Visual Pleasure Research Articles

오감과 영감을 활용한 감성북 편집디자인 연구

5+1(Five Plus One)은 오감 즉 시각, 청각, 후각, 미각, 촉각과 영감을 주제로 한 시각적 표현의 결과물이다. 오감에 관한 자료를 찾아보았으나 과학적 근거와 다국적 언어들의 인용으로 된 자료들만 무성하였으며 시각적 유희와 감성의 표현으로 이루어진 예술적 표현과는 거리가 먼 서적들이 대부분이었다. 대부분 어린이 지능발달을 위한 교재가 대부분이었으며 학술적 논문과 의학서적들이 주를 이루고 있다. 이에 한글과영문을 혼용하여 가독성의 문제가 있어 이해되지 않은 상황에서도 오감과 영감에 관한 커뮤니케이션이 가능한 감성북을 제작하였다. 연구 결과물은 오감과 영감을 시각화 시키는 작업에 중점을 두었다. 그리고 의미와 각 감각의 이해도를 높이기 위한 기초과학 상식에 입각한 정보디자인의 제작, 각 감각의 시각적 증빙을 위한 실험 등을 구사하였다. 그리고 각 감각을 구체화시키기 위해 사물과 의미 표현을 위한 촬영, 메타포의 활용, 일러스트레이션 타이포그라피에 특히 역점을 두었다. 이러한 실험과 표현 방법을 통하여 제작과정과 그리고 이러한 작업의 결과가 하나의 책으로 완성되어가는 결과물을 연구물로 제시하였다. Five Plus One' is a result of visual expressions on five senses such as the sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Although I searched for the data on five senses, there were only information which was quoted in various languages and scientific bases, and also most of the books written were far from artistic expressions including visual pleasure and emotional expressions. In addition, most materials were mainly textbooks for children's intellectual development, academic papers, and medical publications. Therefore, I made this book that makes us to communicate about five senses and an inspiration even though we have a problem to read writings in both Korean and English. I arranged visual elements using illustrations and typography in various ways based on the scientific evidence.

Vindictive virgins: animate images and theories of art in some thirteenth-century miracle stories

Vindictive virgins: animate images and theories of art in some thirteenth-century miracle stories

“The Language of Pictures”: Visual Representation and Spectatorship in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

“The Language of Pictures”: Visual Representation and Spectatorship in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Amanda M. Greenwell (bio) Phillip Pullman foregrounds the act of storytelling in His Dark Materials, and many critics have explored the thematic and literary implications of its function in his novels.1 Most of these studies discuss oral or written storytelling, but I will investigate an alternate mode of telling and receiving in the trilogy: the visual mode, especially as it functions on the levels of expanding fields of vision and hermeneutics in His Dark Materials. Pullman’s own interest in visual literacy opens the door to this examination: he has collaborated with an illustrator to write a few short graphic novels, the most well-known of which is Spring-Heeled Jack, a reinvention of a popular Victorian penny dreadful; he has also written two essays about picture books and graphic novels (“Invisible Pictures” and “Picture Stories and Graphic Novels”). He made his own illustration debut in His Dark Materials by creating the woodcuts that precede each chapter of the trilogy. Thus, Pullman’s fascination with “the notion that you can tell stories, you can ask and answer questions, and so on, by means of pictures” (“Interview”) drives this study. Pullman’s multiple manifestations of the visual in the novels—by way of images (as with the daemon, the alethiometer, and the spyglass) as well as via modes of visual representation, spectatorship, and acts of visualization—often function as means for character and thematic development in His Dark Materials. The visual literacy advocated by the trilogy emphasizes that learning to recognize the potency of visual texts and to engage in multiple active and curious ways of “seeing” allows the viewer to expand his dynamic interaction with the world around him. [End Page 99] The relationship between the visual and the verbal “sister arts” has been a subject of study from the beginnings of western philosophy and certainly has its roots in far earlier times and cultures. His Dark Materials, in its historical context, employs visual storytelling in ways that draw upon and move beyond a classical study of the sister arts. While the trilogy employs classical elements such as iconography and ekphrasis, Pullman writes in the wake of what W. J. T. Mitchell terms the “pictorial turn,” an occurrence he places during the advent of video and internet technology: [The pictorial turn is] a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or “visual literacy” might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality. (16) Thus, my investigation into visual representation in His Dark Materials indulges the conceptual framework suggested by Margaret Dikovitskaya, who states that “Objects of visual studies are not only visual objects but also modes of viewing and the conditions of the spectatorship and circulation of objects” (64). In the worlds of His Dark Materials, one fundamental condition of active spectatorship is the possession of Dust, the life-force of Pullman’s created universe and the central metaphor for consciousness in the trilogy. It is a physically existent substance, but only in the mode of the visual: at no point does any character touch, taste, hear, or smell Dust. While it is invisible to the naked human eye, more than one character manages to see it. Attempts to see and interpret Dust, or see and appreciate evidence of it in other visual manifestations, drive the action of the entire trilogy—which suggests that Pullman’s work, insofar as it employs this investigation into visual literacy, is largely about the way the human subject chooses to perceive the world around him. The first scene of The Golden Compass foregrounds the visual impact of Dust as well as its mysterious importance in the trilogy. When the story opens, Dust has never been seen by any person in the room (or many outside of it) with the exception of Lord Asriel, who introduces it by...

