“La solitude ajoute à l’ardeur du désir”: Dangerous Isolation in Les Liaisons dangereuses

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-511
Author(s):  
Marine Ganofsky

In Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), the motif of solitude, from conventual seclusion to virtuous retreats and libertine isolation, is as much a contributor to the characters’ downfall as the dangerous liaisons advertised in the novel’s title. Engaging the eighteenth-century discourse on solitude, I argue that Les Liaisons dangereuses illustrates the period’s redefinition of the private and public spheres, the Enlightenment’s secularization of the notion of retreat, and its understanding of the Self as the real source of one’s temptation. Solitude in Les Liaisons dangereuses is reconfigured as a space where inner desires can surface; however, such revelations often menace one’s happiness. Analyzing the representation of the characters’ physical seclusion, of their strategic retreats, and of their psychological isolation allows me to explore how Laclos’s representation of solitude as perilous stems from the conviction that, in a period intent on frustrating an individual’s natural drives, the most dangerous liaison one can have is with oneself.

Author(s):  
Peter Knox-Shaw

Emma has often convincingly been assigned to the “quixotic” novel, a genre much favored by the long eighteenth century and admired on occasion by Jane Austen herself. But whereas novels of this type invariably end with a joint renunciation of imagination and romance in deference to a greater realism, Emma shows imagination to be integral to an apprehension of the real world, and to require, for its fidelity, a principle long enshrined by romance. Austen’s understanding of imagination as both necessary and all-pervasive—held in common with a number of contemporary philosophers who built on David Hume’s analysis of the “productive” and “magical” faculty that underlay all perception—in no way lessened her sense of its ambivalence, and Emma shows how its work of construction is constantly undermined by received stereotypes as well as by insidious subterfuges of the self. The novel celebrates an empirical habit of mind, fortified by the virtue of benevolence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 310 ◽  
pp. 120-125
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Kalogeras ◽  
Neil Ruparelia ◽  
Tito Kabir ◽  
Richard Jabbour ◽  
Toru Naganuma ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630512199064
Author(s):  
Claudia Mellado ◽  
Alfred Hermida

One of the main challenges of studying journalistic roles in social media practice is that the profession’s conceptual boundaries have become increasingly blurred. Social media has developed as a space used by audiences to consume, share, and discuss news and information, offering novel locations for journalists to intervene at professional and personal levels and in private and public spheres. This article takes the “journalistic ego” domain as its starting point to examine how journalists perform three specific roles on social media: the promoter, the celebrity, and the joker. To investigate these roles in journalistic performance, the article situates their emergence and operationalization in a broader epistemological context, examining how journalists engage with, contest, and/or diverge from different professional norms and practices, as well as the conflict between traditional and social media-specific roles of journalists.


Author(s):  
Matthew Watson

The market has no independent objective existence beyond the practices that are embedded within particular market institutions. Those practices, in turn, involve learning particular techniques of performance, on the assumption that each market environment rewards a corresponding type of market agency. However, the ability to reflect what might be supposed the right agential characteristics is not an instinct that is hardwired into us from birth. Instead it comes from perfecting the specific performance elements that allow people to recognize themselves as potentially competent actors in any given market context. This chapter takes the reader back to some of the earliest accounts of these performance elements, showing that important eighteenth-century debates about how to flourish as a market actor revolved around little else. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe emphasized the need for market actors to create convincing falsehoods, hiding their true feelings behind a presentation of self where customers’ whims were always catered to. In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith was still wrestling with the dilemma of how genuinely the self could be put on display within market environments, believing that customers had a responsibility to curb excessive demands so that merchants’ interests could be respected. This meant not forcing them into knowingly false declarations, so that moral propriety and economic expedience were not necessarily antagonistic forces in the development of merchants’ character.


Author(s):  
Vittorio Linfante ◽  
Chiara Pompa

Fashion, eroticism and pornography, especially in recent years, have created different synergies that not only embrace the design of fashion products and collections, but have defined and define precise visual, photographic and cinematographic languages as well as communication strategies that have not only borrowed the language and aesthetics of pornography, but also communication models, tools and channels. Today, we have thus witnessed an increasing hybridization of languages and channels that have generated forms of communication (performative, editorial, cinematographic or digital). It is not easy to identify the limits between fashion and pornography and between private and public spheres. Through literature review and several case studies, the article aims to investigate the evolution of the relationship between fashion, pornography and mass communication from an aesthetic, performative and, last but not least, technological point of view.


