I've Got you under my Skin: Narratives of the Inner Body in Cinema and Television

Nuncius ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Brodesco
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Aims Of Education ◽  
Open Ground

Abstract1966 Twentieth Century Fox big-budget film Fantastic Voyage represents a corner stone around which a whole audiovisual trope was built. The topic of the voyage of shrunken people sent to explore the inner space of the body was adopted since then by many feature films, television series and animated TV series, for the aims of education, entertainment or edutainment. While the exploration of the body (and, often, the meeting with its inhabitants) gives space to just a few possibilities of plot development, it leaves open ground for metaphors. Starting from the hypotext, this article analyzes a sample of audiovisuals to try to summarize a taxonomy of narrative schemes and the different metaphors (and their uses) that our body can host.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
World War ◽  
Value System ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Family

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.

Double Affirmation: Medievalism as Christian Apologetic in the Arthurian Poetry of Charles Williams

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-96
Author(s):  
Sørina Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
European History ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
Embodied Theology

In his unfinished cycle of Arthurian poems, Charles Williams developed a totalizing mythology in which he fictionalized the Medieval. First, he employed chronological conflation, juxtaposing events and cultural references from a millennium of European history and aligning each with his doctrinal system. Second, following the Biblical metaphor of the body of Christ, Blake’s symbolism, and Rosicrucian sacramentalism, he embodied theology in the Medieval landscape via a superimposed female figure. Finally, Williams worked to show the validity of two Scholastic approaches to spirituality: the kataphatic and apophatic paths. His attempts to balance via negativa and via positiva led Williams to practical misapplication—but also to creation of a landmark work of twentieth century poetry. . . . the two great vocations, the Rejection of all images before the unimaged, the Affirmation of all images before the all-imaged, the Rejection affirming, the Affirmation rejecting. . . —from ‘The Departure of Dindrane’ —O Blessed, pardon affirmation!— —O Blessed, pardon negation!— —from ‘The Prayers of the Pope’

scholarly journals Vile Sovereigns in Bioethical Debate

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Hall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
Reproductive Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Lecture Series ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Bioethical Debate ◽  
Do So

<p>In this paper, I critically assess transhumanist philosophy and its influence in bioethics by turning to resources in the work of Michel Foucault. I begin by outlining transhumanism and drawing out some of the primary goals of transhumanist philosophy. In order to do so, I focus on the work of Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, two prominent contributors to this thinking. I then move to explicate Foucault&rsquo;s work, in the early iterations of the <em>Abnormal</em> lecture series, on the concept of vile sovereignty. Foucault used the concept of vile sovereignty to critique psychiatric witnesses that had been utilized in mid twentieth-century French courts of law. Turning back to transhumanism, I analyze transhumanist discourse on the basis of Foucault&rsquo;s vile sovereignty. Transhumanists promote human enhancement in a way that rejects the body&mdash;especially the disabled body&mdash;and pose the question of what lives are worth living, as well as attempt to answer it. I conclude that because of the undeserved influence and ableism of transhumanism, it is important for feminist philosophers, philosophers of disability, and other disability scholars, who collide at the nexus of bioethical debate (especially with regard to reproductive technology and the body), to work together to intervene upon transhumanist discourse.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p><p>Keywords: bioethics; enhancement; Foucault; transhumanism; ableism</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Time for Sex

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ishita Pande
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Behavior ◽  
Sex Education ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
The Body ◽  
Clock Time ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Sexuality And Space ◽  
Women In India

This chapter examines attempts to standardize, internalize, and globalize sexual temporality—captured in the conceptualization of the body as clock—in the sexological advice offered to men and women in India in the early twentieth century. It first describes the constitution of “Hindu erotica” during the period and how these English translations gave rise to a set of foundational texts that would become the basis of global/Hindu sexology while filling them up with clock time. It then considers the ways that these texts attached life cycles to the chronological ordering of time by recasting brahmacharya—a prescription for a stage of life devoted to celibacy and learning—as an age-stratified organization of sexual behavior and a schema for sex education. By using the example of bodily temporality, the chapter addresses questions of sexuality and space in relation to globalization and transnational capitalism, colonialism and development.

Dance

2020 ◽  
pp. 274-304
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Pueblo Indian ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Ritual Dance ◽  
The American South

This chapter examines the ways in which Lawrence contributed extensive and innovative literary engagements with dance in the modernist period. Lawrence’s citations of dance are most widely associated with the liberation of the body and identity through early twentieth-century dance practices such as social dance, Greek dance, and the work of Isadora Duncan. Yet, as this chapter explores, Lawrence’s narratives also reflect the aesthetics initiated by the innovations of the Ballets Russes, European Expressionism, and, latterly, the ritual dance of the American South - of Native and Pueblo Indian forms. In his late work Lawrence especially invokes dance experimentally to formulate a new literary critique of a failing European culture.

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