The Grail, the Quest and the World of Arthur (review)

Reviewed by: The Grail, the Quest and the World of Arthur Don Hoffman Norris J. Lacy , ed. The Grail, the Quest and the World of Arthur. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. Pp. xvii, 214; 54 color illustrations. ISBN: 9–781843–841708. $95.00. It is to be expected that a volume edited by Prof. Lacy would be of the highest quality, and this volume does not disappoint. What is most impressive and appealing about the volume is the degree to which it fulfills its promise to cover the world of Arthur. While the majority of contributors are Americans, the scholarly world is well represented by contributors from Canada, Britain, Brazil, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and Germany (although the number of countries is somewhat skewed since the last three are represented by the surprisingly mobile Richard Trachsler). More impressive and more important than the nationality of the contributors, however, is the wide range of literatures covered: Dutch, German, Occitan, Icelandic, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and others in passing. There is also a diversity of media (film and art as well as literature) and genre (chronicle, history, and annals in addition to narrative). If the world of Arthur seems predominantly a Western world, that is due to the less than universal interest in Arthur (however ubiquitous he may seem to American and British readers). There is, however, some space devoted to the east in Antonio Furtado's study of the Crusaders, who necessarily give us a very European and frequently hostile view of the East. Norris Lacy provides a taut and cogent introduction to the volume limning the contours of a map of the world of 'Arthur and/or the Grail.' Then the topic reaches a high note with Martine Meuwese's 'The Shape of the Grail in Medieval Art,' a rich survey of the surprisingly varied shapes of Grail objects in medieval art. Meuwese carefully distinguishes between actual Grails and Eucharistic utensils often misread as Grails. The shape of the Grail may even vary in illustrations within a single manuscript. Meuwese carefully follows the shape-shifting Grail [End Page 104] from Chretien's dish to Wolfram's rock, to Italy where 'the Grail looks like a flower pot' (27). This essay is the gem of the collection, not only for the impressive mass of material covered with clarity and grace, but for the quantity of beautiful illustrations that accompany it. It is a feast for the eye and a valuable source for a great variety of rare images. If none of the other essays offers the visual pleasure of Meuwese's contribution, they certainly provide a wealth of information and analysis. Since space prohibits my commenting on every essay in the collection, I will discuss only a few of the 'best,' bearing in mind that in this excellent volume the choice of 'best' depends primarily on the interests and expectations of the reviewer/reader and not on any deficiency in the essays not discussed. With that caveat in mind, I would like to single out the contributions of Boardman, Field, Carley, and Barber. In 'Grail and Quest in the Medieval World of Arthur,' Philip Boardman opens with a statement as witty as it is surprising that 'our almost reflexive linking of the two terms, in "Grail Quest," assumes a marriage that, in late medieval England at least, is rocky' (126). Boardman goes on to demonstrate the far from universal linkage of grails (of which there are many) and quests (also fairly numerous) in English literature, and concludes that the English may have been so fond of Sir Gawain, in part because his prowess and courtesy, always tottering, was also tested, and, in part, because he was never lumbered with a Grail. In 'Malory and the Grail,' P. J. C. Field continues to enrich our understanding of Malory by analyzing his discussion of the one of the few actual Grail Quests in English investigating its literary and devotional sources to suggest that the narrator of the Morte Darthur 'seems to stumble into his unique moment of illumination in much the same way as his favorite knight had stumbled into the Grail Chapel, to receive a measure of grace beyond his deserving...

‘Une mine d'or inépuisable’: the queer pleasures of François Ozon's 8 femmes/8 Women (2002)

ABSTRACTWith more than 3.7 million tickets sold in 2002, 8 femmes is prolific director François Ozon's greatest commercial success by far. The film centres on a murder enquiry among eight women snowbound in a rural mansion, one of whom is suspected of having murdered Marcel, the patriarch of the house. Yet, the plot is secondary, functioning simply as a launch pad for a series of high-camp performances among its cast, which includes Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant and Isabelle Huppert. Lesbian desires surface repeatedly, culminating in a now famous embrace between Deneuve and Ardant towards the film's closure. Each actor/character performs a musical vignette which covers French pop hits, including Dalida's ‘Pour ne pas vivre seul’. Moreover, the film fuses the kitsch universe of Agatha Christie-style whodunits with the sharp cynicism of The Women (George Cukor, 1939), the hyperbole of Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodramas, the exuberance of Vincente Minnelli's musicals, and the experimentation of Die Bitteren Tränen de Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972). Consequently, the coalition of themes, performances and cinematographic and popular cultural references indexes a transnational archive invested with queer meaning by some viewing groups. By combining detailed analysis of 8 femmes and its inter/extra-textual allusions with a small-scale qualitative investigation of audience reactions, this article seeks to evaluate the importance of this textual queerness for the film's visual pleasure. Furthermore, it compares viewer responses with the film's critical reception, and considers the extent to which its use of parody and camp questions the view that 8 femmes is one of Ozon's most misogynist films to date.

