scholarly journals Decisions about the Beauty of Lithuania in Jean Mauclère’s 'Sous le ciel pâle de Lithuanie'

Literatūra ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 46-53
Author(s):  
Genovaitė Dručkutė

Drawing on the theoretical premises of imagology and geocriticism, the article analyzes the aesthetic experience of the traveler who traverses Lithuanian cities (Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda), walks across small towns, stops over in villages, and makes his way to the seaside. The local aesthetic identity of the newly discovered country, i.e. its beauty and/or loathsomeness, is revealed by the author Jean Mauclère through a few perspectives: on the one hand, it is the beauty of nature, folk and professional art (architectural exteriors and interiors, fine arts, music), the physical type of Lithuanian men and women. This identity, as Mauclère suggests, reveals itself in the contexts of local history, traditions and culture. Although the author seeks to remain objective in his description of his new aesthetic experience in Lithuania, he remains a representative of his own French culture and its traditions nonetheless. On the other hand, he underlines the otherness of the novelty of his experience.

Author(s):  
Johannes Riquet

Drawing on (post-)phenomenological and geopoetic perspectives, the introduction explains the book’s interest in considering islands at the intersection of material and poetic production on the one hand, and aesthetic experience of the phenomenal world on the other. It suggests that the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space, and that fictional and non-fictional representations of islands negotiate these perceptual challenges. It thereby explains how The Aesthetic of Island Space complicates the common account of islands as discrete shapes, geometrical abstractions, and easily understandable images. Instead, it foregrounds the importance of water, mobility, and a range of dynamic geo(morpho)logical and poetic processes in the figuration of islands. The introduction ends by discussing the significance of considering islands in relation to an ‘aesthetics of the earth’ (DeLoughrey and Handley) and a poetics of the material world.


Art Scents ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 255-260
Author(s):  
Larry Shiner

In this final part of the book we turn to three areas of aesthetic practice that raise unavoidable ethical as well as aesthetic issues. If we are to do justice to both the aesthetics and ethics of scenting bodies, places, and foods, we will need an understanding of aesthetic experience and judgment that goes beyond views of aesthetics based primarily on the appreciation of the fine arts. On the one hand, not even all fine artworks have been meant to be experienced purely aesthetically, but also to engage us morally, religiously, or politically. On the other hand, aesthetic experience itself has always been concerned with nature, design, and everyday life in addition to the arts. Although Kant’s aesthetic was framed with nature as well as the arts in mind, from Hegel down into the late twentieth century philosophical aesthetics focused most of its attention on the fine arts. But thanks to the pioneering work of Ronald Hepburn, Arnold Berleant, Allen Carlson, and others, the aesthetics of nature has received increased attention in recent decades. We will consider some of this work in a later interlude on smell in nature. In the case of design and everyday life, which will be the main concern of ...


2016 ◽  
Vol 106 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ábel Tamás

ABSTRACTThis article argues for a ‘reciprocal intertextuality’ between Catullus 64 and Lucretius anticipating the poetic interplays of Augustan poets with theDe Rerum Natura. Catullus’ wedding guests (proto-readers), Ariadne (proto-Narcissus), and Aegeus (proto-Dido) are interpreted here aserrantesin the Lucretian sense: through their erroneous gazes presented in Poem 64, they all exemplify hownotto gaze at the structure of the universe. In the Lucretio-Catullan intertextual space — generated, as it seems, by the Catullan text — a reciprocal way of reading emerges: while, on the one hand, ‘Catullus’ uses ‘Lucretius’ to show that the aesthetic experience he offers is dependent upon an erroneous, unLucretian gaze/reading which deprives us of the external spectator position, ‘Lucretius’, on the other hand, uses ‘Catullan’ characters as deterrent examples in order to teach us hownotto submerge in ‘Catullus’ poetics of illusion’.


