scholarly journals The Human-Fish: Animality, Teratology, and Religion in Premodern Japan

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Castiglioni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Observation Point ◽  
Human Face ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Scientific Discourses ◽  
Premodern Japan

This article focuses on the cultural valence of the human-fish (ningyo), a hybrid aquatic creature with a human face and a fish body, in premodern Japan from the eighth to the nineteenth century. Located at the intersection of religious, political, and scientific discourses, the ningyo becomes an exclusive observation point for better understanding the mechanisms of interweaving and mutual fertilization between apparently unrelated semantic fields such as those concerning deities, humans, and animals. Although heteromorphic bodies, here symbolized by the uncanny physicality of the ningyo, are usually dismissed as marginal elements within the broad panorama of relevant intel-lectual productions, this study problematizes this assumption and argues that hegemonic stances are constantly validated, or invalidated, according to their relationships with those on the fringes. Being an interstitial entity, that is, something that lives in the pleats of discourse, the ningyo is characterized by a continuous inclusion within networks of meaning and, at the same time, is doomed to perennial exclusion. This article sheds light on the hermeneutical dynamics that generate the exceptionality of the ningyo, and its never-ending role as a haunting mediator of reality.

H. G. Wells and the Fin-de-Siècle Gustatory Paradox

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (302) ◽  
pp. 937-951
Author(s):  
Colton Valentine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Third ◽  
Scientific Discourses ◽  
Interpretive Method ◽  
Century Literature

Abstract Beginning with a little-studied scene linking H. G. Wells’s ‘A Misunderstood Artist’ to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours, this essay argues that a shared gustatory paradox runs from Huysmanian decadence, through the theories of Edwin Lankester and Max Nordau and into Wells’s writings. In each case, both a pragmatic and an aesthetic relationship to food can signify degeneration. The argument has three major stakes. The first is to reconstruct a robust intertextual relation between the oeuvres of Huysmans and Wells. The second is to complicate readings that cast two of Wells’s scientific romances, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, as mouthpieces for imperialist or (pseudo)scientific discourses (Anger, Brantlinger, Budd, Gailor, Gregory, Hendershot, Pick). The third is to build on recent studies of food representation in nineteenth-century literature and propose a novel interpretive method (Cozzi, Gyman, Lee). Taking up William Greenslade’s proposal that fictions construct a ‘network of resistances’ to discursive myths, I argue that gustatory scenes show Wells’s ‘network’ operating in a curious way. They neither kowtow to degeneration nor assume Greenslade’s active role of a ‘critical, combative humanist’. Instead, they give contradictory depictions of moralized eating that play out the myth’s structural paradox.

scholarly journals Music and the Uncanny in the 19th Century

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Hentschel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Selection Criteria ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Subjective Opinion ◽  
The 19Th Century

This article explores the musical means composers in the nineteenth century used to evoke the uncanny (das Unheimliche). While most existing attempts to determine these means rely on an author’s subjective opinion with regard to particular evocations of the uncanny, this article draws exclusively on contemporary sources. Drawn from the RIPM database, thirteen examples have been selected—following Ernst Jentsch’s notion of the uncanny and based on a clearly defined set of selection criteria—from works by Weber, Loewe, Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner, Boito, and Ambroise Thomas. Compositional devices that recur in several of the works discussed prove to be of central importance. The article asks, finally, how these techniques generate the effect of the uncanny.

scholarly journals The Uncanny in the Themes of Evil, Transgression and the Double in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter"

LETRAS ◽  
2006 ◽  
pp. 33-47
Author(s):  
Esteban Barboza Núñez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Main Character ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
Human Component

El propósito de este artículo consiste en explorar los mecanismos y representaciones de lo siniestro en "La hija de Rappacci" de Nathaniel Hawthome como expresión del mal dentro de los límites del género gótico del siglo XIX; como expresión del tema del doble en tres personajes humanos y en uno no humano que aparecen en el cuento; y como expresión de trasgresión en el personaje principal, Giovanni Guasconte. El concepto de lo siniestro que se usará será el de la teoría psicoanalítica, siguiendo especialmente los aportes de Sigmund Freud y Jacques Lacan. The purpose of this artide is to explore the mechanisms and representations of the uncanny in Nathaniel Hawthome's "Rappaccini's Daughter" as an expression of evil within nineteenth century Gothic boundaries; as an expression of the theme of the double in three human characters and in one non-human component of Rappaccini's garden; and as an expression of transgression in Giovanni Guasconte, the main character. The concept of the uncanny to be used will be that of psychoanalytic theory, especially reliant on the contributions on the topic by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

scholarly journals “An East, east of the East” Eça de Queirós’ A Relíquia, Álvaro de Campos’ “Opiary” and the Postimperial Scope of Portuguese Literary Orientalism

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Schacht Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
Specific Position ◽  
Scientific Discourses

