scholarly journals A Phone of One’s Own: Woolf, TikTok and the Aesthetic Evolution of Bisexuality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher James Wells
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Social Networking Service ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Made In

Whereas bisexuality, as it existed in modernity, has been described as a ‘floating signifier', one that was problematically conflated with gender and intersex bodies, the articulation of bisexuality is now experiencing a discursive resurgence in spaces and platforms online. Through a deliberately disparate comparison between Virginia Woolf’s modernist writing and the discussions of bisexuality on the video-sharing social networking service TikTok, this essay presents a reflective reassessment of how far bisexual representation in the popular imagination has progressed and by extension, evaluate extant limitations. To realize these ambitions, I compare the reception of sexology (the new science of sexuality) in ‘high’ modernist literature with a post-modern demographic whose bisexuality is articulated in the 2020s online via TikTok’s towards what I would demarcate as a post-queer theory user base. This essay is not intended as an overview of the advancements made in psychoanalytic institutions about bisexuality nor does it set out to comment on the refinement of bisexuality’s aestheticization through time. Instead, it uses these two temporally specific moments in the cultural zeitgeist to compare and contrast how differently two different demographics articulate bisexuality, both as a written mode in modernism and as a visual apparatus online. This is less a critique of bi-erasure, but an interrogation of why and how bisexual representation, as an aestheticized subjectivity that compromises romantic, spiritual, and erotic desires for bodies of all genders, continues to be problematically restrictive.

Modernism and Non-Translation

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Reading Key ◽  
Modernist Fiction ◽  
Selection Of

Modernism and Non-Translation proposes a new way of reading key modernist texts, including the work of canonical figures such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. The topic of this book is the incorporation of untranslated fragments from various languages within modernist writing. It explores non-translation in modernist fiction, poetry, and other forms, with a principally European focus. The intention is to begin to answer a question that demands collective expertise: what are the aesthetic and cultural implications of non-translation for modernist literature? How did non-translation shape the poetics, and cultural politics, of some of the most important writers of this period? Twelve essays by leading scholars of modernism explore American, British, and Irish texts, alongside major French and German writers, and the wider modernist recovery of Classical languages. They explore non-translation from the dual perspectives of both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, unsettling that false opposition, and articulating in the process their individuality of expression and experience. The range explored indicates something of the reach and vitality of the matter of translation—and specifically non-translation—across a selection of poetry, fiction, and non-fictional prose, while focusing on mainly canonical voices. Offering a series of case studies, the volume aims to encourage further exploration of connections across languages and among writers. Together, the collection seeks to provoke and extend debate on the aesthetic, cultural, political, and conceptual dimensions of non-translation as an important yet hitherto neglected facet of modernism, helping to redefine our understanding of that movement. It demonstrates the rich possibilities of reading modernism through instances of non-translation.

« ET VIDI COELUM NOVUM ET TERRAM NOVAM »

Nuncius ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-77
Author(s):  
MAURIZIO TORRINI
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Traditional Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Single Access ◽  
New Science ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Formal School ◽  
Made In ◽  
School Boundaries

Abstract<title> SUMMARY </title>Contemporary movements, united by their common rejection of traditional knowledge and by their common beginnings and development outside formal school boundaries, libertinism and the new science are often considered, evaluated and classified in the univocal light of modern thought introduced by Descartes. A comparison totally unfavourable to libertinism which did not benefit from the attempt made in some cases to assimilate it to the scientific revolution in the name of a common anti-dogmatic character. The movements were in fact distinct in their aims and motives and their occasional interaction must not make us forget the contemporary presence of different and often contrasting ideas at the dawn of modern thought. The aim of this paper is to overcome the historiographical approach which, by privileging a single access to modern thought, evaluates all the others according to the same measure.The paper, through an examination of the European discussion stimulated by Galileo's Sidereus nuncius, shows the philosophical consequences of the astronomical revolution and the series of projects, hopes and misunderstandings that marked its course. An event that did not encounter the indifference of libertines like Naude, who read in the celestial revolution confirmation of the crisis of terrestrial knowledge. In Italy the bond between libertine thought and the scientific revolution came tragically into being as from the condemnation of Galileo and found its consecration in the Neapolitan trial of the atheists at the end of the seventeenth century, thus reuniting in the name of a single orthodoxy, two different conceptions of nature and knowledge.