2002 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Laura María Lojo Rodríguez

In the midst of the terror waged on Europe by Nazi demonstrations of power and racial extermination Virginia Woolf published a most contrevorsial short story -"The Duchess and the Jeweller" (1938)- which was originally entitled "The Duchess and the Jew" but was changed at the request of Woolf's American publisher for its racist connotations. The story has been neglected by the critics on account of two major reasons: on the one hand, it does not partake of those innovative narrative devices that most of Woolf's fiction presents; on the other such an apparently Anti-Semitist piece of work is inconveniently at odds with the oeuvre of a writer who so ardently and energetically rejected Fascism in her pamphlet Three Guineas which was curiously simultaneous in date of composition and publication to "The Duchess and the Jeweller". Despite the fact that Woolf may have been airing her personal prejudices of race and class in the characters of Oliver Bacon and the Duchess of Lambourne, the present paper does not aim to do away with such incoherence, ambivalence and contradiction, but rather focuses on the jewel imagery which structures the narrative and which addresses questions such as the 'art for art's sake' doctrine versus the material commodity of beauty


Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-56
Author(s):  
Christian Schmitt

Abstract The discrepancy between common temporary expectations of Switzerland as idyll on the one hand, and the reality of its industrially organized tourism on the other, imposes irritations upon the touristic gaze. This article, then, traces the origins of this discrepancy and examines the relationship between Swiss idyll and tourism in the 19th century. The analyses of Ida Hahn-Hahn’s Eine Idylle and Hans Christian Andersen’s Iisjomfruen showcase different ways of relating idyll and tourism to one another as well as the aesthetic merit produced by this constellation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-394
Author(s):  
Emelia Quinn

When we encounter the work of Grinling Gibbons, we find ourselves in the presence of multiple non-human animals. However, it is unclear how one should address these presences. On the one hand, for ecofeminist scholars such as Josephine Donovan, the aestheticization of animal death is to be vehemently resisted and the embodied presence of animals recovered by looking beyond the surface: a mode of looking that Donovan terms ‘attentive love’. On the other hand, a re-reading of the philosophical ideas of Simone Weil, upon which Donovan premises her argument, suggests that attention to others requires a mode of radical detachment. These two positions speak in important ways to the dilemmas faced by a vegan spectator. Drawing on Jason Edwards’s previous work on ‘the vegan viewer’, this article seeks to reconcile a vegan resistance to Gibbons’s depictions of animal death, in their spontaneous falling under human dominion, with the aesthetic pleasure generated by Gibbons’s craftmanship. I therefore propose ‘vegan camp’ as a means of reconciling oneself to insufficiency and complicity in systems of violence without renouncing pleasure. Vegan camp is detailed as an aesthetics that acknowledges the violence of humanity and one’s inescapable place within it, dissolving the subjective idea of the beautiful vegan soul to pay attention to the pervasive presence of an anthropocentrism that, in the case of Gibbons, decoratively adorns the sites at which animals might be eaten, worn, or offered up for sacrifice.


Author(s):  
Thomas Johansson

The article deals with the gender ideals cultivated within contemporary fitness and gym culture - in particular the paradoxical features of this culture. On the one hand, traditional gender ideals are maintained and strengthened; on the other hand, there is a development towards an androgynous ideal. The hard and "perfect" body is gradually becoming a dial for both men and women. Men as well as women are facinated by this sculptured and well-trained body. Thus the gym and fitness culture contributes to changes in and a more reflexive attitude towards gender and body ideals.


Author(s):  
Feng Zhu

This paper aims to critically introduce the applicability of Foucault’s late work, on the practices of the self, to the scholarship of contemporary computer games. I argue that the gameplay tasks that we set ourselves, and the patterns of action that they produce, can be understood as a form of ‘work on the self’, and that this work is ambivalent between, on the one hand, an aesthetic transformation of the self – as articulated by Foucault in relation to the care or practices of the self – in which we break from the dominant subjectivities imposed upon us, and on the other, a closer tethering of ourselves through our own playful impulses, to a neoliberal subjectivity centred around instrumentally-driven selfimprovement. Game studies’ concern with the effects that computer games have on us stands to gain from an examination of Foucault’s late work for the purposes of analysing and disambiguating between the nature of the transformations at stake. Further, Foucault’s tripartite analysis of ‘power-knowledge-subject’, which might be applied here as ‘game-discourse-player’, foregrounds the imbrication of our gameplay practices – the extent to which they are due to us and the way in which our own volitions make us subject to power, which is particularly pertinent in the domain of play.


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