Black Beauty Shame: Intensification, Skin Ego and Biopolitical Silencing

Chapter Five pays special attention to writer-director-actor Larry Semon, who transformed the company's approach to comedy from reality-based characters and situations to absurd, frenetic slapstick. This resulted in Semon emerging as Vitagraph's biggest box office star of the 1920s. The popularity of Western-themed serials is covered, as is the rise of Corinne Griffith in becoming Vitagraph's leading female star. Two of the company's most critical and popular successes, Black Beauty and Captain Blood, are considered in depth. Albert Smith's battles with Adolph Zukor, whose initial efforts to "smash Vitagraph" are covered in the previous chapter, culminate here with Vitagraph's decision to bring suit against Paramount for violation of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which is analyzed in detail. Related is Vitagraph's withdrawal from the MPPDA and its criticism of president Will Hays as a shill for Paramount. The chapter concludes with Smith's decision to sell Vitagraph to Warner Bros. in 1925.

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The Infancy of Affection

Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198856986.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 67-105

Author(s):

Alexander Freer

Keyword(s):

Human Development ◽

Early Life ◽

Skin Ego ◽

Psychoanalytic Writing

Chapter 2 considers Wordsworth’s accounts of very early life and its passions, from early drafts of the poem that would become The Prelude to the 1807 ‘Ode’. It reads Wordsworth’s poems as ambivalent narratives of human development, placing them alongside related accounts of genesis and individuation in psychoanalytic writing and criticism. It puts Wordsworth’s poetics of infancy into dialogue with Didier Anzieu’s tactile account of an early ‘skin ego’ and Mutlu Konik Blasing’s developmental theorization of lyric. In this context, Wordsworth’s poems resist normative narratives of development, and testify to a kind of early pleasure spread so widely that it becomes an inseparable element of perception itself, suggesting a formative role comparable to (but pointedly at odds with) psychoanalytic accounts of an ‘original’ trauma.

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