myriad of forms through which non-Western societies have created and continue to create knowledge" (p. xii). Francis evidently refers to the ways in which imperialistic frames of reference have continued to keep non-Western knowledge, in general, out of the "official" archives and historical documents. These expressions of knowledge, perpetuated through orality (oraliture), music, dance, art and belief systems, in Caribbean cultures for instance, must be made visible. Furthermore, the author sets her inquisitive queries precisely upon the ways in which these texts challenge and contest the "hegemonic" archival system itself (p. xiii). According to Diane Taylor, quoted by the author in her introduction, performance leads to "cultural belonging and political agency" (p. xiv). Francis thus tells us that she proposes to study this embodied knowledge as it is manifested through storytelling, songs, riddles, cooking and other artistic and cultural texts. All of these expressions and manifestations put forth the invisible, voiceless, silenced and excluded history and memory of the Caribbean experience as a whole. Francis is also intent on putting on the forefront, not only, the contributions of Francophone Caribbean women writers, but she also incorporates visual and performance arts, as texts in her analysis. In the author's view, these cultural texts contribute significantly to our understanding of Caribbean idiosyncrasies, identities, cultural politics, among other aspects of the Caribbean experience; in order to demonstrate this, she navigates through an extensive body of theoretical and aesthetic work to support her arguments. The first chapter of this book focuses on "issues of dis/placements," as well as "imprints of colonization" in terms of the construction or conceptualization of identity in the "sociocultural and political contexts of Guadeloupe and Martinique" (p. xviii). These constructions are conceived "within a multifaceted" combination of factors, which include the African, Creole and European components (p. xviii-xix). This chapter is [End Page 217] mostly devoted to the analysis of literary works by Dambury, Pineau and Kanor. Expounding on the cultural politics of identity, particularly what she calls impossible citizenships. The author studies ekphrases writing, which "deconstructs and re/constructs" the body. This also speaking to the use of the word "odious," in her title and throughout the text, pointing toward what she describes as the "repulsive embodied depictions used in literary texts, visual productions, and performances, that is, the (non-verbal) practices of ritual, cooking, dance, theatre, funerals…" (p. xiv). Taking her analysis beyond the mere "paradigms of content and subject," the author...

The vernacular of photobombing: The aesthetics of transgression

The banal imaging of ourselves and our environments has led to new aesthetic modes where the conventions of imaging, subject–object relationships and what is pleasurable or popular often draw on the ludic, the unexpected or the surprise element. One such image genre is photobombing, where a transgressive object or entity within a conventional image setting subverts it, adding popular appeal through its ability to reconfigure its aesthetic conventions, opening it up for public pleasure and consumption and inscribing it with a possibility of going viral. Photobombing as an image genre online reflects our aesthetic modes and the age of distraction, where the unexpected remains a mode of ocular appeal underscoring the convergence of popular culture and the fluidity of Web 2.0’s convergence architecture. As such, people’s aesthetic modes of the popular can be invented, renewed and subverted with new formats. The phenomenon of photobombing equally affirms the spectacular as a liminal site where pleasure is experienced with the breaking down of norms and the conjoining of a communal gaze through the aesthetics of transgression.

Drakula u zrcalu: Upisivanje ideologije u gotički roman

Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel, Dracula can be seen as a political text which comments on the social and political reality of Victorian England. The novel relies on the aesthetics of transgression both in its structure, which is epistolary and provides for multiple points of view, and in its contents, which describes the appearance of a supernatural being – the vampire. Supernatural events and characters symbolize the fear of moral decline that may occur as a consequence of contact between the dominant Victorian culture and colonial cultures, enabled by Britain’s colonial endeavours. The character of Dracula functions in most cases as a part of the subtext, a danger one does not see, but feels. He is a symbol of the fear of potential reversed colonialization and of the dangers of female emancipation, both of which represent a threat to the anglo-centric patriarchal hierarchy. As such, Dracula (and the contact with the East that he represents) symbolizes a threat to the tradition and stability of the British Empire which finds itself in a schizophrenic situation: on the one hand, Britain desires the new, as is seen through the scientific and technological progress, as well as progressive cultural phenomena, such as the idea of female equality. On the other hand, the promising future is burdened by an uncertainty that scares the British as it represents a step away from the position of a symbolic center of imperial power and away from patriarchy. Stoker’s novel is thus revealed as one of key texts which, paradoxically, represents Victorian ideology through the representation of ultimate otherness in the form of a monster.

Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa:

Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa:

<em>Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression</em>, by Petra Dierkes-Thrun

Reviewed by: Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression by Petra Dierkes-Thrun Jason Boyd (bio) Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression, by Petra Dierkes-Thrun; pp. x + 247. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011, $65.00. Petra Dierkes-Thrun’s Salome’s Modernity is a study of the “rich afterlife” of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1894). The book’s goal is to answer the question, “What were the historical and cultural forces that established Wilde’s Salome as a canonical text that, in turn, inspired more than a century’s worth of creative cultural reinscriptions, adaptations, and transformations in many different genres and media?” (1). The book’s answer is that Wilde’s play and the reworkings examined express a modernist “aesthetics of transgression”: in her triumphal moment, Salome achieves individualist utopian and apocalyptic fulfillment—ecstasy and death—by means of erotic and aesthetic transgression rather than through pre-modernist metaphysical transcendence. Salome’s Modernity not only argues that Salome inspired modernist “reinscriptions, adaptations, and transformations,” but also that the play itself is a “truly innovative, subversive, forward-looking” modernist text (16). In arguing that Wilde and his play are a part of twentieth-century avant-garde modernism, Dierkes-Thrun is confronted with a common conundrum in Wilde scholarship: to what extent are Wilde’s various perceived radicalisms the result of a retrospective revaluation and remaking of Wilde as the precursor of various forward-looking twentieth-century artistic, intellectual, and social movements? While Dierkes-Thrun acknowledges “anachronistic readings” that assume Wilde understood himself as a radical queer writer (177), she does not confront the related anachronistic reading, pertinent for her argument, that presumes Wilde was a highly original and socially iconoclastic writer and theorist before his time. Perhaps recognizing this problem, the argument in chapter 1 never makes explicit whether the conception of the play it expounds is to be taken as an elucidation of Wilde’s own [End Page 535] conception of his play. In Dierkes-Thrun’s reading, based on broad intertextual parallels and patterns, Salome is the expression of the modernist zeitgeist, the unique synthesis of the (proto)modernist aspects of previous Salome treatments by Stéphane Mallarmé, Gustave Flaubert, and Joris-Karl Huysmans; the epicurean philosophy of Walter Pater; and the postreligious philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (although there is no evidence Wilde knew Nietzsche’s writing). As if to prove Salome as a modernist text, the chapter ends with a discussion of the perceived parallels between the play and Georges Bataille’s modernist pornographic novella Madame Edwarda (1941). The subsequent chapters—on composer Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera (the libretto of which was based on Wilde’s play), Maud Allan’s solo dance piece The Vision of Salomé (1908), and actress and producer-director Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film adaptation—argue that each of these works, in their own fashion, gave expression to the modernist aesthetics of transgression. These chapters draw extensively on previous scholarship, largely to provide the broader contexts in which these works emerged, although Dierkes-Thrun strikes out on an original path in chapter 2 by arguing, against predominating critical opinion, for “the essential compatibility between Wilde’s and Strauss’s projects” (58). These works are linked by being instances of “popular avantgardism,” a seemingly oxymoronic term. Dierkes-Thrun notes that both Wilde and Strauss “acted as modern artist-marketers interested in producing innovative art that would titillate, dazzle, and sell” (73). Of course, this raises the issue of how truly innovative and radical a work can be when the creator’s goal is to unite “avant-garde ambition with commercial appeal, catering to the audience’s popular, political and religious tastes” (75), a question that should have been raised in chapter 1. Besides Strauss’s opera, both Allan’s dance piece (by helping to create and capitalizing on Edwardian “Salomania” [94]) and Nazimova’s film (by using the newest popular medium and capitalizing on her status as a Hollywood film star) also exemplify popular (rather than radical) avant-gardism. As Salome’s Modernity shows, lurking in the background in each of these cases is the tantalizing threat posed by Wilde as...

Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (review)

Reviewed by: Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression John Paul Riquelme Petra Dierkes-Thrun. Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 247, illustrated. $65.00 (Hb). This engaging genealogical meditation on Wilde’s Salome presents, seriatim, an ambitious, multifaceted claim that the play embodies a forward-looking aesthetics of transgression that is distinctive compared with antecedent versions of the narrative, in service of a revolutionary ideal of agency that is both female and queer and strongly influential on later cultural productions in various genres and media that draw on its transgressive attitudes with variable success. As the title implies, the book argues that the direction set by Wilde’s play is still with us; it was modern then and continues to be. The study provides a worthy, theoretically committed, updated complement for William Tydeman and Steven Price’s stage history, Wilde – Salome (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). Necessarily treating some of the same material, Salome’s Modernity devotes considerably more attention to Wilde’s precursors, provides more detailed treatment of Strauss’s opera and of early-twentieth-century interpretations by female artists, pays little attention to English stage productions from 1930 to 1990, and evaluates works of recent decades influenced by Salome. Its bibliography is admirably substantial. The paratactic title of the earlier volume suggests an alignment between Wilde and his play, or between Wilde and his character. That identification emerges regularly in Salome’s Modernity, regarding a biographical link that critics have sometimes made between playwright and character to which Dierkes-Thrun cogently objects, but also concerning the play’s [End Page 571] implications as representative of Wilde’s attitudes. She argues for that latter form of alignment as part of her salutary claim that Salome is more important in the Wilde canon than has been widely recognized. In the interest of full disclosure: Dierkes-Thrun cites an article of mine to support her claim about the play’s importance, especially in relation to later modernist writing. Although she does not put it this way, we can conclude from her argument that both Wilde and Salome have become modern myths that are actually one, a joint myth of aesthetic transgression and agency involving the contradictions and persistent retellings that accompany all myths. Dierkes-Thrun pursues the interlocking aspects of her multiform claim in an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction presents Wilde as future-oriented, anticipating or initiating modernism, which she characterizes as intent on achieving physical and aesthetic sublimity. She traces her sense of transgression as productive and expansive, not primarily destructive, to Foucault, a significant, though not overbearing, theoretical presence in the study. Chapter one argues for Wilde’s crucial refashioning of works by his precursors, including Mallarmé, Flaubert, and Huysmans, into a modernist form that “is distinctly more utopian and individualist” (43) in its sensuously sublime attempt to address the crisis of the subject. The section concerning the play’s final scene is memorable. It adduces both Pater (erroneously identified as Wilde’s teacher at Oxford [44]) and Nietzsche to evoke the intense complexity of the action as providing an ecstatic limit experience and an opening for agency. Less effective is the turn to Bataille at the chapter’s end, though the discussion there does contribute to projecting the relevance of Wilde’s perspectives into the early middle of the twentieth century. The second chapter provides a revisionary reading of the relation of Wilde’s play to Strauss’s 1905 opera, “the first modernist music drama” (11). In this strong-minded reading, rather than going against the grain of the play, the opera carries its aesthetic direction forward. Chapters three and four concern two female modernist artists, Maud Allan, the North American dancer who made her career in Europe and England, and Alla Nazimova, the Russian actress and filmmaker who worked in the United States. Chapter three focuses on Allan’s highly successful dance performance, The Vision of Salomé (1908), and on the career-destroying Pemberton- Billing Trial (1918) that resulted from her involvement in a private production in England of Wilde’s play, which was still banned...

Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (review)

Reviewed by: Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression S. I. Salamensky Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression. Petra Dierkes-Thrun. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. 247. $65.00 (cloth). For every "Oscar Wilde" may be found infinite other Wildes. Enigma, paradox, and multiplicity were his stock in trade. He was, among many other things, a remarkably accomplished dilettante, meeting success of various degrees with a relatively scant but remarkable oeuvre of public lectures, poems, essays, epigrams, a novel, short stories, and plays, not only ranging across genres but hybridizing a vast array of historic and contemporary models and styles. Indeed, it was precisely the undecidability of his work and life that fueled his fame, and his notoriety. That was both cultivated and not; he wrote intensively but sporadically, in between competing distractions. His pithy epigrams, with their tricksy doublings and inversions—some of which were read aloud, in one of the trials that would lead to his "gross indecency" conviction, as evidence of dangerously deviant thought structures, both in content and in form—were deftly engineered for productive perplexity. Yet many of his other works, such as the play Salome, combine hodgepodge conflicting impulses and far-flung influences in a manner indicating less evident design. The same may be said in terms of his career at large: heuristically, he tended [End Page 621] to seize upon what worked, or seemed as if it ought to work, at a given moment, then to move on to the next plan. For over a century, artistic interpreters and critics have labored to impose order upon the chaotic collection of works, traits, and ideologies adherent to Wilde, casting him variously as an Irish radical, an Anglophilic runaway, an ardent socialist, a crass capitalist, an unregenerate elitist, and more. It is a testament to his inconsistency that few can be proven fully wrong or right. Pegging Wilde as anything, at all, is a difficult task. The author of this lively, expansive investigation energetically takes on the challenge, claiming a formative position in the modern canon for Salome, Wilde's flamboyant, hyper-sexual, gory tragedy—first mounted privately in Paris in 1896, while Wilde was in jail—as well as for its seductive, self-actualized eponymous woman protagonist and for the later echoes of the Salome story and character in music, dance, film, and popular culture. The book begins with an argument about the play itself: that "simply looking at Salome in . . . [its] nineteenth-century context disregards [its] truly innovative, subversive, forward-looking features" (16)—features that would form the foundation of a "modernist aesthetics of transgression" through the twentieth century and the first decade of our own (2). It then proceeds to an intricate analysis of the 1905 opera Richard Strauss based on the play, explicating problems of what one critic has discussed as the incongruous conglomeration of Wilde's "delicate" fin-de-siècle text with Strauss's "brutal" modernist score (56). Two following chapters—on Maud Allen's loose 1908 adaptation of the play to modern dance, which led to the sensational Pemberton-Billing obscenity case, and on Russian émigré star Alla Nazimova's 1923 transformation of the play into a cross-gendering, exoticist, bizarre fantasia of a film—provide a great wealth of historical information on fascinating, under-studied phenomena. The final chapter, a look at appearances of Wilde, the play, and the Salome character in popular culture since the 1980s, well traces the ways in which these have come to reflect and to be utilized in discourse surrounding queer and feminist issues in the contemporary age. The book is especially useful as a semi-comprehensive study of modern and postmodern incarnations of the Salome tale and figure. While not all instances are covered—an endeavor handled ably by William Tydeman and Steven Price in their solid reference volume, Wilde: Salome,1 and less so by Toni Bentley in the strenuously salacious Sisters of Salome2—the in-depth analysis accorded those that are covered provides a firm structure for examining related cases. Wilde—who died in 1900 at forty-seven years old, shortly after his release—remains the most iconic...

Patrizia Bettella. The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Patrizia Bettella. The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. University of Toronto Press, 2005.

:The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque

:<i>The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque</i>

BETTELLA, PATRIZIA. The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (Toronto Italian Studies), 2005. viii + 260 pp. 40.00/$60.00. ISBN 0 8020 3926 X

Journal Article Bettella, Patrizia. The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (Toronto Italian Studies), 2005. viii + 260 pp. £40.00/$60.00. ISBN 0–8020–3926–X Get access Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 4, October 2007, Page 470, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm072 Published: 01 October 2007

Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression (review)

