Blinded like a state? Urban sanitation, improvement and high modernism in contemporary Myanmar

2020 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 102255
Author(s):  
Jérémie Sanchez
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie Myers ◽  
Sue Cavill ◽  
Samuel Musyoki ◽  
Katherine Pasteur ◽  
Lucy Stevens
Keyword(s):  

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.


Author(s):  
renée c. hoogland

Considered odd, obscene, a genius nonetheless, at the time she created her best-known works, French photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1950) cuts a particularly unruly figure in literary criticism and art history. Her recalcitrant faux autobiography Aveux non avenus, [Disavowals, or, Cancelled Confessions] (1930), a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages, have encouraged the artist’s association with High Modernism and Surrealism while her photographic self-portraits have been claimed for an affirmative (feminist) gender politics. However, the proliferous and mercurial nature of Cahun’s disavowed confessions and self-stagings defy easy “domestication.” Instead she constructs a continuously shifting configuration of fragments and collages: assemblages of singularities that are always in a multiplicity, in a pack. Escaping dominant forms of expression, Cahun’s work has nothing to do with recognition or imitation, nor does it constitute a relation of representation. The chapter argues instead that Cahun presents us in both her writing and in her photographic work with the successful experience of becoming in the absence of any final term or form. A becoming-animal that moves beyond destruction into the zone of indiscernibility where a work, or, perhaps, an oeuvre comes into view—an oeuvre that nonetheless remains decidedly outlandish.


Author(s):  
Robert Chodat

Literary works since the rise of high modernism have been intensely hostile to abstract generalization, and have focused attention on the unique experience and singular expression. This nominalist impulse—summed up in the cry “show, don’t tell!”—has encouraged a deep wariness toward broad normative concepts: “good,” “bad,” “courage,” “justice,” etc. More than is often recognized, however, this literary skepticism parallels the skepticism toward such concepts in the natural sciences, which accords no place to such abstract “high words” in a world of matter and calculable motions. Against this dual literary and scientific inheritance, the postwar sage offers a “weak realism” about normative concepts and a “reflective” mode of composition: a movement between the particular and the general, art and argument. Such a literary–intellectual project is risky, and opens the sage to charges of sentimentalism. Closely attending to their works, however, suggests that we should avoid entering this protest too quickly.


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