scholarly journals Nordic Modernists in the Circus. On the Aesthetic Reflection of a Transcultural Institution

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Annegret Heitmann
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

Around 1900 the circus was not only an important and highly popular cultural phenomenon all over Europe, but also an inspiration to writers and artists at the onset of Modernism. As an intrinsically intermedial form with international performers, it can be seen as an expression of certain important characteristics of modern life like innovation, mobility, dynamics, speed and vigor. Its displays of color and excitement, of bodies in motion and often provocative gender relations were experienced by authors as a challenge to create new aesthetic forms. However, the circus does not only figure prominently in well-known works by Kafka and Thomas Mann and paintings by Degas, Macke or Leger, it is also thematized in texts by Scandinavian authors. When writers like Henrik Ibsen, Herman Bang, Ola Hansson and Johannes V. Jensen referred to the circus in their works, they represented it as an experience of modernity and addressed themes like alterity, mobility, voyeurism, new gender relations and ambivalent emotions. As a self-reflexive sign, the circus even served to represent the fragile status of art in modernity and thus made an important contribution to the development of Modernism.

scholarly journals Imagining Hedda Gabler: Munch and Ibsen on Art and Modern Life

Text Matters ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 71-86
Author(s):  
Kristin Gjesdal
Keyword(s):  
Set Design ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The University

Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the sketch is given the title Geniuses. Munch’s sketch shows Ibsen, who had died a few years earlier, in the company of Socrates and Nietzsche. The picture was a working sketch for a painting commissioned by the University. While Munch, in the end, chose a different motif for his commission, it is nonetheless significant that he found it appropriate to portrait the Norwegian dramatist in the company of key European philosophers, indeed the whole span of the European philosophical tra­dition from its early beginnings to its most controversial spokesman in the late 1800s. In my article, I seek to take seriously Munch’s bold and original positioning of Ibsen in the company of philosophers. Focusing on Hedda Gabler—a play about love lost and lives unlived—I explore the aesthetic-philosophical ramifications of Ibsen’s peculiar position between realism and modernism. This position, I suggest, is also reflected in Munch’s sketches for the set design for Hermann Bahr’s 1906 production of the play.

scholarly journals Love and homophobia in Malawi's spoken-word poetry movement

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-387
Author(s):  
Harri Englund
Keyword(s):  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Spoken Word Poetry ◽  
The People ◽  
Popular Interest ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Selection Of

AbstractBy the early 2010s, a number of Malawian poets in their twenties had begun to substitute the elliptical expression of earlier generations with a language that resonated with popular idioms. As poetry directed at ‘the people’, its medium is spoken word rather than print, performed to live audiences and distributed through CDs, radio programmes and the internet. Crafted predominantly in Chichewa, the poems also address topics of popular interest. The selection of poetry presented here comes from a female and a male poet, who, unbeknown to each other, prepared poems sharply critical of homosexuality and what they regarded as its foreign and local advocacy. The same poets have also gained success for their love poems, which have depicted intimate desires in remarkably compatible ways for both women and men. The poets who performed ‘homophobic’ verse went against popular gender stereotypes in their depictions of romantic love and female and male desires. This introductory essay, as a contribution toAfrica's Local Intellectuals series, discusses the aesthetic challenges that the new poets have launched in the context of Malawi's modern poetry. With regard to gender relations in their love poems, the introduction also considers the poets’ possible countercultural contribution despite their avowed commitment to perform for ‘the people’.

Brief Analysis for the Aesthetic Form of Chinese Garden Art

2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 650-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bian Ling Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Development History ◽  
Artistic Conception ◽  
High Uniformity ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

Chinese garden art has developed gradually along with the neutralization--lasting appeal--artistic conception trend till to the peak, meanwhile, those aesthetic forms can be existed synchronously with historical advancement, logic arrangement in parallel and correspondence as well as abundance and deepening of the interior connotation and exterior extension, which represent the high uniformity of the development history and logics of Chinese garden art. Nowadays, the landscape garden development is required to probe its root, explore its cultural soul, so as to base itself upon the garden industry all over the world. Additionally, the function of traditional aesthetic form will show the powerful functions, declare publicly the deep influence of modernized landscape garden development.

The What-Has-Been and the Now of a Communist Past in Malaya in the Films of Amir Muhammad

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65
Author(s):  
Carlo Bonura
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Village People ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Malayan Emergency ◽  
The Village ◽  
Communism Today ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

This article considers two films by the Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad, The Last Communist of 2006 and the Village People Radio Show of 2007. Both films are focused on the Malayan Emergency and the lives of a small group of Malayan communists. Through an engagement with Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” the analysis in this article examines the aesthetic forms that structure Amir’s films, namely nonlinear narratives, intertextuality, and the use of images and stories as comparative frames. This article argues that Amir’s films enable audiences to recognize how the truth of a communist past in Malaysia, both of its politics and suppression, inflects the present. The films provide an opening to recognize how the absence of communism today is the effect of the ideological clearing of all leftism that became the hallmark of the end of the British Empire in Malaysia. Communism is made meaningful in Amir’s films both as a lived experience and as a displacement that is absent from the postcolonial everyday.

Theoretical Problems of Soviet Underground Culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Tomáš Glanc ◽  
Maria Engström ◽  
Ilja Kukuj ◽  
Klavdia Smola
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Relational Art ◽  
Theoretical Hypothesis ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article presents a spectrum of theoretical problems associated with the Soviet artistic underground as a historical and cultural phenomenon. The central focus is on constellating issues of terminology and definition around the borders of underground culture in the USSR, within scholarship about it. As a theoretical hypothesis of the handbook, the chapter introduces the concept of the lifeworld, which the volume editors and contributors interpret as a synthetic multimedia nexus of a given nonconformist circle’s activities, both artistic and cultural. The underground lifeworld manifests the aesthetic discourse idiosyncratic for each artistic circle and serves as the source of semi-spontaneous “relational art” that absorbs and generates artworks, along with performative and communicative practices. Through the concept of the aestheticized lifeworld, the authors of this article define the historical specificity of the Soviet artistic underground in relation to the Russian historical avant-garde and Western neo-avant-garde.

On Jon Snow’s death: Plot twist and global fandom inGame of Thrones

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Héctor J Pérez ◽  
Rainer Reisenzein
Keyword(s):  
Participatory Culture ◽  
Negative Events ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Cognitive Reactions ◽  
Global Event ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Activities ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual

The death of Jon Snow at the end of the fifth season of the TV serial Game of Thrones prompted an intense reaction among the fans of the serial on social media. Thousands of viewers all over the world contributed to the discussion of the meaning and implications of this event, turning it into a global event in the participatory culture of contemporary seriality. In this article, we propose an explanation of this remarkable cultural phenomenon. Based on a theory of plot twists as surprise structures, we argue that the reactions of fans can be understood as concrete, contextually adapted realizations of the characteristic cognitive reactions evoked by the emotions of surprise and shock caused by unexpected negative events. Our analysis focuses in particular on the contributions of viewers to the establishment of the beliefs disconfirmed by the plot twist and on the cognitive activities that served to adapt their minds to the new reality revealed by the twist, which also included reflections on the aesthetic aspects of the plot twist and the narrative in which it was embedded. By providing a public platform for these reflections, the fan forums allowed the individual attempts to adapt to the plot twist to become a collective endeavor. The study illustrates how universal cognitive mechanisms interact with culturally produced contents to generate similar reactions to a fictional event across the globe.

scholarly journals On Approximate Aesthetic Curves

Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 1394
Author(s):  
Ioana Crăciun ◽  
Dorian Popa ◽  
Florina Serdean ◽  
Lucian Tudose
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Basic Element ◽  
Neutral Curve ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
Neutral Curves ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

Symmetry plays an essential role for generating aesthetic forms. The curve is the basic element used by designers to obtain aesthetic forms. A curve with a linear logarithmic curvature graph gradient is called aesthetic curve. The aesthetic value of a curve increases when its gradient is close to a straight line. We introduce the notions of approximate aesthetic curves and approximate neutral curves and obtain estimations between the curvature of an approximate aesthetic/neutral curve and an aesthetic curve.

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hui
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The World ◽  
Architectural Decay ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
The Aesthetic

When we think of ruins and literature, we usually think of Romanticism. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature dislodges this critical commonplace by locating European literature’s fascination with architectural decay in the aesthetic culture from Petrarch to Spenser. The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as category of discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. The ruin thus became the material sign—the broken cipher—that marked the rupture between the world of the humanists and their idealized classical past. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future. To make this case, Hui embraces a philological method, a venerable tradition that has recently undergone a resurgence of interest. Philology is particularly appropriate to the study of ruins, since philology and ruins are both fundamentally about imagining the whole through its parts. Specifically, the book traces three words in three authors as semantic case studies: vestigia in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. By starting from the smallest unit of linguistic speech—the word—and enlarging our view to its larger cultural context, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature not only revises some of our most basic ideas about early modern texts and how they came to be, but also offers a new way for understanding the fundamental theme of survival in the classical tradition at large.

scholarly journals Theater museums as a base for excursion and tourism programs

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (27) ◽  
pp. 333-339
Author(s):  
Tatiana V. Portnova
Keyword(s):  
Work Related ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Tourism Sector ◽  
History Of ◽  
Development Processes ◽  
Aesthetic Field ◽  
Academic School ◽  
Tourism Service ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Artistic Image

The article discusses excursion work related to theatrical museum collections, which is one of the interesting, but little developed types of activities in the field of tourism. Гhe author refers to the specifics of the theater museums involved in updating knowledge and raising the professional level, developing practical skills and professional competencies of tourism service specialists in the field of a holistic presentation of the history of the development of such a museum as a specific sociocultural institute. It touches on the interesting history of the creation, formation and composition of collections, as well as the modern activities of major museums and the latest museum centers around the world, hosting tourists. It is noted that the purpose of excursion and tourist programs using the collections of theater museums is not only to improve the modern tourist structure, but also to create a special spatial and artistic image that complements the content of the text, overcomes psychological discomfort due to the frequent presence of tourists in the bus or in open spaces , by creating favorable environmental conditions, the realization of the aesthetic potential of the museum atmosphere, capable of Favorably affect the emotional state and enrich the tour. In this regard, today, an important complex of problems that lie in the aesthetic field arises in the context of intensive tourism development processes, along with the need to solve infrastructure and technological issues, problems of implementing socio-economic problems in the tourism sector. Theater museums in excursion programs are considered as a special historical and cultural phenomenon. Their development is a continuation of world and domestic experience and, at the same time, a unique cultural phenomenon, inextricably linked both with the regional traditions of the countries and with the theater school - the academic school, for which the theater exhibit has become the most important area for the realization of creative potential.  An attempt is being made to reflect the optimal combination of considering general theoretical and methodological issues and concrete and practical material on museum theater pedagogy.

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