Sodomscapes

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Hans Blumenberg ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
History Of

Sodomscape presents a fresh understanding of Lot’s wife in the reception history of the Sodom story. Premodern biblical cultures found in the scene of abortive flight a monitory sign of improvident curiosity and rooted inhospitality. This book’s cross-cutting array of texts and images—a fifteenth-century illuminated miniature, a group of Counter-Reformation devotional paintings, a Victorian lost-world adventure fantasy, a Russian avant-garde rendering of the flight from Sodom, Albert Memmi’s career-making first novel (The Pillar of Salt), and a contemporary excursion into the Dead Sea healthcare tourism industry—shows how the repeated desire to reclaim Lot’s wife, across millennia and diverse media, turns the cautionary emblem of the mutating woman into a figural laboratory for testing the ethical bounds of the two faces of hospitality – welcome and risk – in diverse cultural locations. Sodomscape—the book’s name for this gesture—revisits touchstone moments in the history of figural thinking (Augustine, Erich Auerbach, Maurice Blanchot, Hans Blumenberg) and places these in conversation with key artisans of the hospitality question, particularly as it bears on the phenomenological condition of attunement to the unfinished character of being in relation to others (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt). The book’s cumulative perspective identifies Lot’s wife as the resilient figure of vigilant dwelling between the substantialist dream of resemblance and the mutating dynamism of otherness. The radical in-betweenness of the figure discloses counter-intuitive ways of understanding what counts as a life in the context of divergent claims of being-with and being-for.

scholarly journals Receiving the Word in Image: Federico Zuccaro’s the Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) and the Reception History of the Bible in the Counter-Reformation

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Church
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Visual Exegesis ◽  
Church Tradition

Abstract The Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) was an altarpiece created by Federico Zuccaro (1541–1609) for the Church of the Annunciation, Rome. It was the first image commissioned by the Order of the Jesuits, a movement involved in propagating the objectives of the Counter-Reformation Church. Altarpieces were particularly effective points of communication between the Catholic Church and the lay beholder, and used visual exegesis as a means to communicate appropriated receptions of biblical texts. The intimate connection that these objects have to their theological and political context marks them as significant moments of biblical reception, that have, up to this point, been overlooked by historians in the field. This article identifies the broader lacuna in scholarship surrounding the reception history of the Bible during the Counter-Reformation. Whilst this is due to a preference for studies of the Bible in the Protestant Reformation, the lack of scholarly investment poorly reflects the relevance of the Counter-Reformation period to the reception-historical methodology. The context prioritized the interpretation of the Bible through the lens of Church tradition, or in other words, the history of the Bible’s reception. This affinity is echoed in the reception-historical approach found in contemporary biblical scholarship, creating a hermeneutical link between the two contexts. Visual culture was a valuable expression of Counter-Reformation rhetoric and visualized the mediation of biblical texts through Church tradition. This article uses Zuccaro’s altarpiece as a tool to argue this hypothesis and postulate the intimate relationship maintained between texts and their reception in Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

Lot’s Wife is Still Standing: In Search of the Pillar of Salt

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Low
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Sexual Trauma ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead

Abstract This article explores how readers search for Lot’s wife at the shore of the Dead Sea and how they use the pillar of salt as a destination, as a symbol, and as a lasting memorial. Whether Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt that travelers to the Dead Sea can visit today is not relevant for this analysis. Spanning many centuries, this reception history of Lot’s wife argues that readers use her for their own interests to address their own cultural concerns. Three chronological areas are addressed for a broad-sweeping coverage of some trends and traditions about Lot’s wife. While the Hebrew text remains ambivalent about memorializing Lot’s wife, Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian sources reveal a concern to remember Lot’s wife in terms of God’s final judgments. The article then turns to medieval Christian travel narratives and maps that use Lot’s wife to mark the borders of Christendom, with pilgrims seeking her amid Crusades-era concerns. Finally, modern sources are discussed that deal with Lot’s wife in terms of symbolizing sexual trauma, deviance, and danger. Gender theory and queer theory are utilized in the article as secondary ideological lenses through which to engage reception history. What results is a complex picture regarding how people use Lot’s wife to negotiate boundaries, engage biblical myth, and further their own agendas.

