Disciplining , Animalizing Ambition

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Osterweis
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Control ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Alter Ego ◽  
Darren Aronofsky

By paying particular attention to the role of the dancing body inBlack Swan(2010), this chapter interrogates the status of virtuosity and performance in a film that insists on the horror of transformation.Swan Lakeis significant in dance history for introducing thefouettéturn, the modern mark of female virtuosity in ballet from the late nineteenth century onward. Director Darren Aronofsky relies upon filmic techniques to invoke the dismantling effects of ballet technique, demonstrating how the pursuit of virtuosity narrates a story of the attainment, surpassing, and failure of technique. He does so by drawing upon lowbrow “body genres” (Linda Williams) to depict an otherwise highbrow art form.Black Swanportrays artistic ambition through a ballerina’s (and Odette/Odile’s) erratic transformation from human to animal. Mirroring, doubling, and reversibility (Vivian Sobchack) are tropes for Nina (Natalie Portman) and her alter-ego. Embodied by Nina and Lily (Mila Kunis), self andotherperform a necessarily entangled pas de deux, one in which the seemingly perfect image of the other simultaneously haunts and motivates the dancer, a figure for whom psychological control diminishes as artistic control accrues.

scholarly journals Debating Scientific Medicine: Homoeopathy and Allopathy in Late Nineteenth-century Medical Print in Bengal1

2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinjini Das
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Systems ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
Medical Journals ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Print Market

AbstractThe historiography of medicine in South Asia often assumes the presence of preordained, homogenous, coherent and clearly-bound medical systems. They also tend to take the existence of a medical ‘mainstream’ for granted. This article argues that the idea of an ‘orthodox’, ‘mainstream’ named allopathy and one of its ‘alternatives’ homoeopathy were co-produced in Bengal. It emphasises the role of the supposed ‘fringe’, ie. homoeopathy, in identifying and organising the ‘orthodoxy’ of the time. The shared market for medicine and print provided a crucial platform where such binary identities such as ‘homoeopaths’ and ‘allopaths’ were constituted and reinforced. This article focuses on a range of polemical writings by physicians in the Bengali print market since the 1860s. Published mostly in late nineteenth-century popular medical journals, these concerned the nature, definition and scope of ‘scientific’ medicine. The article highlights these published disputes and critical correspondence among physicians as instrumental in simultaneously shaping the categories ‘allopathy’ and ‘homoeopathy’ in Bengali print. It unravels how contemporary understandings of race, culture and nationalism informed these medical discussions. It further explores the status of these medical contestations, often self-consciously termed ‘debates’, as an essential contemporary trope in discussing ‘science’ in the vernacular.

Moulin Rouge! and the Undoing of Opera

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-282
Author(s):  
MINA YANG
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Love Triangle ◽  
Musical Elements

AbstractWhile Moulin Rouge! (2001) riffs on and even exaggerates conventions from classic Hollywood backstage musicals, it owes a clear debt to an even earlier musico-dramatic genre – the opera. Combining operatic and film musical elements with those of pop videos, contemporary cinema and the rave scene, Baz Luhrmann's film engages with many of the thorny issues that have concerned opera critics of late, such as power, gender, exoticism, authorship, and identity construction and performance. The spotlight on the central love triangle of a consumptive courtesan, a writer and a wealthy patron makes possible a deeper scrutiny of traditional gender roles in the production and reception of Western art. The film's formulaic plot and the backstage musical format render transparent the commercial impetus behind the creative process and demystify the role of the Romantic artist-genius. Finally, the transnational and transhistorical elements of the film – a mostly Australian production team and crew, American and British pop songs, a Parisian backdrop, the Bollywood-inspired show-within-a-show, numerous anachronisms that refuse to stay confined within the specified time setting of the late nineteenth century – disrupt the Classical ideals of artistic unity and integrity and suggest new postmodern geographies and temporalities. This article considers how Luhrmann, by simultaneously paying homage to and critiquing operatic practices in Moulin Rouge!, deconstructs and reinvents opera for the postmodern age.

scholarly journals Could Southern Italians Cooperate? Banche Popolari in the Mezzogiorno

2000 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian A 'Hearn
Keyword(s):  
Southern Italy ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Robert Putnam ◽  
Cooperative Banks ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Performance ◽  
North And South

Recent work by Robert Putnam has revived a contentious debate about the role of culture in Italian regional disparities. Southern Italy is argued to have been locked in an impoverishing, no-trust equilibrium. This article explores an apparent exception to Putnam's historical evidence: the South's late-nineteenth-century cooperative banks (banche popolari). Econometric investigation reveals important differences in the strategy and performance of these banks in North and South during the crucial decade of the 1890s, and shows that these differences cannot be attributed to differences in the local environment. In fact, the evidence is broadly consistent with Putnam's hypothesis.

Native American Expressive Arts

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anya Montiel
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Native Art ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Impact

Opening with the life and art of Dakota artist Oscar Howe, the chapter discusses the “Indianness” of Native art and the frustrations experienced by Native artists over the years surrounding their creative expressions. The chapter is arranged chronologically, opening in the late nineteenth century and highlighting sample exhibitions, artworks, and artists from the United States in order to illustrate broad conceptual issues. These include Indian authenticity and identity, differences between fine art and “crafts,” traditional versus contemporary art forms, the role of the arts in economic development, and the impact of federal power on the arts. The chapter draws examples from painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance art. It concludes with a proposal for understanding Native art inspired by the words of Santa Clara artist Rose Simpson.

scholarly journals Cinema And Society In The Light Of Emile Zola’s Naturalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Hossein Shahin Karbalaeetaher
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Messages ◽  
The Relationship

This study will seek to discuss the essential impact of Emile Zola’s naturalism regarding the role of cinema in projecting social issues. To be clear on how cinema has got involved with social issues and has become an effective art form for distributing social messages and encouraging social changes, this study first will give a detailed historical background on the relationship between cinema itself and society. Then, it will elaborate on Emile Zola's naturalistic literature role as the first serious endeavors to raise social awareness through art and literature in the late nineteenth century. Finally, this study will focus on the first cinematic movement with an emphasis on the depiction of the working class' real life and revealing inequalities and injustices in a society based on Zola’s naturalism. 

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

‘Our passion for legality’: international law and imperialism in late nineteenth-century Britain

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
CASPER SYLVEST
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Congo Free State

AbstractThis article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.

Adventism, Apocalyptic, and the Cause of Liberty

1994 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-249
Author(s):  
Douglas Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conservative Protestantism ◽  
Late Nineteenth

“I have felt like working three times as hard as ever since I came to understand that my Lord was coming back again,” reported revivalist Dwight L. Moody, the most prominent of nineteenth-century premillennialists. Moody's testimony to the motivating power of premillennialism points to the crucial role of that eschatology in conservative Protestantism since the late nineteenth century—a role delineated by several studies within the past twenty-five years. As a comprehensive interpretation of history which gives meaning and pattern to past, present, and future, and a role for the believer in the outworking of the divine program, premillennialism has been a driving force in the fundamentalistand evangelical movements.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document