The ‘Image-World’ and the Reality of Photography

This chapter considers Antonioni’s thematisation of photography in and beyond Blow-Up (1966), in the context of the postwar proliferation of media images and image culture. It argues that if photography and what Vilém Flusser more broadly terms ‘technical images’ affect Antonioni’s cinema, his cinema in turn also demonstrates a commitment to reflect on such proliferation, and engage film, as itself a medium of technical images, in a self-critique of the role of the image in mass media culture.

Estate world in Bunin`s prose:from “Sukhodol” to “Wanderings” and “The Life of Arseniev”

The image of the estate — “noble nest” is one of the key ones in Bunin’s depiction of Russian world. This image is illuminated before a reader by writer`s works of different years. It is examined how this image is changing, is subjected to correction and even transformation depending on the time when the book was written. Prognostic and culturally sensitive writer’s concept translated into a fatal attachment of the characters to the estate (“Sukhodol”). That attachment is akin to a religion. Writer’s concept is implemented this way with help of master poetics of surrealism that create the picture where “dreams are sometimes richer than reality”. The dramaticism of culturally sensitive view is replaced by the tragic of an apocalyptic vision in the works of beginning emigrant period (“Nameday”). The phase of “return” of Russian estate to timeless space of culture begins in 1930s — 1940s (“Wanderings”, “The Life of Arseniev”). The culture as well as the Russian world as a whole is illuminated as “not temporary and distorted but eternal and metaphysically enlightened”. It is necessary to bear in mind that in addition to cross-cutting transformations of the estate’s image, world of the estate is organically linked with the general concept in every specific work. This image is enriched with new semantic focuses and nuances every time.

Phenomenological Reproduction in Thompson and Mailer's New Journalism

In this essay, I seek to interrogate the New Journalism of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer (exemplified in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [1971] and The Armies of the Night [1968] respectively) through the lens of David L. Eason’s concepts, “cultural phenomenology” and “the image-world.” In doing so, I delve deeply into questions of epistemological authority, examining the methods and success of each writer in his attempts to communicate experience to the reader, as well as the relevance of this endeavor to Thompson and Mailer’s historical moment. By placing these two writers in conversation, I hope to identify areas of con- and di-vergence in order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of each writer’s approach. Through this method, New Journalism’s inner workings, which operate at the crossroads of phenomenology, journalism, and literature, come to the fore, illuminating the representational limits of the genre.

Exemplarity and Encyclopedism at the Tomb of Eurysaces

Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with exempla, stories of the past meant to serve as models for contemporary and future behavior. This period also witnessed the rise of an encyclopedic mode of composition among Latin authors, which purported to collect and organize the totality of knowledge in a given field. The following essay proposes that exemplarity and encyclopedism were not just literary devices, but deep organizational principles throughout Roman culture. It seeks to show how they were operative in the visual arts in the first century BCE, focusing especially on a frieze depicting the baking process on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces in Rome. By approaching a monument like the frieze of Eurysaces through such principles we may better articulate both visual and thematic relationships across a variety of genres within the broader Roman image world.

The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency

This essay engages an undertheorized form of democratic agency: the embodied spectacle that characterizes a strain of activist politics. Where an existing literature addresses “the spectacle” as a tactic of power, it does not do justice to how marginal groups have used radical bodily acts in order to intervene within the image-world of democratic politics (e.g., hunger strikes, die-ins, self-immolation). The essay argues that such performances represent a standing challenge to democratic theory and demand a more richly sensuous approach to how political claims are made. Such forms of bodily theatre do not only “speak” in ways that exceed official civic discourses but, in so doing, they unsettle the space of citizenship. Ultimately, these bodies do something in being undone.