Dalí’s Montaigne

On Essays ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 323-348
Author(s):  
Christy Wampole
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Association ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
The Self ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Walker Evans ◽  
Photo Essay ◽  
Film And Video

This chapter analyses the hybridization of the essay with visual genres such as illustration, photography, film, and video, an emergent tendency throughout the twentieth century that underscores the shared features of essayism and Surrealism. These include the use of a logic of digression and free association, a focus on the inner life of the self, the dismissal of formal strictures, the deployment of sensory perception, memory, intuition, and imagination towards expressive ends, and the reliance on images. Beginning with Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Montaigne’s Essays (1947), the chapter then turns to James Agee and Walker Evans’ collaborative photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Chris Marker’s essay-film Sans soleil (1982), and John Bresland’s video essay Mangoes (2010) in order to pinpoint the shared affinities between essayism and Surrealism.

scholarly journals Introduction: Know Thyself

2018 ◽  
pp. xii-20
Author(s):  
Richard G.T. Gipps ◽  
Michael Lacewing
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Free Association ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Temple

This Handbook examines the contributions of philosophy to psychoanalysis and vice versa. It explores the most central concept of psychoanalysis—the unconscious—in relation to its defences, transference, conflict, free association, wish fulfilment, and symbolism. It also considers psychoanalysis in relation to its philosophical prehistory, the recognition and misrecognition afforded it within twentieth-century philosophy, its scientific strengths and weaknesses, its applications in aesthetics and politics, and its value and limitations with respect to ethics, religion, and social life. The book explains how psychoanalysis draws our attention to the reality of central aspects of the inner life and how philosophy assists psychoanalysis in knowing itself. This introduction elaborates on the phrase ‘know thyself’, the words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, and illustrates the connection between matters philosophical and psychoanalytic in relation to the Delphic command by highlighting their mutual concern with truth and truthfulness.

Protesting the Privilege of Perception

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-227
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Walker Evans

This chapter explores how Hale County, Alabama became an iconic site of documentary representation during the twentieth century and why some its poor black and white residents resisted the attempts of documentarians to turn their private lives into public symbols. The chapter begins by examining the collaboration between two local white documentarians, amateur folklorist and poet, Martha Young and photographer J.W. Otts, who recorded the lives and customs of Hale County’s rural black people in the early 1900s. It focuses on Young’s dialect poems that speak from the perspective of black women who refused to be photographed by whites and who saw photography as an exploitative medium. Next, the chapter demonstrates how this narrative and tradition of resistance to documentary continued during the 1930s. It explores the resistance writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans faced in the 1930s from some of the white tenant families they documented for their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it shows how their descendants often found new ways to resist documentarians and journalists in succeeding decades. These acts of resistance transformed poor black and white residents into actors rather than just icons in the documentary process.

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

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.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

Why Phenomenology?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
The Way

This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure intuition of its subject matter, phenomenology will also be necessarily interpretative and existential. Although phenomenology is limited to what shows itself and therefore cannot pass judgement on the existence of God, it can deal with God insofar as God appears within the activity and passivity of human existence. From Hegel onward, it has also shown itself open to seeing the self as twofold and thus more than a simple subjective agent, opening the way to an understanding of the self as essentially spiritual.

Mock Mockers: Cynicism, Suffering, Irish Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-194
Author(s):  
Ronan McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
Irish Modernism

Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

Langdell Laughs

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-144
Author(s):  
William P. LaPiana
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Teaching Profession ◽  
The Self ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Self Image ◽  
American Law

The amount of ink spilled in consideration of the life, thought, accomplishments, and legacy of Christopher Columbus Langdell is eloquent testimony to the critical role he plays in the self-image of the American law teaching profession. It is both wonderful and astounding, therefore, to find that critical primary sources remained unread and unused at the very end of the twentieth century. Now that Bruce Kimball has brought them to light, we have a more complete view of the man and his thought, one that, not surprisingly, reveals to us someone quite different from the cruelly and crudely caricatured inventor of those twin devices for stifling young minds, the case and Socratic methods.

Towards a Psyche for Psychiatry

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 689-695 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Meares
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
World War I ◽  
William James ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
World War ◽  
The Core

Objective: To draw attention to the absence of a concept of personal existence in standard psychiatric approaches to mental illness. Method: To sketch a shift in Western consciousness which occurred suddenly before World War I, involving a banishment of such notions as self and the awareness of inner life from the discourse of psychiatry, psychology and philosophy, leaving a fundamental vacancy at the heart of these disciplines. Results and Conclusion: The positivist–behaviourist hegemony of the twentieth century involved an implicit devaluation of that which is essentially human. The influence of this tradition brings with it the risk of an understanding and treatment of mental illness which leaves out issues at the core of humanity. I suggest we need to recover something of the manner of thinking of the great figures in psychological thought who were writing before the rise of behaviourism and who were contributing to the origins of dynamic psychiatry. A study of the phenomena of human consciousness was central to their work. Main figures mentioned include: Hughlings Jackson, the great neurologist who considered a career in philosophy; Pierre Janet, a philosopher turned psychiatrist; and William James, a physiologist who became a psychologist and philosopher.

Embodying the Self: Gestures and Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century Germany

2009 ◽  
Vol 203 (Supplement 4) ◽  
pp. 257-279
Author(s):  
M. Fulbrook
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document