Quantum of Solace (2008) (review)

Reviewed by: Quantum of Solace (2008) Tobias Hochscherf Quantum of Solace (2008), Directed by Marc Forster. Distributed by MGM and Sony/Columbia Pictures: www.007.com, 106 minutes. The latest James Bond film was eagerly awaited by critics, fans and the public following the media festivities caused by the acclaimed debut of Daniel Craig as 007 two years ago. This time, however, the echo in the press has been varied at most. Many critics argued that Quantum of Solace was based on a thin, sketchy script, that its art house director failed to leave his mark on the film and that it was overtly influenced by the action-packed, fast-paced Bourne films than by earlier 007 films. Moreover, the film was repeatedly accused of lacking many essential elements of the Bond formula -- the absence of "Q" and the usual gadgets (Guardian, November 10), the lack of the series' "traditional sense of humor" (The Sunday Telegraph, November 2), its missing "conversational battles of wit" (The Times, October 30) and last but not least the absence of Monty Norman's signature theme song until the very end of the film (Guardian, October 30). Why all this anger? Much of this disappointment may at least in part be explained by the heightened expectations sparked by the overwhelmingly positive reception of [End Page 77] Casino Royale (2006) and an unmatched marketing and PR-campaign, which made it virtually impossible to escape James Bond in the weeks before Quantum of Solace's release. Yet, much of the critics' and ultimately the audience's discomfort may also be the result of the uncompromising way in which the film continues to reinvent (or "reboot" to use James Chapman's term) the Bond franchise ever since Craig took on the role of Her Majesty's most successful secret agent. Although Quantum of Solace, if seen exclusively by itself, may yield legitimate criticism (perhaps above all the almost complete absence of the series' hallmark representation of British eccentricity) – the film, nevertheless, marks an important moment within the Bond film series in terms of genre and character development. Created as a sequel to Casino Royale, the latest Bond adventure takes up many of the threads from the first Craig Bond film by continuing and cementing the transformation process. In the end, the filmic version of 007 shifted from "gentlemen spy" in the tradition of spy literature (like Erskine Childer's The Riddle of the Sands) or the vast majority of previous Bond films, to more a tough, rugged and uncompromising agent in the tradition of violent hard-boiled detectives. Indeed, the 'new' Bond, who appears to be at once an ambivalent hero, a loner, and a "loose gun," seemingly fits John G. Cawelti's description of the hard-boiled hero as someone who "rejected the ordinary social and ethical pieties and faces a world he has learned to understand as fundamentally corrupt, violent, and hostile." Revolving around the theme of revenge and the tensions between state justice and personal justice, this new Bond universe seems to offer less room for lengthy and snide conversations (such as the many beautifully-scripted conversations between Bond and Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale) let alone romance and bedroom sequences. Owing to the franchise's turn towards a noirish form of cinematic realism driven by action sequences, there is little (or at least far less) orthodox objectification of the two female leads – notwithstanding the understated seduction of the rather unfortunately named Strawberry Fields. In terms of male visual pleasure there are almost no scenes that fetishize the female form or body parts by either elements of mise-en-scène, camera movement or placement (by way of showing figure-hugging dresses, make-up, lips, legs, cleavages, etc.). Having said this, though, there are is also no repetition of the now iconic 'reverse male gaze' of Craig coming out of the sea in Casino Royale. This new Bond, it appears, has no time to spare in his mission to save the world. Although the last Bond film starring Pierce Brosnan, Die Another Day (2002), was popular at the box office and generated a revenue of $432 million, there was certainly a danger of it turning...

