scholarly journals Re-run and Re-read

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Violi
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
The Past ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Cinematic Technology

Hailed by critics as breaking paths for the direction of British fiction, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2005) has been described as a way of re-thinking literature in terms of intermedial spaces, be they installations, performance artworks or a ‘remix’ of writing and film. The newness of Remainder seems to hinge on its imitation of a contemporary mediascape saturated with technical images and simulacra, in which reality is totally metamorphosed into a filmic phantasmagoria that novel writing is striving to mimic. Following McCarthy’s eschewing of the rhetoric of the ‘new’, this essay discusses the practice of re-enactment described in Remainder as a way digging up images from the past to read the myth of postmodern hyperreality against its grain. McCarthy’s ‘archeology of the present’ takes the concern with mediation and visual culture back to the unfinished business of modernism and its encounter with cinematic technology, reproposing the materialist aesthetics of embodiment that emerged from the conversation among literature, film and medicine in writers such as Joyce or T.S. Eliot, down to Samuel Beckett.

scholarly journals “Prefer not, eh?”: Re-Scribing the Lives of the Great War Poets in Contemporary British Historical Fiction

2018 ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
María Cristina Pividori
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Great War ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted process of sifting and discerning what should be remembered, neglected or amplified from the stream of war experience. In his book about Pat Barker, Mark Rawlinson argues that “historical fiction has been transformed in the post-war period by the way writers have exploited the porous and unstable demarcation between fiction and no fiction, stories and history” (14). Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), Geoff Akers’s Beating for the Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006) and Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light (2008) have not become best sellers like Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; yet, they too represent the predominant commemorative drift in contemporary British fiction about the Great War. Without doubt, these three authors have followed in Barker’s steps in their purpose of holding a mirror to real people and real events in the past and of deciphering the deleted text of ‘the war to end all wars.’ However, while Barker chose to write about the often-anthologised Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dawson, Akers and Edric base their narratives on the writings, and lives, of Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney respectively. My discussion of these three novels will explore the various ways in which the past can be accessed and interpreted from the present and represented in fiction. The authors’ decisions as to what historical instances to unravel do not just reveal the relation that contemporary British fiction entertains with the Great War and with history, but also how the past erupts in the present to interrogate it. Taking three salient features of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1988)—intertextuality, parody and paratextuality—as my theoretical points of departure, I will explore the dominant frameworks and cultural conditions (that is the propagation of either patriotic or protest readings) within which the Great War has been narrated in the novels and the new approaches, opportunities and ethical implications of using historical and literary sources to re-scribe a previously non-existent version of the lives of the iconic Great War Poets.

scholarly journals introduction

2005 ◽  
Vol 183 ◽  
pp. 523-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
michel hockx ◽  
julia strauss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Job Insecurity ◽  
Market Manipulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The World ◽  
Positive Experiences ◽  
Complex Phenomena

this collection offers a variety of perspectives on culture in contemporary china. we begin and end with pieces by jing wang and deborah davis on the production and consumption of culture in general, before moving on to three specific areas: visual culture, music and poetry. jing wang's opening piece on “bourgeois bohemians” (bobos) in china revolves around the all-important question of how taste is constructed and a multiplicity of lifestyles imagined. in china as elsewhere in the world, lifestyles are first imagined and transmitted through advertising. wang describes how marketing campaigns propagate idealized lifestyles to different segments of china's self identified urban middle class; notably the bohemian and the xin xin renlei. deborah davis focuses on the consumption end of culture, suggesting that for all the real resentments and worries engendered by growing income inequality and job insecurity, urbanites in shanghai experience consumer culture and the pursuit of individual taste and comfort in the home through shopping to be positive experiences, particularly when juxtaposed against the deprivations of the past. both wang and davis show that the production and consumption of culture are complex phenomena that go beyond mere market manipulation. there is substantial agency involved, from urbanites joyfully participating in redecoration of their flats to the ways in which niche segments of the urban middle class separate into different “tribes.”the braester, denton and finnane essays focus on different aspects of the production and consumption of visual culture: film, museums and fashion. braester suggests that one cannot sharply differentiate commercial film from art film on the basis of content or aesthetics, as directors previously known for making art films move into commercials, and both share similar sensibilities.