Coming to terms with the increasing peripherality of Portugal at the height of Europe’s “Scramble for Africa” and in its immediate wake, both Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa’s Álvaro de Campos engage with orientalism reactively, setting the stage for a prescient critique of European representations of the Orient. Through the parody of nineteenth-century religious and scientific discourses (Eça), and of symbolist poetics (Álvaro de Campos), as well as the recontextualization of early-modern Portuguese travel writing tropes, these two writers propose two alternative understandings of Portugal’s specific position in the modern geopolitics of empire. This article argues that the prescience of Eça’s and Pessoa’s critiques of orientalism forecloses, rather than authorizes, future essentialist views of Portugal’s historical specificity as evidence of exceptionalism. 

scholarly journals O corpo negro, as marcas e o trauma

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Sheila Cabo Geraldo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Scientific Discourses ◽  
Postcolonial Discourse

ResumoO discurso pós-colonial, de acordo com as teorias desenvolvidas a partir dos anos 1970, está nas marcas deixadas nas sociedades colonizadas, as quais construíram seus processos de independência e modernidade por cima dessas marcas, na forma da violência. A modernidade é como uma máscara branca sobre a pele negra (Frantz Fanon), que só em casos de embate deixa aflorar, como imagens dialéticas, a permanência das relações escravistas recalcadas. São máscaras, impostas ou autoimpostas, que forçaram o apagamento da memória racial, muitas vezes associada ao gênero. O texto aqui apresentado procura, assim, ativar criticamente algumas imagens produzidas pela artista Rosana Paulino, sobretudo as que desenvolveu para a instalação Assentamento, cujas imagens dos corpos masculinos e femininos escravizados, enquanto imagens de discursos científicos positivistas dos novecentos, são ressignificadas pela artista como imagens-denúncia.AbstractThe postcolonial discourse, according to the theories developed since the 1970s, is on the marks left in the colonized societies, which built their processes of independence and modernity over these marks, in the form of violence. Modernity is like a white mask on the black skin (Frantz Fanon), which only in cases of clash brings out, as dialectical images, the permanence of repressed slave relations. They are masks, imposed or self-imposed, which forced the erasure of racial memory, often associated with gender. The text presented here seeks to critically activate some images produced by the artist Rosana Paulino, especially those developed for the Settlement installation, whose images of male and female enslaved bodies, as images of positivist scientific discourses of the nineteenth century, are restated by the artist as images-complaint.

The Music Behind the Mask: Rossini’s Uncanny Salon

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-114
Author(s):  
Simon Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
A Site ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Shed Light

Despite receiving scant attention from scholars and performers, Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), written between 1857 and 1868 for his private salon, have a unique and expressive stylistic language. In these works, the composer gives musical voice to the uncanny discourses that emerged around the idea of his “creative death.” This paper establishes how Rossini’s return to composition functioned as a musical “exhumation,” with his compositional activities functioning as a site for broader discourses about disease, aging, and death in nineteenth-century France. Close readings of visual depictions of Rossini by Eugène Delacroix and Antoine Etex shed light on changing attitudes toward the composer, which coincided with broader aesthetic shifts taking place at the time. The tensions engendered by Rossini’s precarious status as both living and dead, and his nostalgic relationship to the past, constitute a kind of doubleness that can be heard in his late compositions. Bringing together cultural history and musical analysis, I show that the privacy of Rossini’s salon gave rise to music with unique signifying potential that has not yet been duly acknowledged.

“Pretty as a Picture”

Journeys ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106
Author(s):  
Imene Gannouni Khemiri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
Travel Accounts

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in travel writing, postcolonialism, and landscape politics. However, studies of travel writing addressing the notion of the picturesque have not yet explored the idea of aesthetic sensibility in British travel narratives in the Regency of Tunis. This article examines the aesthetics of the picturesque in three British travel accounts: Grenville Temple’s Excursions in the Mediterranean: Algiers and Tunis (1835); Robert Lambert Playfair’s Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis (1877); and Henry Spencer Ashbee and Alexander Graham’s Travels in Tunisia (1887). These travelers used the picturesque in different but interlinked ways; they oscillated between finding the uncanny landscape an object of delight where it conformed to British aesthetic doctrine and an object of derision where they noted aesthetic deficiencies. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this picturesque way of seeing shifted into an Orientalist desire for “Otherness.”

Re-reading Armenian Modernity in Madt‘ēos Mamurian’s English Letters

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Maral Aktokmakyan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract This article moves to examine Madt‘ēos Mamurian’s English Letters or the Destiny of an Armenian alongside issues of national consciousness and the modern political subject. Focusing on the narrative style and structure that allowed the author to problematize and cultivate the idea of reawakening the Armenian nation and individual as a political animal, the article claims to bring in the notion of the strange, stranger and the uncanny, as the operating tools in Mamurian’s engagement with the modern in a late nineteenth century Ottoman-Armenian context.

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