Reviewed by: Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression Giuseppe Mazzotta (bio) James Miller, editor. Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression Wilfrid Laurier University Press. x, 566. $85.00 This book, a collection of eighteen essays by a number of different authors, is held together by one thematic concern: the transgressive power of Dante's poetry and vision. The editor, who himself seems to want to transgress the norms of editorial restraint and chooses to contribute rather combative pieces in every rubric of the volume, insists on Dante's will to power as he takes 'audacious steps' in his pursuit of the sacred. Accordingly, the volume is organized as a series of chapters that gloss Dante's 'oltraggio' – his poetics of excess, of stepping over, passing beyond, and, above all, transgressing gender divides. The central point is that Dante [End Page 379] transgresses the official authority of the Church and opens up for debate the Church's doctrines. Such a claim depends on one legitimate premise: the poetic imagination creates history and values. It follows, to say it in the language of Nietzsche, that there is nothing stable or sacrosanct in history and everything is up for grabs. Such a view can be brought back to a common English Romantic vision (Blake and Shelley), but there is nothing transgressive, to be sure, about the idea that the Florentine poet breaks open, questions, and radically redefines the language and moral norms of his time. For years some scholars have debated the ways in which the aesthetic, visionary perspective afforded by the Divine Comedy changes our understanding of ethics (for instance the sins of pride and heresy), or the way the reader is meant to grasp the tragic workings of divine justice itself, or even how it alters and broadens the limitations of Pauline vision. The sequence of paradoxes scanning the last prayer to the Virgin (Paradiso 33) exemplifies Dante's and St Bernard's sense of the inadequacy of all linguistic conventions. Indeed, the representation of Ulysses, the Greek hero who for Dante does not remain in Ithaca after returning from Troy but sets sail past the Pillars of Hercules towards the unknown, has been viewed as the very figure of Dante himself. Like Ulysses' adventure, his imagination shatters the commonplace boundaries of knowledge. One can even say that in Dante's universe of love, to say it in the language of St Augustine (not to mention Benedict xvi's recent first encyclical letter), the foundation of the world lies in love and freedom. Love refuses commandments and is at one with freedom. Appropriately, Dante's Paradiso contains no ethics, in the conviction that ethics would be incongruous in the divine economy. But it does not follow that the reader ought to identify the representations of Hell with Dante's whole vision. There is an ethics in the human world (Inferno and Purgatorio) , where the poet's focus falls on suffering, on the tragic links between suffering and knowledge, on the ways of healing the wounded soul, and in acting out the difficult exercise of the virtues. The remark amounts to saying that the relation between theology (or politics or ethics) and aesthetics is more problematical than is generally believed. What needs to be explored, in effect, is the liminal nature of Dante's poetry; a poetry which, in its constitute ambiguity, forever escapes univocal determinations and counters all literalizations. Understandably, over roughly the last forty years, the hermeneutical challenges for Dante scholars have consisted in answering two key problems: establishing how Dante's fiction of order adapts the forms of transgression, and understanding the farthest-reaching implications of his aesthetic theology. Whether or not these critical positions have been staked before or what is Dante's sense of order is in many ways beside the point. At any rate, it does not matter to the intents of this volume. What matters is not really [End Page 380] scholarship. In truth, however, its editor does articulate his polemical (and correct) views against those scholars (such as Teodolinda Barolini) who 'detheologize' Dante as well as those (such as Charles Singleton) who chain Dante's poem within the strait-jacket...

The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (review)

The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (review)

The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque by Patrizia Bettella

<i>The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque</i> by Patrizia Bettella

Völkerschau, Kannibalismus, Fremdenlegion: Zur Ästhetik der Transgression (1897-1936) by Volker Mergenthaler

