Ekphrasis, Abstraction, and Myth: ‘From Psyche’s Journal’, Eurydice in the Underworld, ‘Requiem’

Kathy Acker ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Colby
Keyword(s):  
Ordinary Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Abstract Sculpture

The final chapter of the study examines Acker’s practices of ekphrasis and reappropriation of mythology in her final works. Chapter six offers a close reading of ‘From Psyche’s Journal’, Acker’s creative critical piece on Cathy de Monchaux’s sculptural work, examining the ekphrastic impulse of the work. Ekphrasis is read as enabling Acker to access the materiality of sculpture in her writing. Acker’s writing practices are placed within the context of postwar abstract sculpture by women, with a particular focus on Eva Hesse’s idea of absurdity that ‘is not a “thing” but, “the sensation of the thing.”’ Acker’s ekphrastic practice is brought into dialogue with her practice of the reappropriation of mythology, and the conceptual practice that is termed here ‘literary calisthenics’, which arises from her experiments with language and bodybuilding. Acker’s two later texts, Eurydice in the Underworld (1997) and Electra (1997) are addressed in light of Elaine Scarry’s work on the difficulty of expressing physical pain. Acker’s experiments that move towards a non-verbal language against ordinary language, and the silent languages of the body, facilitate the voicing of pain, and in particular the relation between physical pain and imagining.

Variations of the Mixed Discourse

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Jaquet
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Shed Light

Lastly, on the basis of this definition, the author shows how affects shed light on the body-mind relationship and provide an opportunity to produce a mixed discourse that focuses, by turns, on the mental, physical, or psychophysical aspect of affect. The final chapter has two parts: – An analysis of the three categories of affects: mental, physical, and psychophysical – An examination of the variations of Spinoza’s discourse Some affects, such as satisfaction of the mind, are presented as mental, even though they are correlated with the body. Others, such as pain or pleasure, cheerfulness (hilaritas) or melancholy are mainly rooted in the body, even though the mind forms an idea of them. Still others are psychophysical, such as humility or pride, which are expressed at once as bodily postures and states of mind. These affects thus show us how the mind and body are united, all the while expressing themselves differently and specifically, according to their own modalities.

Bad Dreams and Secret Artists: Translating Freud into Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Popular Approach ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Creative Writer ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

This article addresses the increasingly popular approach to Freud and his work which sees him primarily as a literary writer rather than a psychologist, and takes this as the context for an examination of Joyce Crick's recent translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. It claims that translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, and that the many interlocking and overlapping implications of the word need to be granted a greater degree of complexity. Those who argue that Freud is really a creative writer are themselves doing a work of translation, and one which fails to pay sufficiently careful attention to the role of translation in writing itself (including the notion of repression itself as a failure to translate). Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud is taken as an example of the way Freud gets translated into a novelist or an artist, and her claims for his ‘bizarre poems' are criticized. The rest of the article looks closely at Crick's new translation and its claim to be restoring Freud the stylist, an ordinary language Freud, to the English reader. The experience of reading Crick's translation is compared with that of reading Strachey's, rather to the latter's advantage.

Contesting Aristotle: Science, Theology and the Resurrection of the Body in Methodius of Olympus’ De Resurrectione and the Dialogue of Adamantius

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dawn LaValle Norman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Parallel Text ◽  
Entire Text

Abstract The contest over the resurrection of the body used the scientific authority of Aristotle as ammunition on both sides. Past scholars have read Methodius of Olympus as displaying an anti-Aristotelian bias. In contrast, through close reading of the entire text with attention to characterization and development of argument, I prove that Methodius of Olympus’ dialogue the De Resurrectione utilizes Aristotelian biology as a morally neutral tool. To put this into higher relief, I compare Methodius’ dialogue with the anonymous Dialogue of Adamantius, a text directly dependent upon the Methodius’ De Resurrectione, but which rejects arguments based on scientific reasoning. Reading Methodius’ De Resurrectione with greater attention to the whole and putting it in the context of its nearest parallel text retells the traditional story of early Christian resistance to Aristotle. Methodius of Olympus’ characters, although they view scientific knowledge as subordinate to philosophy, see it as neutral in and of itself.