Pen, print and communication in the eighteenth century is a volume of fourteen essays each of which explores the production, distribution and consumption of both private and public texts during the Enlightenment from a variety of historical, theoretical and critical perspectives.  During the eighteenth century there was a growing interest in recording, listing and documenting the world, whether for personal interest and private consumption, or general record and the greater good. Such documentation was done through both the written and printed word. Each genre had its own material conventions and spawned industries which supported these practices. This volume considers writing and printing in parallel: it highlights the intersections between the two methods of communication; discusses the medium and materiality of the message; considers how writing and printing were deployed in the construction of personal and cultural identities; and explores the different dimensions surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of private and public letters, words and texts during the eighteenth-century. In combination the chapters in this volume consider how the processes of both writing and printing contributed to the creation of cultural identity and taste, assisted in the spread of knowledge and furthered bother personal, political, economic, social and cultural change in Britain and the wider-world. This volume provides and original narrative on the nature of communication and brings a fresh perspective on printing history, print culture and the literate society of the Enlightenment.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Anita Kasabova

Abstract How the self perceives reality is a traditional topic of research across several disciplines. I examine the perceived self on Facebook, as a case-study of self-knowledge on „classical” social media. Following Blascovich & Bailenson (2011), I consider the distinction between the real and the virtual as relative. Perceptual self-knowledge, filtered through social media, requires rethinking the perceived self in terms of social reality (Neisser, 1993). This claim dovetails Jenkins’s (2013) notion of the self as an active participant in consumption. I argue that the perceived self in social media could be conceived in terms of how it would like to be perceived and appraised by its virtual audience. Using Neisser’s (1993) typology of self-knowledge and Castañeda’s (1983) theory of I-guises, I analyse seven samples from Anglo-American and Bulgarian Facebook sites and show that the perceived self produces itself online as a captivating presence with a credible story. My samples are taken from FB community pages with negligible cultural differences across an online teenage/twens (twixter) age group. I then discuss some problematic aspects of the perceived self online, as well as recent critiques of technoconsumerism.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
JÁNOS MALINA

ABSTRACTThis article examines various eighteenth-century sources to determine whether they confirm the present practice of calling a first-floor hall of the Fertőd (Eszterháza) palace the ‘music room’. While the answer is essentially negative, we learn that the neighbouring ceremonial hall was used by Empress Maria Theresia for a banquet with some music-making in 1773, and that two more spaces on the ground floor served regularly as the ‘summer music halls’. So where did the ‘real’, quality concerts take place? A whole body of documentary evidence clearly shows that theaccademiestook place in the opera house orGrosses Theater. Much of this evidence refers to the first opera house, which burnt down in 1779. The practice apparently continued in the new, bigger 1781 opera house, but by then the number of concerts would have been reduced substantially, owing to the Prince's growing addiction to opera. A survey of Haydn's last symphonies and concertos composed for domestic use confirms that regular concerts could not have taken place later than 1783 or, possibly, 1784. However, a long-neglected remark in a contemporary witness report provides direct proof of the inclusion of symphonies in the course of opera performances.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (57) ◽  
pp. 51-60
Author(s):  
Ewelina Twardoch-Raś

The paper aims to analyze Neil Jordan’s famous movie Breakfast on Pluto in the context of affective “narrative identity.” Breakfast on Pluto is an adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s diary and presents the story of a man who wants to be a woman – he feels like a woman and gradually transforms into one. Patrick/Patricia is thus a transsexual (not only transgender) person who tells the story of a bodily metamorphosis. The author of the paper finds the process of storytelling extremely interesting for a number of reasons. In the paper, the author focuses especially on the process of creating a new identity for the protagonist through the movie’s narration in reference to the categories of “subjective narration” (Edward Branigan) and narrative identity, that is the creation of an identity in the process of telling one’s own story. The author shows how the tools of the movie can shape the process of storytelling (by using special frames, montage, etc.) and how three stories are incorporated in Jordan’s movie: the male and the female story as well as, finally, the subversive self-creation when Patrick/Patricia becomes one whole, one processual identity (in the context of Judith Butler’s assumption about gender). In the paper, the diegesis of the movie will also be analyzed: a number of objects – attributes of masculinity and femininity and the quasi-parodic character of the movie space and the process of storytelling. Parody in Breakfast on Pluto emphasizes the subversive and surfictional structure of the self-story in the movie. The author treats Breakfast on Pluto as a movie version of Entwicklungsroman – the process of narrativization of an identity in transition, of fictionalizing the real life of the protagonist. Therefore, the author also refers to J. M. Coetzee’s assumptions about confession, which is always an important part of self-narration.


Author(s):  
Татьяна Ивановна Кузьмина

Показана специфика формирования представлений о себе у взрослых лиц с нарушением интеллекта. Продемонстрированные особенности связаны с нарративными проявлениями Я-реальной структуры личности, контекстуально означенной как реалистичное понимание себя, оценивание себя и своих поступков, внутреннее содержательное наполнение установок и стремлений по отношению к себе, прогностические позиции по отношению к собственными возможностям и социальным реалиям жизни. При исследовании конструкта Я-реальное с помощью специально разработанных методик и структурированной беседы у исследователя появляется возможность феноменологически описать и интерпретировать имеющиеся особенности через анализ вербальных репрезентаций субъектов диагностики. Presents the specifics of forming self-images in adults with intellectual disabilities. The demonstrated features are related to the narrative manifestations of the Self-the real structure of the personality, contextually meant as a realistic understanding of oneself, evaluation of oneself and one's actions, internal content of attitudes and aspirations in relation to oneself, predictive positions in relation to one's own capabilities and social realities of life. When studying the I-real construct using specially developed techniques and structured conversation, the researcher is able to phenomenologically describe and interpret the existing features through the analysis of verbal representations of diagnostic subjects


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