596 Reviews Enghaus, the strong self-possessed woman. 'Miinnlichkeit [ist] bei Hebbel etwas zu tiefstFragiles, weil sie nichtwirklich existiert. Sie istnur vorhanden als soziokulturell konstruiertes Verhaltensmuster' (p. I96). Mecky Zaragoza would say: 'I told you so.' EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD HELEN WATANABE-O'KELLY V1lkerschau- Kannibalismus- Fremdenlegion: Zur Asthetik der Transgression (I897-1936). By VOLKER MERGENTHALER. (Hermaea, 109) Tiubingen: Nie meyer. 2005. X+27OPP. ?64. ISBN 978-3-484-15IO9-3. What 'aesthetics of transgression' is supposed tomean in this study is defined on page 236: 'nicht der literarischeUmgang mit dem Phanomen des Ubergangs, nicht die Freisetzung der isthetischen Produkivkrafte angesichts von Ubergangen [. . ], sondern zunachst und umgekehrt die Frage nach dem Poetischen, Rhetorischen, Literarischen, Asthetischen von Transgressionen selbst'. Consequently, the author has selected three cases of transgression which are not in the first instance present in literary representations but in other media of public discourse. In analysing the sources, he identifies the aesthetic potential of the acts themselves, which means he investigateswhether the acts of rule-breaking or deviation fromnorms possess a di mension thatcould be described as setting freeaesthetic energies. He then juxtaposes thediscourse on these acts (in newspaper reports, factual and polemical literature,and other extra-literarymedia) with three literary treatments of related themes and uses one element of these pairings to identify the aesthetic qualities of each of the others. Even thoughVolker Mergenthaler does sowith the explicit intention of understand ing the aesthetic nature (and appeal) of the actual 'cases' of transgression, not their representations, he manages also to bring intomuch sharper focus the aesthetics of the literaryrepresentations of the fictitious transgressions. The pairings of 'cases' and literary 'counterparts' are as follows. First, Peter Altenberg's text 'Ashantee' (I897) about an encounter with the 'actors' in an ethnological exhibition (V6lkerschau) in Vienna isjuxtaposed with the 'case' of the teenage girls fromDresden who absconded from home in 1913 to travelwith the 'Indian' actors of aWild West Show: inboth these instances the sexual implications of the crossing of the dividing-line between spectators and 'actors' is suggested by the device of aposiopesis, and this aposiopesis contains and conveys theaesthetic quality of the act and the literary treatment.Next, Hanns Heinz Ewers's story 'Mameloi' (1907) about a European's participation in Voodoo rituals that involve the drinking of human blood is juxtaposed with the case of Franz Bratuscha, who confessed tohaving killed his own daughter and eaten of her flesh: inboth instances (fictitious account and confession) the allegation was derived from extraneous sources (ethnographic reports) which, according toMergenthaler, cast the two versions as acts of 'dissimulation'; the aesthetic energy thus arises out of casting as genuine a second-hand experience. Thirdly, Ernst Jiinger'sAfrikanische Spiele ( 936), the storyof a young man firstjoining and thenoutgrowing theForeign Legion, isjuxtaposed with the case ofPaul Tromel, mayor of a small town innorthern Germany, who joined theForeign Legion in I913, allegedly in a state ofmental con fusion: in both instances the transgression is seen as an act of self-empowerment in defiance of domestic conventions; aesthetically forJuinger,this step isone of enabling literaryagency or 'Autorschaft' (p. 2 I8 and passim). This entire subject-matter is fascinating and themeticulous interpretations are compelling. What the three themes have in common is their extraordinarily strong presence in themedia around the turn of the twentieth century; Mergenthaler's painstaking reconstruction of the contemporary debates on these subjects in news papers, pamphlets, police reports, and other sources is truly admirable. This work MLR, I02.2, 2007 597 allows him todefine the social and cultural function of thedebates as one of collective self-assurance or self-definition vis-a-vis the extreme, the abhorrent, the unknown. Those readerswho arewilling to read past some high-brow theory and tolerate some convoluted, quotation-soaked, and occasionally rather inflated language will be re warded with a thrillingjourney into a strange and fascinating area of encounter with extremes and with an enhanced understanding of the attraction inherent in under taking, reporting, and fictionalizing such transgressions. NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH FLORIAN KROBB Zwischen Abenteuer,Wissenschaft undKolonialismus: Der deutscheAfrikadiskurs imi8. und I9. Jahrhundert. By MATTHIAS FIEDLER. Cologne: Bohlau. 2005. 30I PP. E34g90. ISBN 978-3-412-I9Io5-4. Since the I990S, postcolonial enquiry inGerman literature,culture...

Book Review: The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque

Book Review: The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque