Uncanny Encounters

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-140
Author(s):  
Michael Davidson

The emergence of affect theory has returned the body to cultural theory by stressing the phenomenological impact of bodies on other bodies. Chapter 6 opens with a reading of Baudelaire’s “Une Passante” that offers one such instance. Despite its emphasis on what Lauren Berlant calls the “messy dynamics of attachment,” affect theory has not attended to disability where the encounter with the non-traditional body incites emotions of anxiety, confusion, and in some cases solidarity. This chapter explores a structure of feeling around dynamic historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through works by Sigmund Freud, Frank Norris, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Toomer. Each illustrates stages in what Sara Ahmed calls “dramas of contingency” by which world historical changes are registered through quotidian moments of attention and confrontation. These stages mark a trajectory in the novel, from Realism and Naturalism to the modernism of Woolf and Toomer.

Author(s):  
Michael Davidson

Invalid Modernism contributes to an intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at aesthetics through non-conforming bodies and minds. It also offers an intersectional understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor, and welfare. Readings of texts by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, F. T. Marinetti, Jean Toomer, an opera by Alexander Zemlinsky, and paintings and constructions of Dadaists and Surrealists are set against historical developments in sexology, medical discourse, and eugenics and anthropometry. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but this challenge has often been enabled by shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the eighteenth century modern aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a private sensory response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. By looking at modernist aesthetics through a disability optic, Invalid Modernism attempts to restore the missing body to aesthetic discourse through figures marked by medical discourse of the period as “invalid” subjects.


2019 ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Michael Davidson

The opening chapter discusses representations of the aesthete and convalescent as seminal figures in the late nineteenth-century formation of modernist art and literature. Unlike the more fashionable treatment of disease in the Victorian period, embodied often in the figure of the female invalid, modernist representations of disease or illness were more likely to be considered pathological, subject to increasing medicalization, diagnosis, and incarceration. The figures of the male aesthete and convalescent offer a more transgressive model to ideals of health and improvement by which modernity is measured. This figure was, not insignificantly, formative in the appearance of the sexual other or “invert” in sexological research. By looking at several writers—Friedrich Nietzsche, John Addington Symonds, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—this opening chapter seeks a correlation between the aesthetic and the body, between autonomy and contagion.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 05-18
Author(s):  
José Luiz Passos

The article discusses the premise behind binding literary value to the ability a work has to yield socio-historical information, prevalent in recent criticism on Machado de Assis. It argues that the body of Machado's work shows an increasing ambivalence regarding the links between imagined lives and history, thus proposing that in his late writings the matching between things real and things represented is a rhetorical and melancholy gesture of great insight. In order to illustrate the prevalence of moral imagination as object and technique in Machado's late novels, the author highlights a few points of contact between Machado de Assis and Henry James, contemporaries and akin in their literary sensibilities.


2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-125
Author(s):  
Apoorva Singh ◽  
Nimisha

: Skin cancer, among the various kinds of cancers, is a type that emerges from skin due to the growth of abnormal cells. These cells are capable of spreading and invading the other parts of the body. The occurrence of non-melanoma and melanoma, which are the major types of skin cancers, has increased over the past decades. Exposure to ultraviolet radiations (UV) is the main associative cause of skin cancer. UV exposure can inactivate tumor suppressor genes while activating various oncogenes. The conventional techniques like surgical removal, chemotherapy and radiation therapy lack the potential for targeting cancer cells and harm the normal cells. However, the novel therapeutics show promising improvements in the effectiveness of treatment, survival rates and better quality of life for patients. Different methodologies are involved in the skin cancer therapeutics for delivering the active ingredients to the target sites. Nano carriers are very efficient as they have the ability to improve the stability of drugs and further enhance their penetration into the tumor cells. The recent developments and research in nanotechnology have entitled several targeting and therapeutic agents to be incorporated into nanoparticles for an enhancive treatment of skin cancer. To protect the research works in the field of nanolipoidal systems various patents have been introduced. Some of the patents acknowledge responsive liposomes for specific targeting, nanocarriers for the delivery or co-delivery of chemotherapeutics, nucleic acids as well as photosensitizers. Further recent patents on the novel delivery systems have also been included here.


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