Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus

doi:10.3167/cs.2021.340106

Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus

Critical Survey ◽

10.3167/cs.2021.340106 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 74-86

Keyword(s):

Visual Images ◽

Distinctive Features ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

The Uncanny ◽

Urban Decay

Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.

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Doppelgamers: Video Games and Gothic Choice

American Gothic Culture ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401616.003.0010 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Hancock

Keyword(s):

Video Games ◽

Rational Choice ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

The Uncanny ◽

Virtual Realities

This chapter explores gothic elements encoded into the narrative and the very act of choice that govern video games. These elements both reinforce and expose the lie of rational choice that undergirds the neoliberal economy that saw games rise to media dominance. Videogames may be simulacra, but not just virtual realities: they are the uncanny symptom of how the neoliberal subject recognizes its own lack of identity. Games are thus the gothic double of the Enlightenment self, the prime image of the hollow American neoliberal consumer mass-marketed as self-fashioning individual.

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Home Truths: The Importance of the Uncanny for Patrick Süskind's Critique of the Enlightenment inDas Parfum

German Life and Letters ◽

10.1111/j.1468-0483.2007.00384.x ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 60 (2) ◽

pp. 225-242

Author(s):

Jonathan Woolley

Keyword(s):

The Enlightenment ◽

The Uncanny

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From men to machines and back: Automata and the reception of virtuosity in European instrumental art music, c.1815-c.1850

New Sound ◽

10.5937/newso1648065c ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 65-80

Author(s):

Žarko Cvejić

Keyword(s):

19Th Century ◽

Human Subject ◽

Contemporary Music ◽

Art Music ◽

Musical Performance ◽

Contemporary Philosophy ◽

Music Criticism ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

The Uncanny ◽

Automatic Technique

In most histories of Western music, the 1830s and 40s are typically described as "the age/era of virtuosity and/or virtuosi". Indeed, major contemporary sources, including leading musical journals of the time, teem with reports on the latest exploits of Liszt and his rivals and in much of this body of criticism, piano and violin virtuosi were commonly celebrated for pushing the limits of humanly conceivable excellence in musical performance. However, a significant number of these critical responses were also negative, critiquing individual virtuosi for playing not like humans, but like automata. My claim in this article, documented with a detailed perusal of contemporary music criticism, is that this line of anti-virtuosic critique was part of the larger 19th-century suspicion of virtuosity as super but also, perhaps, non-humanly accomplished, automatic technique, devoid of all emotion, expression, that is, of human presence and content. Also, I propose to interpret this line of criticism with reference to the even broader 19th-century anxiety over the issue of human subjectivity, that is, its freedom, evident not only in contemporary philosophy (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Novalis, etc.), but also in literature. Such narratives and, as I argue in this paper, much of contemporary criticism of virtuosity were shaped by the uncanny feeling that the human subject, too, like automata and "automatic" virtuosi, may not be free, contrary to the Enlightenment view of the human subject in Rousseau, Kant, and others, but actually under the power of mechanisms beyond itself, operating automatically and not of its own accord. In contemporary criticism of virtuosity, the elusive notions of expression, expressivity, expressive playing and the like, which were deliberately kept under-explained, were then marshalled to preserve the supposedly ineffable or at least ineffably human core of musical performance, in line with the contemporary Romantic view of music as the only means of expressing what is otherwise inexpressible, that is, ineffable.

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Governance as a Strange Elephant Past Legacies, Current Complexities and Future Challenges On Navigating Troubled Waters (Ferenc Miszlivetz and Attila Pók eds., iASK 2020)

Köz-gazdaság ◽

10.14267/retp2021.02.21 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 264-267

Author(s):

Izabella Agárdi

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Common Sense ◽

Political Legitimacy ◽

The Other ◽

Visual Images ◽

Washington Dc ◽

The Past ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Future Challenges ◽

Deep Crisis

The other night, as I was reading a book with a poetic and tragically apt title, the TV showed a crowd of rioters raiding the Capitol building in Washington DC. It was as if everything on the pages came to life in front of my eyes in the form of emblematic visual images: the crisis was visible, the tension palpable and never before have I felt a greater need for the return of common sense, rationality, solidarity and faith in institutions and shared values that societies have been trying to perfect and expand since the Enlightenment. Just like in a bad, sensationalist CIA-movie, I saw an example of the worst of our current civilisation: a deep crisis of not only political legitimacy but of democracy. The power of the past, the terrible ghost of the twentieth century came back to haunt, leaving me and many sleepless. What is going to happen? What is the way out of this? (...)