America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies

America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies

Editorial

Editorial Drake Stutesman What does a journal today do? This is Framework's 50th issue, merging numbers 1 and 2 into a single 2009 volume. The journal started in 1974, over thirty years ago, in England, as a small publication. Its trail-blazing, far-reaching exploration of international film, its publication of directors' own writing on cinema and on each other, and its reprints of early film theories are fundamental aspects of cinema studies today. There are articles from early issues that impress me still with their desire to look at something anew, such as Werner Herzog's 1976 story "Why Being Rather Than Nothing?"; Laura Mulvey's reanalysis of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1981); Nguyen Khac Vien's take on Apocalypse Now (1981); or Sunila Abeysekera's examination of women in Sri Lankan cinema (1989). Framework 50 reflects less on film than on its huge diaspora: film has left its old country (of being a film) and now appears in cut-up resemblances of itself, video art remakes, or computer PowerPoints, screened in restaurants (as wallpaper), on iPods, and in galleries. Also scattered are the critiques: most journals, e-zines, blogs, websites, and magazines now hazily combine culture and politics, often blurring definitions of expert opinion. Our zeitgeist has a polarizing dynamic. Its almost obsessive return to the past (especially the last fifty years), which can be rigid in its "reassessment" of what it finds there, is offset by the twenty-first century's hard-won open-mindedness about individual rights, allowing what is real just to be itself. In this issue these contradictions are seen through a number of topics: journal editing, cinephilia, feminism, video installation, photography, and [End Page 5] the art of recycling art, such as the technique of "reenactment" found in work as diverse as that of Pithy Rahn, Australian Aboriginal tribes, or Pierre Huyghe. Has cinephilia's potency passed? In what way has film helped feminist thinking, or the thinking of any repressed group, and how has that thinking been coded in films? Does it still need to be coded to survive? What does video art's parasitism of movies and documentaries do (or not do) for film or for art? Why is an old technique such as reenactment, a method used before cinema even began, so currently revitalized? In "Edward Said's Nazareth," Susan Slyomovics, a professor of anthropology, pieces together a photo journey of Said and Nazareth, making a remarkable picture of what can no longer be pictured. E. Ann Kaplan returns to 1970s and 1980s international feminism and the tropes that women covertly and overtly used in their art to analyze their part in society. She places two films side by side, one by Susan Sontag (Brother Carl, SE, 1970) and one by Marguerite Duras (Nathalie Granger, FR, 1972), to see how these two women coincide rather than depart from each other, despite different, almost opposing, intellectual constructs. Donna Casella does something similar in her gloss of scholarly perspectives on the "women's picture" films of Dorothy Arzner. Casella finds that Arzner intended an even greater subversion of the genre than has been previously argued. Bitter and sympathetic, Arzner both despaired of the convention and used it to lay bare women's lives where, Casella argues, little comfort is found. Dudley Andrew's cogent interview with Cahiers du cinéma's then chief editor, Emmanuel Burdeau, combs over the legacy of Bazin and Cahiers and the joys and difficulties, as Burdeau puts it, of "translating the screen." Nevertheless, much as he loves words, Burdeau advocates activism beyond them. He pointed out, in the 2008 New York Film Festival panel on criticism, that Cahiers could be a "dinosaur" if it only remained in the field of writing. Finally, the issue contains two dossiers, on Reenactment and on Cinephilia. In the first dossier, guest editor Jonathan Kahana poses the operative question—"What now?"—showing, through six pieces, how reenactment's old trick has become new. What can it do for us? The same can be asked of cinephilia—What can it do? In the second dossier, guest editors Elena Gorfinkel and Jonathan Buchsbaum ask twelve critics what is at stake in cinephilia...

Dealing with the Blank in Books’ Layout Design

In traditional Chinese painting, blank functions importantly. But it is different from that of a general sense. It is actually the organic component of the whole piece of art work. Blank has a rich expression, making pictures vivid and lively. In the traditional painting and modern layout design, the content is black, that is, the entity. However, it is the blank that is oversensitive. When every entity is put in the position, there must be some blank to adjust the visual intension so that the strain and dynamic can be released and extended. The virtual space is blank-leaving. The blank in the format is not only for the visual pleasure but for an aesthetic realm it creates for readers.

<i>Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics Leon Hunt (bio) Jeffrey Sconce, ed., Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 340pp. US$23.95 (pbk). In the ever-growing terrain of cult film analysis, the study of 'trash', 'sleaze' or (to use Jeffrey Sconce's term) 'paracinema' has enjoyed what some might see as a disproportionate amount of attention, like a licentious peninsula seemingly poised to stage a coup and declare itself capital of Planet Cult. However, given that 'cult' can sometimes collapse too easily and interchangeably into 'trash', there is something to be said for a scholarly collection exploring cinematic 'sleaze' on its own terms. The study of 'trash cinema' is not always a pretty sight (if that is not too much of a tautology), sometimes sliding into unreflexive assertions of the supposedly transgressive politics of watching 'bad films' (particularly academics watching and writing about them). But we are in safe hands here. Sconce is the author of arguably the most influential essay on trash cinema, '"Trashing" the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style' (published in Screen in 1995, it is the 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' of 'bad movie' studies, at least in terms of citational ubiquity), and he has gathered together some distinguished scholars in the field. Eric Schaefer provides a historical account of advertising strategies in US-distributed sexploitation films, focusing in particular on their less-than-flattering construction of their hypothetical (male) audience as sad, lonely 'goons'. Harry M. Benshoff argues that 'homo-military' films such as Reflections in a Golden Eye (Huston US 1967), The Sergeant (Flynn US 1968) and The Gay Deceivers (Kessler US 1969) are as much about the perils of repressing homosexuality as they are about representing queer desire itself as pathological or dangerous. Joan Hawkins examines the 'sleazy pedigree' of Todd Haynes, drawing out his affinity with trash and exploitation cinema. Kevin Heffernan, [End Page 307] in his enjoyable account of the troubled history of Mario Bava's Lisa e il diavalo (Lisa and the Devil; Italy/West Germany/Spain 1973), and its bastardised US theatrical version, The House of Exorcism), manages the impressive feat of remaining outside the daunting shadow cast by Tim Lucas's gargantuan book about Bava (it tells us something about the canon that it is roughly the same size as Taschen's 2008 The Ingmar Bergman Archives, edited by Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius). Tania Modleski offers an ambivalent feminist reading of Doris Wishman, a figure who, as a rare female director with a paracinematic style, might be celebrated as 'bad girl' auteur were it not for the sexual violence in her 'roughies' (violent sexploitation). Modleski values Wishman for challenging the masculinity of trash as a woman who 'expanded the borders of bad taste' (69), even as she critiques the 'traffic in battery' (50) of films such as The Defilers (Frost and Friedman US 1965). Like several writers in the collection, Modleski offers no easy solution to this dilemma, but while she concludes that Wishman-as-feminist-trash-auteur is just not going to work, she is reluctant to leave her to 'the boys' to celebrate condescendingly as some kind of cinematic idiot savant. In fact, Modleski's essay is not the first feminist re-reading of Wishman (Moya Luckett's 'Sexploitation as Feminine Territory: The Films of Doris Wishman', in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis's Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (2003), provides a different and more 'positive' take on her films), but it is nevertheless one of the most striking essays in Sleaze Artists. Sconce's 'Trashing the Academy' drew on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of 'cultural capital' to examine how 'trashophiles' negotiated their cult investments, positioning themselves in opposition both to 'high culture' and an imagined 'mainstream' consumed by the mundane masses. 'Paracinema' transforms trash into a kind of 'counter-cinema', but requires the ingenuity of the fanzine or Internet critics (increasingly joined by trashophiles within the academy) to turn ineptitude into authorial distinction. In his introduction to Sleaze Artists, Sconce seems at first...