Jacob Gordin and the Anti-Spinozist Legacy of Hermann Cohen in France

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Ori Werdiger
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia ◽  
Hermann Cohen ◽  
Point Of Departure

Hermann Cohen is often described as the last in a line of German idealist, or Jewish rationalist, thinkers. This article, instead, takes Cohen as a point of departure, tracing his distinct form of anti-Spinozism which was transmitted to France by the Russian émigré philosopher of religion Jacob Gordin. It considers the engagements by Cohen, Leo Strauss, and Gordin with Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, and examines the role an essay by Gordin played in bringing Cohen's view to francophone Jewish audiences and in defending Cohen's reading of Spinoza against Strauss's critique. The article then treats the postwar redeployments of Gordin's essay by Emmanuel Levinas and the historian of anti-Semitism Léon Poliakov against the Zionist and Spinozist views promoted by David Ben-Gurion. Attention to the overlooked centrality of Gordin demonstrates the importance of Russian intelligentsia as carriers of Cohen's legacy, highlights the presence of Cohen's anti-Spinozist views in postwar French and French Jewish thought, and introduces another site within the reception history of Spinoza in the twentieth century.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

La ética del Otro: una introducción al pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Carlos Alvaréz Teijeiro
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
First Philosophy

Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of ethics par excellence in the twentieth century, and by own merit one of the most important ethical philosophers in the history of western philosophy, is also the philosopher of the Other. Thereby, it can be said that no thought has deepened like his in the ups and downs of the ethical relationship between subject and otherness. The general objective of this work is to expose in a simple and understandable way some ideas that tend to be quite dark in the philosophical work of the author, since his profuse religious production will not be analyzed here. It is expected to show that his ideas about the being and the Other are relevant to better understand interpersonal relationships in times of 4.0 (re)evolution. As specific objectives, this work aims to expose in chronological order the main works of the thinker, with special emphasis on his ethical implications: Of the evasion (1935), The time and the Other (1947), From the existence to the existent (1947), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (1961) and, last, Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (1974). In the judgment of Lévinas, history of western philosophy starting with Greece, has shown an unusual concern for the Being, this is, it has basically been an ontology and, accordingly, it has relegated ethics to a second or third plane. On the other hand and in a clear going against the tide movement, our author supports that ethics should be considered the first philosophy and more, even previous to the proper philosophize. This novel approach implies, as it is supposed, that the essential question of the philosophy slows down its origin around the Being in order to inquire about the Other: it is a philosophy in first person. Such a radical change of perspective generates an underlying change in how we conceive interpersonal relationships, the complex framework of meanings around the relationship Me and You, which also philosopher Martin Buber had already spoken of. As Lévinas postulates that ethics is the first philosophy, this involves that the Other claims all our attention, intellectual and emotional, to the point of considering that the relationship with the Other is one of the measures of our identity. Thus, “natural” attitude –husserlian word not used by Lévinas- would be to be in permanent disposition regarding to the meeting with the Other, to be in permanent opening state to let ourselves be questioned by him. Ontology, as the author says, being worried about the Being, has been likewise concerned about the Existence, when the matter is to concern about the particular Existent that every otherness supposes for us. In conclusion it can be affirmed that levinasian ethics of the meeting with the Other, particular Face, irreducible to the assumption, can contribute with an innovative looking to (re)evolving the interpersonal relationships in a 4.0 context.

National Institute of Art and Design named after Kamoliddin Behzod

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 104-108
Author(s):  
Dilzoda Alimkulova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
20Th Century Art

The art of Uzbekistan of the first decade of 20th century (1920-30s) is worthily recognized as the brightest period in history of Uzbek national art. We may observe big interest among the artwork which was created during the years of Independence of Uzbekistan towards the art of 20th century and mainly it may be seen in form, style, idea and semantics. Despite the significant gap between the 20th century art tendencies and Independence period, there is very big influence of avant-garde style in works of such artists as Javlon Umarbekov, Akmal Ikramjanov, Alisher Mirzaev, Tokhir Karimov, Daima Rakhmanbekova and others.

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