scholarly journals The House Reformed: A Reaction to Suburban Monotony

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Florence Mangan
Keyword(s):  
Design Method ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Mass Scale ◽  
Life Styles ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Final Design ◽  
Manual Methods ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
House Design ◽  
Made In

<p>Joyless rows of monotonous houses are be- ginning to define the suburban typology of tomorrow. Quality and innovation is being compromised for speed and quantity and there is a distinct lack of consideration for the home’s potential to enrich and influence the life-styles and well-being of its occupants.  This thesis is a reaction to the researcher’s dis- satisfaction with New Zealand’s suburban typology and seeks to identify and demonstrate an alternative design approach. The research- er considers that a house should enable its occupants to flourish by instigating moments of joy and surprise whilst maximising economy of space.  The thesis uses an investigative research method of five different design tests. Each test reveals strategies to aid the approach of designing the suburban typology, focusing on maximising joy, surprise and economy of space.  Both digital and manual methods are used, revealing their respective strengths and flaws. The Digital method used in the Data House and Rigid x Fluid house tests lacked the ability to apply tangible aesthetic qualities to a de- sign. The manual hands on method of used in the Patchwork House and House Reformed tests was hugely beneficial for the aesthetic qualities of design, however it lacked the rigor and capacity to apply individuality on a mass scale.  Discoveries made in the thesis investigations are collated in a final design outcome, the House Reformed. This house design demonstrates a compilation of the successful strategies identified in the research and reveals the benefits of approaching home design with qualities of joy, surprise and economy of space. The most successful strategies used to achieve these aims were establishing a great- er connection with the outdoors, providing flexible spaces through the use of innovative partitions and furniture and injecting unexpected aesthetic moments through the use of interesting texture and colour.  Overall the research reveals a successful de- sign outcome and provides interesting in- sights into design method. It explores worth- while questions and issues related to the lived domestic experience such as the lack of joy, surprise and economy of space in suburban housing and demonstrates the importance of designing with such qualities.</p>

Materialities of Abstraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Brandon Truett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Material World ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article recovers the 1918 chapbook that the understudied Vorticist poet and visual artist Jessie Dismorr composed for the American sculptor John Storrs and his wife Marguerite. It examines the ways the chapbook reorients the aesthetic criteria by which we recognize abstraction in the early twentieth century. Studying how Dismorr’s divergent and feminist approach to Vorticist practice exploits “the materialities of abstraction,” or the traces of the material world that evince the outside of the abstract art object, it suggests that these material traces lead us to reimagine the boundary between inside and outside, and thus the way an art object indexes and interacts with the material world. Proposing that the recovery of an object as seemingly inconsequential as an individual chapbook in fact raises questions about how we construct the literary- and art-historical field of modernism, the article situates Dismorr’s work in relation to other feminist understandings in British modernism of the socialized space of artistic practice across media exemplified by Virginia Woolf ’s account of sociability within the Bloomsbury Group, and argues for the importance of such unique objects as chapbooks to the study of material culture within literary history and within art history as well.

Interseções entre Cinema e Pintura em Maria Antonieta de Sofia Coppola

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laís Bravo Serra
Keyword(s):  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Made In

The scene of Sofia Coppola’s movie, Marie Antoinette, is made in dialectic with pictorial works, which occur primarily in three forms: classical painting within diegetic space, as an element of scenography; painting as a scene, when the film picture incorporates the pictorial aesthetics of a canonical work; and the re-appropriation of a canonical painting according to the aesthetic molds of the fictional universe of the film in question, which was placed as scenic object.