Faceblindness, Visual Pleasure, and Racial Recognition: Ethnicity and Technicity in Ted Chiang's “Liking What You See: A Documentary”

Thomas Foster is a professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the author of The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (2005). He formerly served as the director of the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University, where he was also an adjunct professor in the cognitive science program.

‘Just Like Eating Chocolate’: A reflection on China's DV culture

This essay examines the development of DV practices as micro-cinema in China. It calls for a reflection on Chinese screen culture, not simply from the perspective of film studies but also from a cultural studies approach that incorporates Chinese DV practices into popular culture and youth culture analyses. It argues that technological empowerment does not easily translate into artistic and social power. The Internet and the various innovative forms of Chinese micro-cinema, while offering people lightness and evocative visual pleasures, also risk being ‘toned down’ through DV practitioners’ willing and cooperative incorporation by the mainstream and the establishment.

Selling stereoscopy, 1890–1915: Penny arcades, automatic machines and American salesmen

One of the most popular of all nineteenth‐century optical recreations was the stereoscope. Most previous studies, however, have focused on its initial popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, downplaying the fact that stereoscopy enjoyed a significant revival between 1890 and 1914 to the extent that its diffusion in schools, homes and libraries was probably at its greatest. This article explores the way the revival in stereoscopy was fostered by a significant updating of the marketing, distribution and exhibition of stereographs in both public venues and the home. Through examining how large American producers like Underwood and Underwood employed travelling salesmen in Britain and America, it particularly demonstrates the importance of consumption in provincial and rural areas. Underwood’s stereoscopic tours emphasised the stereoscope as a form of rational recreation; however, this domestic consumption was complemented by a proliferation of penny‐in‐the‐slot devices during the 1890s in penny arcades that offered a variety of more salacious visual pleasures. The second half of the article traces the numerous prosecutions that took place around the turn of the century for the exhibition of indecent stereographs in penny arcades, comparing them to the moral panic aroused by the parallel development of the mutoscope.

Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660–1720 (review)