The Archaeology of Passage: Reading Invisibility in Chinese Tombs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wu Hung
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Tao Te Ching ◽  
The Past ◽  
Daode Jing

The eleventh section of Daode jing (Tao Te Ching), the foundational text of Taoism, reads: . . . Thirty spokes share a hub; Because [the wheel] is empty, it can be used in a cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Because it is empty, it can function as a vessel. Carve out doors and windows to make a room. Because they are empty, they make a room usable. Thus we possess things and benefit from them, But it is their emptiness that makes them useful. . . This section has always been appreciated as a supreme piece of rhetoric on the powers of nothingness, a philosophical concept fiercely articulated in the Daode jing. Whereas that may indeed be the author’s intention, the empirical evidence evoked to demonstrate this concept reveals an alternative way of seeing manufactured objects by focusing on their immaterial aspects. This way of looking at things has important implications for archaeological and art historical scholarship on ancient artifacts and architecture precisely because these two disciplines identify themselves with the study of physical remains of the past so firmly that tangibility has become an undisputed condition of academic research in these fields. Archaeologists routinely classify objects from an excavation into categories based on material and then inventory their sizes, shapes, and decoration. Art historians typically start their interpretation of images, objects, and monuments by identifying their formal attributes. Whereas such trained attention to material and formal evidence will surely persist for good reasons, the Daode jing section cautions us of the danger of ignoring the immaterial aspects of man-made forms, which, though eluding conventional typological classification and visual analysis, are nevertheless indispensible to their existence as objects and buildings. The current chapter incorporates this approach into a study of ancient Chinese art and visual culture by arguing that constructed empty spaces on artifacts and structures—holes, vacuums, doors, and windows—possess vital significance to understanding the minds and hands that created them and thus deserve a serious look into their meaning.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Elemental Component

This book traces the lineage of humane insight and spectacles of black suffering and death in the past century and a half, from the abolitionist movement to the murder of Emmett Tilland and the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Humane insight refers to a kind of looking in which the onlooker's ethics are addressed by the spectacle of others' embodied suffering. It is an ethics- based look that turns a benevolent eye, recognizes violations of human dignity, and bestows or articulates the desire for actual protection. This book investigates incidents in African American visual culture that depend upon the recognition of humanity as an elemental component of human identity to be sought and secured. It examines how the image of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body grounds a politics of racial equity and justice in the language of pathos. By focusing on how pain and even death among African Americans are rendered discussable, the book reveals how black pain has been made to make sense.

Visions and ruins

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Davies
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Middle Ages

This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.

CASTING MAIZE SEEDS IN AN AYÖÖK COMMUNITY: AN APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF DIVINATION IN MESOAMERICA

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-478
Author(s):  
Araceli Rojas
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Complicated System ◽  
Maize Seeds ◽  
The People ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractRecent investigation among the Ayöök (Mixe) people of Oaxaca showed that the on-going use of a 260-day calendar complements the divinatory technique of casting maize seeds. This paper offers a detailed description of this mantic practice as a means to approach and better understand precolonial divinatory practices and the people who practiced them, such as thetonalopouhqueamong the Nahua. In particular, this new data will also serve to shed light on the use of the pictorial manuscripts that portray the 260-day calendar, such as the so-called Borgia Group Codices. Along these lines, historical and colonial accounts, origin narratives, visual culture, and the archaeology surrounding divination will also be re-examined. This article will show that, similar to the Ayöök contemporary daykeepers and diviners, those that lived in the past were also wise women and men who were specialized in managing the complicated system of symbolism surrounding prognostication and prescription set out over 260 days. Furthermore, they employed divination for medical purposes and aided people with afflictions, curing them of sickness.

