“Fairy of Light”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Farfan
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
New Women ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
The Uncanny

This chapter focuses on Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance to exemplify the interplay between performer and character as a central aspect of queer modernist performance that was foregrounded through the uncanny qualities of Fuller’s work. Charting Fire Dance from its origins in Fuller’s 1895 version of Salome through to its reworking as a solo and its reappearance in her autobiography, the chapter traces a queer genealogy of uncanny doubles that included Oscar Wilde, Salome, heretical witches, and new women in an incremental layering of queer and feminist resonances that flickered into view through Fuller’s experiment in illuminated dance. The uncanny in Fuller’s work thus emanated from an integral and coproductive relationship between modernist aesthetics and sexual queerness that intersected through her performing body in an intensification of the interplay between character and role, onstage and offstage, and representation and presence that was a crucial facet of queer modernist performance.

“BALLADS IN PROSE”: GENRE CROSSING IN LATE-VICTORIAN WOMEN'S WRITING

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 619-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Independent Contribution ◽  
New Women ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Periodical Publishing

“Oh, it is indeed a burning shame that there would be one law for men and another law for women. I think that there should be no law for anybody” (Beckson, I Can Resist 100). So said Oscar Wilde to a journalist interviewing him in January 1895. And for the first five years of the 1890s, it looked as though the British literary and publishing worlds, at least, were increasingly in accord with this Wildean perspective. Texts challenging the double standard of heterosexual conduct proliferated, even as bold articulations of same-sex desire appeared. At the same time, laws of all sorts that governed the production and consumption of literature seemed to be struck down daily. The three-volume novel declined and, with it, the circulating libraries' law of conforming to Mudie's definition of the reading public's tastes. New Women and other new realists gleefully violated the laws that required fictional narratives to end with marriage or, indeed, to provide some version of closure. In the sphere of periodical publishing, the law demanding that the visual arts be subordinate to words vanished in April 1894 with the first issue of the Yellow Book. The Bodley Head's new quarterly proudly stated that “The pictures will in no case serve as illustrations to the letter-press, but each will stand by itself as an independent contribution” (Stetz and Lasner 8).

The Real Challenge of Plato's Republic

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
Russell E. Jones
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Real Challenge

Glaucon's Challenge at the beginning of Book 2 of Plato's Republic has long prompted interpretive difficulties, due to a misunderstanding of its central aspect. The task of this essay is to correct that misunderstanding, at which point The Challenge can be seen to be as simple and powerful as Glaucon seems to think it is. The Challenge is simple, insofar as it requires Socrates to show that justice is always good, that one is always better off cultivating a just character and acting justly than otherwise (and that's all there is to it). And it is powerful, insofar as Glaucon and Adeimantus provide plausible reasons to think not simply that justice is not always good, but that fully developed injustice is always good.

Reading and Interpreting Variants inCome and Go,Va-et-vientandKommen und Gehen

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Pascale Sardin
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
French Translation ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
Textual Variants ◽  
Insight Into

This paper focuses on textual variants in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen and considers these variants as thresholds (Genette, 1997) into these works. This paper aims to show how Beckett's self-translating process, which was prolonged and complicated in the case of his plays when he directed them himself, produces a number of possible textual confusions, but also how these complications constitute insight into the Beckettian text. Indeed variants and rewritings point to moments in the writing and rewriting process when Beckett met ‘resistant vitalities’ mentioned by George Steiner in After Babel (1975). To illustrate this, I study Beckett's first ‘dramaticule’, Come and Go, by examining its pre-texts, the French translation, and Beckett's production notebooks for Kommen und Gehen. In these texts, I explore the motifs of death and ocular anxiety, as studied by Freud in his famous paper on ‘The Uncanny.’ I show how the Freudian uncanny actually reveals the parodic archaism of Beckett's drama, as a parallel is drawn between the structure of Beckett's play and Greek tragedy. Beckett's sometimes ‘messy’ rewritings in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen served the performing intuitive perception in us of death, an issue explored here through the trope of femininity. Furthermore, comparing Beckett's Come and Go and Va-et-vient makes it easier to see Beckett progressing towards what Deleuze called a ‘theatre of metamorphoses and permutations’ in Difference and Repetition – a monograph published in France the very year Come and Go was first produced (1966).

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