Reviewed by: Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660–1720 Brett D. Wilson Marsden, Jean I. Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660–1720. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. viii + 216 pp. Focusing on the genre of “she-tragedy,” Jean Marsden’s book offers an account of why the British theater of the Restoration and early eighteenth century fixated on the suffering woman as a figure of arousal, sympathy, or condemnation—often, seemingly, all at once. Fatal Desire ably addresses vital theatrical developments during decades typically identified with rakish comedy and heroic tragedy, foregrounding the instrumentality of pathos and the centrality of women to provide a salutary corrective. Fatal Desire begins by situating the 60 years of the subtitle as a period during which onstage women and the emotional effects they raised in their audiences became a “source of cultural anxiety” (5), imperiling both sexual and national virtues. Tracing the Collier controversy over stage profanity and obscenity, Marsden finds unease over moral contagion spreading from lewd play-action to impressionable audiences, principally female spectators. Anti-theatrical polemicists may have found the female gaze threatening—but at least they forthrightly admit its power. In contrast, defenses of the stage by practitioners including Congreve and Vanbrugh consider female theatergoers moved only to decorous emulation, never to desire. Marsden perceives this as a telling overcompensation, evidence that prominent Restoration and early eighteenth-century playwrights disregarded the female gaze and accordingly relied upon voyeurism and objectification of women for their own works’ emotional and [End Page 57] political effects. Marsden subsequently uses comedy to calibrate a baseline for the “problem of the female gaze” (39) in the Restoration-era theater. While the comedies (like The Plain Dealer and The Provok’d Wife) stage characters who indulge their sexual appetites and seize control of the desiring gaze—in order to scapegoat them at worst or reform them at best—the tragedies reconfigure female agency so as to strip away the “aggressive sexuality” (61) and linger over the spectacle of the woman as victim. Marsden’s four next chapters, the heart of her argument, are dedicated to what she dubs “female-centered tragedy.” She discusses in detail works by Otway (The Orphan), Southerne (The Fatal Marriage), and Congreve (The Mourning Bride); the “Female Wits” Trotter, Pix, and Manley; and Rowe (The Fair Penitent, Jane Shore, and Jane Gray). Marsden has read impressively widely in the mode, and her work draws on both the nearly-canonical and the ephemeral, anonymous, and scurrilous. Her admonition to continue narratives of British theatrical history past 1700 is especially well-taken. Fatal Desire extends the insights into the cultural work performed by Restoration and eighteenth-century tragedy offered most recently by Lisa Freeman’s Character’s Theater (2002), which in a key chapter argues that the era’s tragedies omit or contain female agency in order to promote nationalism and bourgeois values, and Cynthia Lowenthal’s Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage (2003), whose discussion of gender, exoticism, and tragedy traces the emergence of transgressive female heroism in the 1690s. Marsden aptly connects the pervasive dismissal of she-tragedy to a perception that its characteristic emotionalism is soft-hearted or girlish. Yet this is not to say that Fatal Desire aims to rehabilitate the often-deprecated she-tragedy. Indeed for Marsden these plays become evidence of a widespread effort to shore up “the stability of English sexual and political culture” (63). In she-tragedy, disorderly women who bring categories into crisis are traded among and displayed by gazing men and finally must be terminated with extreme prejudice. Men are led to watch these tableaux of victimization, especially rape and incest, for vicarious sensual gratification or “visual pleasure”; women are led to sympathize, cry, and become tableaux in turn themselves, heroines becoming both “object of pity and object of desire” (76). As a result, women who desire and women who have been desired are equally consigned to objectification, debasement, and destruction. Rape plots are sensational staples of the Restoration era, but many tragic women incur punishment for their strong and active passions. Isabella in The Fatal Marriage, whose unwitting adultery leads to her demise, speaks what becomes for...

Early Cinema and the Variety of Moving Images

For decades people knew what movies were: huge, illuminated moving images projected on a screen before a seated audience, attractions shown in movie theaters. The screen had a standard shape (slightly wider than a square), and moviegoing involved fairly standard rituals—entering through lobbies into auditoriums with rows of upholstered seats (usually red), the opening of a curtain (again usually red) that concealed the screen, lowered lights during projection, and, in the U.S.A. at least, the consumption of popcorn. While these elements still signify the “movies” to most of us, increasingly they appear as figures of nostalgia, knowingly employed to reference a nearly vanished movie culture (families now microwave popcorn before they gather around a television set to watch a DVD, or revival theaters raise velvet curtains to open their programs). The introduction of commercial television soon after World War II and then the VCR in the 1970s changed a predominantly public act of visual entertainment and consumption into a domestic, intimate event. Curiously, competition with smaller television screens at home also prompted a transformation of screen shape in theaters, stretched to new proportions and a range of shapes, from nearly twice as wide (the standard shape adopted in the mid-1950s) to the more-than-twiceas-wide ratio of the various anamorphic forms of Cinemascope and Panavision. Thus film in the 1950s became simultaneously larger and smaller, more spectacular and more intimate, offering a range of cinematic experiences. But if recent transformations in viewing seem radically different from the classical Hollywood film era, they should also remind us that it took some time for the movies to emerge even after motion pictures were invented. Furthermore, during most of film history ways of viewing and displaying motion pictures other than the “movie theater” also existed. Pictures that moved first became commercialized in the nineteenth century as educational toys for curious children, and the earliest photographic motion pictures on celluloid resembled these toys more than theatrical movies. Thomas Edison’s first commercial motion pictures were displayed through the Kinetoscope (“the viewer of motion”), a peepshow device into which a single viewer peered to see short films of dancers, acrobats, or May Irwin and John Rice’s famous stage kiss. Edison had been working on the Kinetoscope since 1888, and it appeared commercially in urban centers in 1894 as rows of coin-operated machines that offered viewers a brief dose of visual pleasure and technical novelty, one by one. The Kinetoscope provided a glimpse into a miniature world, recalling the noncinematic peepshows of eighteenthand nineteenth-century fairgrounds and the stereoscope viewer found in Tom Gunning

Sade's Theatre: Pleasure, Vision, Masochism

This first full-length study in English to examine the marquis de Sade’s theatre will be of interest to all those working in eighteenth-century drama and theory of spectatorship. Attentive to eighteenth-century dramatic theory and practice, this book also borrows from psychoanalysis and film theory to argue that his plays offer a model of visual pleasure that is masochistic in nature.