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Structural Organization and Distribution of Fiber Types in Extraocular Muscles of Cats

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100093420 ◽

1972 ◽

Vol 30 ◽

pp. 34-35

Author(s):

Asish C. Nag ◽

Lee D. Peachey

Keyword(s):

Fiber Type ◽

Light And Electron Microscopy ◽

Small Diameter ◽

Extraocular Muscles ◽

Fiber Types ◽

Distinctive Features ◽

Superior Rectus ◽

Adult Cats ◽

Different Diameters ◽

Orbital Region

Cat extraocular muscles consist of two regions: orbital, and global. The orbital region contains predominantly small diameter fibers, while the global region contains a variety of fibers of different diameters. The differences in ultrastructural features among these muscle fibers indicate that the extraocular muscles of cats contain at least five structurally distinguishable types of fibers.Superior rectus muscles were studied by light and electron microscopy, mapping the distribution of each fiber type with its distinctive features. A mixture of 4% paraformaldehyde and 4% glutaraldehyde was perfused through the carotid arteries of anesthetized adult cats and applied locally to exposed superior rectus muscles during the perfusion.

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Learning From (Test) Experience

Zeitschrift für Psychologie ◽

10.1027/2151-2604/a000424 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 228 (4) ◽

pp. 264-277 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Evan E. Mitton ◽

Chris M. Fiacconi

Keyword(s):

Recognition Memory ◽

Test Performance ◽

Memory Performance ◽

Judgments Of Learning ◽

Visual Images ◽

Memory Tests ◽

Recognition Memory Performance ◽

Study Test ◽

Explicit Feedback

Abstract. To date there has been relatively little research within the domain of metamemory that examines how individuals monitor their performance during memory tests, and whether the outcome of such monitoring informs subsequent memory predictions for novel items. In the current study, we sought to determine whether spontaneous monitoring of test performance can in fact help individuals better appreciate their memory abilities, and in turn shape future judgments of learning (JOLs). Specifically, in two experiments we examined recognition memory for visual images across three study-test cycles, each of which contained novel images. We found that across cycles, participants’ JOLs did in fact increase, reflecting metacognitive sensitivity to near-perfect levels of recognition memory performance. This finding suggests that individuals can and do monitor their test performance in the absence of explicit feedback, and further underscores the important role that test experience can play in shaping metacognitive evaluations of learning and remembering.

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Time Window from Visual Images to Visual Short-Term Memory: Consolidation or Integration?

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169.51.1.45 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 51 (1) ◽

pp. 45-51 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Yuhong Jiang

Keyword(s):

Short Term Memory ◽

Time Window ◽

Short Interval ◽

Visual Images ◽

Short Term ◽

Temporal Window ◽

Term Memory ◽

Visual Short Term Memory ◽

Probe Task ◽

Long Time

Abstract. When two dot arrays are briefly presented, separated by a short interval of time, visual short-term memory of the first array is disrupted if the interval between arrays is shorter than 1300-1500 ms ( Brockmole, Wang, & Irwin, 2002 ). Here we investigated whether such a time window was triggered by the necessity to integrate arrays. Using a probe task we removed the need for integration but retained the requirement to represent the images. We found that a long time window was needed for performance to reach asymptote even when integration across images was not required. Furthermore, such window was lengthened if subjects had to remember the locations of the second array, but not if they only conducted a visual search among it. We suggest that a temporal window is required for consolidation of the first array, which is vulnerable to disruption by subsequent images that also need to be memorized.

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