Online Knowledge Dictator or Learning Facilitator

2012 ◽  
pp. 191-200
Author(s):  
Victor X. Wang
Keyword(s):  
Online Teaching ◽  
Traditional Classroom ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Teaching Learning ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Made In

While online knowledge dictators are determined by certain teaching/learning situations, Rogers’ (1969) five well-accepted hypotheses suggest that teachers be learning facilitators to focus on what is happening in the learners. To help teachers become learning facilitators, this chapter specifies what exactly teachers can do in both the traditional classroom and online teaching/learning settings. The chapter also examines what other factors may contribute to this dichotomy of online knowledge dictators and learning facilitators. To compare and contrast this dichotomy, cultural backgrounds in relation to learning are also discussed to increase the readers’ background in order to better understand the argument made in this chapter.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Samantha Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Cultural Interest ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Key Terms

Virginia Woolf dismissed Byron’s early poetry as ‘album stuff’ and critics have assumed album poetry is inherently unoriginal and imitative. The introduction challenges these received ideas by laying out the aesthetic and cultural interest of this neglected hybrid, protean form designed to be read and circulated in manuscript, and which developed its own poetic language, generic conventions, and common themes. Writers of album poetry range from canonical Romantic poets, women poets, society poets, to amateurs, and albums create social spaces where different views of gender, hierarchy, and poetry clash. ‘Albo-mania’ has been seen as a phenomenon of the 1820s. The introduction traces the fashion’s origins in the 1780s, defines and contextualizes key terms ‘album verse’ and ‘album’, while analysis of Byron’s ‘Written in an Album’ (1812) lays out the characteristics and creative possibilities of album poetry examined in the six case studies which follow.

Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature, Theory

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
pp. 1056-1075
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Alternative Route ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
Opening Up

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Isadora Duncan ◽  
The Aesthetic

Rather than looking primarily “beyond” ourselves to understand animals and aesthetics, I suggest we must also look “within” to identify a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in bioaesthetic practices. A “bio-impulse” at the root of the aesthetic itself connects human artistic propensities to animality through strategies of excess, display, and intensification. Re-envisioning the aesthetic domain itself as trans-species in scope is ethically charged because our species must acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly “exceptional” activities. In examining the work, theories, and art practices of Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rachel Rosenthal, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage, I articulate ways to recognize and assess the entanglement of human and nonhuman aesthetic forces.

Appropriation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Cultural Sensitivity ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Adaptation Studies ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Intercultural Performance ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Right

Literary texts have long been understood as generative of other texts and of artistic responses that stretch across time and culture. Adaptation studies seeks to explore the cultural contexts for these afterlives and the contributions they make to the literary canon. Writers such as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens were being adapted almost as soon as their work emerged on stage or in print and there can be no doubt that this accretive aspect to their writing ensures their literary survival. Adaptation is, then, both a response to, a reinforcer of, and a potential shaper of canon and has had particular impact as a process through the multimedia and global affordances of the 20th century onwards, from novels to theatre, from poetry to music, and from film to digital content. The aesthetic pleasure of recognizing an “original” referenced in a secondary version can be considered central to the cultural power of literature and the arts. Appropriation as a concept though moves far beyond intertextuality and introduces ideas of active critical commentary, of creative re-interpretation and of “writing back” to the original. Often defined in terms of a hostile takeover or possession, both the theory and practice of appropriation have been informed by the activist scholarship of postcolonialism, poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. Artistic responses can be understood as products of specific cultural politics and moments and as informed responses to perceived injustices and asymmetries of power. The empowering aspects of re-visionary writing, that has seen, for example, fairytales reclaimed for female protagonists, or voices returned to silenced or marginalized individuals and communities, through reconceived plots and the provision of alternative points of view, provide a predominantly positive history. There are, however, aspects of borrowing and appropriation that are more problematic, raising ethical questions about who has the right to speak for or on behalf of others or indeed to access, and potentially rewrite, cultural heritage. There has been debate in the arena of intercultural performance about the “right” of Western theatre directors to embed aspects of Asian culture into their work and in a number of highly controversial examples, the “right” of White artists to access the cultural references of First Nation or Black Asian and Minority Ethnic communities has been contested, leading in extreme cases to the agreed destruction of artworks. The concept of “cultural appropriation” poses important questions about the availability of artforms across cultural boundaries and about issues of access and inclusion but in turn demands approaches that perform cultural sensitivity and respect the question of provenance as well as intergenerational and cross-cultural justice.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document