Dynamic Splendor: The Wall Mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč (review)

Reviewed by: Dynamic Splendor: The Wall Mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč Elizabeth S. Bolman Ann Terry and Henry Maguire Dynamic Splendor: The Wall Mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč, 2 vols. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007 Pp. xxvii + 429; 300 illustrations. $95. Ann Terry and Henry Maguire make a formidable team as is attested by this impressive two-volume publication on the Justinianic mosaics in the Cathedral of bishop Eufrasius at Parentium (Poreč, Croatia). They have derived a truly extraordinary amount of information from a careful, tessera-by-tessera examination of the mosaics. While they focus principally on subjects such as evidence for a sixth-century date for the mosaics, conservation interventions, and methods of work, historians of the late ancient Mediterranean and of religion will find much here of interest. Terry and Maguire subtly examine the relationships between patronage, doctrine, artistic materials, and images. Beautifully and extensively illustrated with color photographs of the mosaics in the basilica together with a generous number of comparanda, this book recuperates for scholars a major, long ignored monumental program. The usefulness of the mosaics in the Basilica of Eufrasius for our understanding of art in the Justinianic period has long been doubted because of their restoration. Terry and Maguire's greatest contribution is their meticulous evaluation of both the conservation history of the monument and the physical evidence, which leads them to the convincing conclusion that most of the mosaics are original. In the body of the text, in an appendix, and in documentary drawings, they clearly identify original and restored areas, distinguishing as well between sixth-century iconographic elements and new ones imposed during the three phases of conservation (one early eighteenth- and two late nineteenth-century). In the first two chapters, the authors present the lively history of the mosaics and the politics of restoration. In chapter 3 they demonstrate the unambiguously close ties between the mosaics and sculpture at Poreč and Ravenna, persuasively establishing a date of ca. 550 for the former. In chapter 4, "Mosaic Artistry in Sixth-Century Poreč," they brilliantly explain the subtle and complex working method and style of the mosaics. Some of their analysis is so unusual that it calls for elaboration here. For example, they show that the rarest and smallest of the tesserae were used for the face of Eufrasius with a descending hierarchy next including the faces of the Virgin Mary and Christ. Tesserae made with inexpensive materials, such as limestone and brick, were used with greater frequency in [End Page 127] the side apses. Through an examination of materials and techniques they deduce that the artists completed the central apse first, then moved to the northern, and finally southern apses. They also consider such subjects as texture, light, color, composition, the movement of spectators, and "visual pleasure" (95) as components of an historically specific aesthetic. Most publications of mosaics include extensive analysis of iconography with little or no consideration of style and rare treatment of materials. Terry and Maguire have effectively done the opposite, of necessity in this case because of the need to establish which parts of the mosaics (material and iconographic) are original. As is indicated by the subjects they examine in chapter 4, it is apparent that they have extracted considerably more information from this close study than which parts of it are original. Additionally, in chapters 5 and 6 they address iconography and iconology, evaluating the subjects depicted and assessing their significance. In chapter 6 they pay the greatest attention to the relationship between the iconography and its immediate historical context, considering, for example, specific features in the mosaics in light of the Three Chapters Controversy and ideas about the Trinity. They are even able to ascribe meaning to materials and to ubiquitous subjects such as shells, explaining that the shells interspersed with mother of pearl roundels not only add to the beauty of the work for the late antique beholder with their varying lustrous qualities and colors but also contribute to the significance of the program by representing the Virgin's womb (the shell) and Christ (the pearl). I find one aspect of chapter 6 problematic, and that is...

Postapartheid Publics and the Politics of Ornament: Nationalism, Identity, and the Rhetoric of Community in the Decorative Program of the New Constitutional Court, Johannesburg

Focusing on the new Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, South Africa, this article considers the role that the architecture of public buildings, and more particularly the decorative programs in these public buildings, are playing in constructing the national imaginary of unity in diversity in contemporary South Africa. It proceeds from the understanding that architectural ornament, far from being merely an elaboration of the appearance of the building for the sake of visual pleasure, is in fact central to the way in which a building can carry social meaning. Ostensibly innocuous, certainly unthreatening (these ideas, after all, are implicit in the definitions of decoration and as essentially superfluous—indulgent afterthoughts to the serious business of structure), architectural ornament provides fixed points of reference for connecting a building with notions of place. It enters into the debate around the beliefs and perceptions that constitute citizens' longings for the tangible proof of identity—of being in the world—afforded by the fantasy of an inalienable sense of place. The architectural solutions that the Constitutional Court and other recent examples discussed in the article offer are fairly modest, but their decorative programs are consistently driven by the need to establish a rhetoric of community. They enable a shift in the discourse of public architecture—away from staid notions of civic decorum and conventionalized grandeur, and toward open-endedness, inclusivity, and a sense of a deliberate playing with the elements and expectations of public space in relation to notions of individualized and personal place. They thus raise interesting questions, around not only the notion of constructing, both literally and metaphorically, imagined communities (to use Benedict Anderson's phrase), but also the centrality of visual experience to urban experience in the construction of postcolonial, urban identity in post-apartheid South Africa.