The Justified Body: Hauerwas, Luther and the Christian Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The One ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

scholarly journals “Celebration of the Body”: Marshall McLuhan and the Sensory Conceptualism of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lauder
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Artist's Book ◽  
Livre D'artiste

Through a close reading of the 1976 artist’s book and exhibition catalogue “Celebration of the Body,” the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.’s pioneering representations of the body’s “informationalization” are situated within the conceptual company’s creative reworking of Marshall McLuhan’s sensory media theories. In turn, McLuhan’s thought is located within a genealogy of physiological aesthetics that troubles conventional narratives of Conceptual art as a movement defined by its engagement with theories of cognition, language, and systems. Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of modernism as reflecting the decomposition of the body under a regime of psychophysical experimentation provides the framework for this article’s re-evaluation of the Toronto School theorist and his influence on the foundational Vancouver-based “critical company.”En utilisant une lecture attentive du livre d’artiste et catalogue d’exposition « Celebration of the Body », 1979, les représentations du corps numérisé de N.E. Thing Co. sont encadrées dans le remaniement créatif des théories médiatique de Marshall McLuhan entreprit par la compagnie.  À leurs tours, les pensées de McLuhan sont placées dans une généalogie d’esthétique physiologique qui dérange les récits conventionnels de l’art conceptuel comme étant un mouvement défini par son engagement avec les théories de la cognition et du langage. L’analyse de Friedrich Kittler de modernisme comme réflexion de la décomposition du corps effectuée par des expériences psychophysique fournit le cadre pour cette réévaluation du théoricien de l’École de Toronto et son impact sur la « compagnie critique » fondatrice de Vancouver.

‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Michelle Charalambous
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Works

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

Mansfield’s Psychology of the Emotions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan Marie Hammond
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Emotional Pain

In one of Katherine Mansfield’s early stories, ‘In Summer’ (1908), a young fairy child named Phyllis sits upon a hillside and sobs, ‘Oh, I have never been so unhappy before. […] I have a curious pain somewhere.’1 It is an arresting and confusing moment. Phyllis, a child on the brink of adulthood, cannot name the unfamiliar and vaguely located pain. The nature of the pain is never clarified. It might be physical pain (for women’s specific pains are often spoken of in oblique terms) or emotional pain, which plays out in the body but cannot be said to happen in any particular place. To read Mansfield is to reckon with such ambiguously embodied feelings – life for her characters is the experience of obtrusive and often unarticulated emotions. In her most memorable characters we observe emotion in the body: Ma Parker tries desperately to hold back her ‘proper cry’ (2: 297), Bertha Young has uncontrollable urges ‘to run instead of walk’ in her moments of bliss (2: 142), and the anxious Kezia tiptoes out of ‘Prelude’ feeling ‘hot all over’ (2: 92)....

Coda: Affect after the Affektenlehre

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-142
Author(s):  
Roger Mathew Grant
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Historical Investigation

This concluding chapter places contemporary affect theory in conversation with the historical investigation outlined in the body of the book. It finds within recent affect theory a certain musicality and a tendency to rehearse dynamics that once played out within historical music theory. This final chapter closes with a call to restore diachronicity and movement to affect theory: to think affect historically, and to therefore pay close attention to the movements between the objects and subjects that have generated it.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Dorothy H. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Immune System ◽  
Infected Individual ◽  
The Body ◽  
Virus Infections ◽  
Emerging Viruses ◽  
The Future

The Introduction outlines the structure of this VSI. The first two chapters introduce viruses, their structure and diversity, how they live, and their effects. Then the constant battle between viruses and the immune system of the infected individual is outlined, followed by chapters about infection by emerging viruses, epidemic viruses, pandemic viruses, and those that persist in the body for a lifetime. Later chapters look at how our knowledge of viruses has advanced through the ages and how the recent molecular revolution has enhanced our ability to isolate new viruses and to diagnose and treat virus infections. The final chapter speculates about how humans and viruses might interact in the future.

scholarly journals Mixing Body and Soul: Galen on the Substance of Soul in QAM and De Propriis Placitis

Phronesis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-246
Author(s):  
Robert Vinkesteijn
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Body And Soul

Abstract In a late treatise, That the Capacities of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body (QAM), Galen of Pergamum infamously offered the view that the substance of the soul is identical with a bodily mixture. This thesis has been found radical and extreme in modern scholarship and is generally considered to be at odds with Galen’s ‘agnosticism’ on the substance of soul. In this paper I propose a close reading of QAM that allows us to make sense of it in terms of Galen’s other work, including his late work On My Own Opinions (De Propriis Placitis).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document