Unfinished Business: Re-viewing Medea in Roman Painting

Ramus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 119-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Vout
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Roman Painting ◽  
Editorial Decision ◽  
Crucial Part

This chapter examines the Medea of Roman painting. In some senses, this constitutes a crazy editorial decision: gems and sculpture, sarcophagi in particular, are a crucial part of the visual culture that pulls and pushes against text and theatre. But in other senses, a two-dimensional focus offers peculiar challenges that situate Medea firmly within the domestic sphere, in cubicula and peristyles; and yet also beyond this sphere. Unlike freestanding sculpture, which actively intervenes in the viewer's space, painting affords access to a parallel universe. Its figures are not cold to the touch like Pygmalion's statue. They are intangible, exciting different desires from those elicited by stone, desires which invite viewers to leave their world behind them; or at least to pause and take stock. In these ways, painting provides a commentary on everyday life—closer to performances on stage than to installation.Ancient writers, Ovid included, recognised this analogy between painting and theatre. In defending his work against charges of immorality, the exiled poet cites the genre of the mime, asking whether it is the stage that makes its adulterous content permissible and reminding Augustus that his poems had often ‘detained his eyes’, accompanied by dancing. He continues:scilicet in domibus nostris ut prisca uirorumartificis fulgent corpora picta manu,sic quae concubitus uarios uenerisque figurasexprimat, est aliquo parua tabella loco,utque sedet uultu fassus Telamonius iram,inque oculis facinus barbara mater habet,sic madidos siccat digitis Venus uda capillos,et modo maternis tecta uidetur aquis.

scholarly journals Hillforts, rocks and warriors

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 154-165
Author(s):  
Javier Rodriguez-Corral
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
The Bronze Age

During the Late Iron Age, monumental stone statues of warriors were established in the northwest of Iberia, ‘arming’ landscapes that ultimately encouraged specific types of semiotic ideologies in the region. This paper deals with how these statues on rocks not only worked in the production of liminality in the landscape – creating transitional zones on it –, but also how they functioned as liminal gateways to the past, absorbing ideas from the Bronze Age visual culture up to the Late Iron Age one, in order to create emotional responses to a new socio-political context.

scholarly journals Performances da cultura visual e de eventos no processo de revitalização urbana no “Distrito Criativo” de Porto Alegre

ILUMINURAS ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (36) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Simon
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Urban Revitalization ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Porto Alegre ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ritual Process ◽  
Video Makers

Busco com este artigo refletir sobre as formas como o processo de revitalização urbana em uma região de Porto Alegre se constrói por meio da cultura visual e de eventos específicos. Com aporte da antropologia urbana e visual, a pesquisa etnográfica foi realizada no Quarto Distrito de Porto Alegre/RS/Brasil, principalmente no bairro Floresta, o qual passou por um processo de desindustrialização e hoje recebe olhares atentos de alguns atores interessados em sua revitalização. Junto a este contexto de transformação urbana, compreendemos a importância da cultura visual como um agente fundamental, pois cria uma nova cartografia imagética urbana, que sobrepõe imagens do passado com as do presente, contribui para o registro e a disseminação dos projetos de inovação social. As performances desempenhadas pelos fotógrafos, vídeo makers e participantes dos eventos atuam de forma significativa para uma reconfiguração imagética e estética do território criativo. Os eventos reúnem práticas de sociabilidades, narrativas permeados de emoção com resgates de memórias e com projeções para o futuro. O próprio evento se mostra como um processo estético e ritual. Este artigo compõe parte da pesquisa desenvolvida no Núcleo de Antropologia Visual, da UFRGS.Palavras-chave: Bairro Floresta. Cultura visual. Eventos. Revitalização urbana.Performances of visual culture and events in the urban revitalization process in the "Creative District" of Porto AlegreThis paper aims to reflect upon the ways in which the process of urban revitalization in a region of Porto Alegre is built by visual culture and specific events. Following the contribution of urban and visual anthropology, the ethnographic research was conducted in the Forth District, Porto Alegre/RS/Brazil, mainly in the Floresta neighborhood, which went through a process of deindustrialization and today receives watchful eyes of some actors interested in its revitalization. Near this context of urban transformation, we understand the importance of visual culture as a key player, because it creates a new urban imagery cartography, which overlays images of the past with the present, contributes to register and disseminate the projects of social innovation. The performances of photographers, video makers, and the participants of the events act significantly for a reconfiguration of the imagery and the aesthetics of the creative territory. The events assemble sociability practices, emotional narratives with memories rescue and projections for the future. The event itself performs as an aesthetic and ritual process. This paper is a research developed within the Visual Anthropology Center, at UFRGS.Keywords: Floresta neighbourhood. Visual culture. Events. Urban revitalization.  

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