Aesthetic Embarrassment: The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism

Aesthetic Embarrassment:The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism Linda M. Austin The late twentieth-century indictment of tourism in Britain and America, launched almost half a century ago by Daniel J. Boorstin, has focused on the industry's embrace of simulation and its tendency to transform everything in its field into, as Jonathan Culler has written, "a sign of itself, an instance of a cultural practice."1 The suspicion of the tour as an inauthentic experience is at least two centuries old, however, and has guided the development of tourism as middle-class recreation since the start of the nineteenth century.2 Inevitably this suspicion affected the aesthetic experiences of tourists themselves. The idea of travel as an exercise in the individual cultivation and display of distinctive taste induced discomfort, even self-contempt, among those of moderate means who were eager to emulate their aristocratic predecessors and develop artistic appreciation and connoisseurship. They suffered from "touristic shame," to use John Frow's words; and their shame educed what Dean MacCannell has called a "rhetoric of moral superiority."3 Although this rhetoric privileged romantic conditions such as authenticity and autonomy, it depended on prestigious aesthetic codes to structure individual experiences. It is the self-conscious and often hapless deployment of these codes in the second half of the nineteenth century that I shall examine. Not only were the codes regularly undermined, but their users were frequently embarrassed. This usually occurred in one of two ways: either the material circumstances of tourism desublimated the aesthetic code of a tourist's consumption or the viewer's efforts to encounter the new and to defamiliarize the customary lapsed into a dependence on a familiar (and shunned) visual paradigm, that of the picturesque. The precariousness of the nineteenth-century tourist's visual pleasure is blatant in the prosaic accounts of ordinary persons in unfamiliar settings; but it is noticeable as well in the records of practiced writers on native ground. When Richard Jefferies, renowned in the second part of the century for his contributions to a literature of English [End Page 629] husbandry and rural life, composed the three travel essays he later collected for The Open Air (1885), he concentrated on the Victorian tourist's sedulous and frustrating efforts to isolate himself from other excursionists and to elevate his observations into an almost abstract formalism. Likewise, John Davidson, a journalist too, as well as a poet—and one, moreover, on the fringes of avant-garde circles of the nineties—remained uncomfortably aware of the obstacles to his pursuit of aesthetic pleasure and legitimacy while on his walking-tours of the Chiltern Hills and the environs of London. A collection of his sketches entitled A Random Itinerary (1894) records the ambitious traveler's efforts to avoid the vapidity of sightseeing and elevate it into an art of description allied with contemporary trends in aesthetic appreciation and the production of the lyric. Written by men of known cultural competence and easily linked to their own travels, these texts exhibit the aspirations of many ordinary travelers who were eager to elevate their tourism not simply into memorable moments but into legitimate ones linked to elitist modes of production and consumption. In recording their embarrassments, the following pages historicize the conflict between the physiological apparatuses of enjoyment and the contemporary aesthetics of authority and prestige. I. Richard Jefferies, Connoisseurship, and Touristic Shame In his reverent study of the writing, and countryside, of Jefferies, published 22 years after his death in 1909, Edward Thomas declared his subject a romantic observer who "was clearly as much of the soil as the things which he described."4 More than a half-century later, Raymond Williams read Jefferies' nature and field studies, as well as his commentaries on the condition of agriculture, as illustrations of "green language," a term he borrowed from John Clare's "Pastoral Poesy" (1832) to illuminate the social and political dilemma of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers who had not profited from improvements in agriculture and tourism. The attention of "green language" to the weather, lighting effects, birds, and botanical life reflected the lonely imaginations of its users and registered, as Williams...

Special Section: Pleasure in Mind

After a brief introduction to Silvan Tomkins, the man and his work, the interdisciplinary reach of Tomkins' theory of affect is demonstrated here in a collection of articles illustrating how affective engagement intertwines inner and outer reality. Susan Best rescues the `pleasure in looking' from renunciation, consolation or a voyeuristic, suspect visual pleasure, and revitalizes aesthetics using Tomkins' conceptualization of affects, interest and joy. These affects suspend the viewer between objectification and identification, as interest leaves the art as object, while joy renders it a source of communion. Adam Frank demonstrates how lingering unspoken affective memory—bodily memory—uncannily shapes our negotiations with the environment, via skills or taboos: skills which remain as phantom `nervy guesses' as to where a lost limb might have been; or taboos on looking limiting our visual pleasure. Doris McIlwain rezones pleasure, renews the promise of drive theory and maps how even transient affective states (or gaps in affective experience) become enduring personality dispositions promoting cascading developmental constraints regarding what we can feel about, and do to, ourselves and others.