As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age

Tekstualia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (44) ◽  
pp. 37-58
Author(s):  
John T. Matthews

The following essay provides an analysis of the dialectical relationship between the aesthetic form of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and its „sedimented” social context. With its highly modernist and avant-garde qualities, As I Lay Dying stands out as one of Faulkner’s aesthetically most ambitious works. However, the author proposes, relying chiefl y on Adorno’s conceptual framework, a multifarious reappraisal in which the unconventional formal layer of Faulkner’s work manages to dialectically establish a textual independence while simultaneously uncovering the disturbing socioeconomic stratum that not only foregrounds the progressive shift of the New South but also provides a contextual base for As I Lay Dying.

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-184
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs

Pure cinema and the aesthetic of the fragment is applied to the evolution of sound design in the avant-garde experimental silent cinema of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The chapter argues that sound design and production were conceived as an integral part of pure cinema, tracing the emergence and development of this philosophy within the avant-garde experimentation with film form. Hitchcock articulates a philosophy of pure sound cinema in a number of critical pieces from the early 1930s and is clearly influenced by European philosophies of the early sound image. Sound is read as a discretized contrapuntal aesthetic form, achieving the abstraction of noise as patterned pitch (melodic), harmonic, and rhythmic form, in close analyses of Rear Window, The Birds, the imitation of Vertigo’s “Madeleine” theme in Pino Donaggio’s score for Dressed to Kill, and Argento’s cutting of a narrative segment of Deep Red to a standard blues I–IV–V harmonic progression. The chapter concludes with a study of Bernard Herrmann’s concluding sonic motif in Psycho as the purity of sound form in its atonal harmonic structure.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu

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.


ARTic ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 121-134
Author(s):  
Apsari Dj Hasan

This study aims to examine the decorative types of Gorontalo karawo fabrics in aesthetic and symbolic elements. Researchers want to know as made in the research design, aspects that are present in the decoration of fabrics in aesthetic and symbolic elements. This study uses a number of related theories to get results, and as a determinant, the authors use aesthetic theory, as well as historical approaches. With this theoretical basis, the author seeks to describe the aesthetic aspects and symbolic meanings that exist in Gorontalo karawo fabric. Through the data collection of the chosen motif and provide a classification of motives, the part is used as a reference for research material. The results showed that Gorontalo filigree had an aesthetic value consisting of unity formed from the overall decorative motifs displayed, complexity formed by complexity in the manufacturing process, and intensity of seriousness in the manufacturing process or the impression displayed on the filigree motif. The aesthetic form also reflects the diversity of meanings for communication, such as the symbol of a leader with his noble instincts, a symbol of cultural cooperation, which is worth maintaining, and ideas about nature conservation. This research proves that the decoration in Gorontalo filigree cloth (karawo) does not only act as a visual value, but also as a communication of cultural meanings and social status. Of all these distinctive motifs show a relationship between humans and humans and humans with nature. The influence of culture from the Philippines is also known to have a strong influence on the emergence of the Gorontalo filigree namely manila filigree.


2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 650-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bian Ling Zhang

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 198-202
Author(s):  
Sushma Jain

The painting tradition in the Maratha region dates back to prehistoric times. Human beings have left examples of paintings with a very careful reflex of behavior. In the primitive tendons of Madhya Pradesh, we are surprised today by the many linear signs of the human and the aesthetic form of the weapons, following the craving to be cultured and ornate on that barbar. मराठा क्षेत्र में चित्रकला परंपरा का प्रारंभ प्रागैतिहासिक काल से होता है। मानव ने बहुत ही प्रांरभ में व्यवहार की सजगता के साथ चित्रों के उदाहरण छोड़े हैं। मध्यप्रदेश की आदिम कंदराओं में हमें उस बर्बर पर सुसंस्कृत और सुअलंकृत होने की लालसा के अनुगामी मानव के रचे अनेक रेखीय चिन्ह तथा अस्त्र शस्त्रों के सौंदर्य प्रधान रूप आज हमंें आश्चर्य चकित करते है।1


Author(s):  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Tomáš Glanc ◽  
Maria Engström ◽  
Ilja Kukuj ◽  
Klavdia Smola

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.


Author(s):  
Tony Crook

Angkaiyakmin notions of a person's efficacy circulating beyond themselves and combining with others is used in this chapter as a vantage point on anthropological interpretative artefacts, and the section argues that these contemporary aesthetics of anthropological knowledge-making produce interpretative forms after a particular understanding of subjectivity and personhood. The chapter specifically compares the capacities of Bolivip and anthropological knowledge-practices, and considers how each form of knowledge adheres to a powerful aesthetic that is taken for granted by the respective practitioners. Recognition and currency for artefacts – the capacity to animate analytic and social relations in others – is governed by exhibiting this demanding aesthetic form. The chapter then addresses the insights from Bolivip knowledge-practices to anthropological knowledge-practices: by adopting the vantage point of ‘the textual person’, the aesthetic principles through which anthropological knowledge is given form are outlined, and the means by which anthropologists circulate parts of themselves to others – their efficacy and ‘relations’ – are examined. The ‘textual person’ figure makes explicit the form of subjective relationality that informs anthropological interpretation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...


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