Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Baudelaire’s ‘Une Charogne’
Get PDFIn the late 1980s I taught Baudelaire’s ‘Une Charogne’ to a class of first-year students using the Richard Howard translation of Les Fleurs du mal (1982). Howard was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the institution (one of them, anyway) where I was un-gainfully employed: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a progressive professional college for would-be artists, architects, and engineers located in the neighbourhood of New York City formerly known as the Lower East Side but now called, for reasons of real estate gentrification, the East Village. The year was likely 1987 or soon thereafter because 1987 was the year the Pet Shop Boys released their synth-pop hit ‘I Want a Dog’. The dog the Pet Shop Boys wanted was a Chihuahua and Richard Howard had a little dog that he sometimes carried around with him, perhaps so that when he got back to his small flat, he could hear somebody bark (as the song goes). Naturally, whenever Howard would sit outside my office, I would play ‘I Want a Dog’ at very high volume on a boom box (it was the ’80s, after all)
Step Forward the Cowards! – Humiliation, Shame and Countershame in Memories of the White Feather Campaign
Get PDFOne of the most enduring and dramatic tropes of the First World War is the image of a young woman giving a white feather to a man who is not in uniform to shame him into enlisting. This article examines the ‘White Feather Campaign’ from a history of emotions perspective, focusing on the male shame experience. It analyses this as part of a dynamic interaction of the participants: the white feather giver, the receiver, and the witness(es). The narratives of the men involved illustrate the varied ways they regained their sense of manhood in the face of humiliation: through reframing and counter-shaming
Decadent Historicism on Stage: Trans History and Alexander Sacharoff’s Renaissance Dances
Get PDFThis article looks at the Renaissance dances of the largely forgotten modernist performer Alexander Sacharoff. It reconstructs the controversies surrounding these dances starting from his debut in Munich in 1910, asking why the Italian Renaissance appeared in contemporary criticism as a vehicle for articulating ideas about gender non-conformity. The first half of the article shows how performers like Sacharoff, as well as viewers and critics, drew inspiration from a Renaissance conceived by decadent thought of the late nineteenth century. The second half of the article moves to the murkier territory of historical experience, considering the transhuman possibilities of Sacharoff’s historicism, as many spectators reported experiencing Sacharoff’s dance as an uncanny blurring between human and artwork. The article suggests that Sacharoff’s work not only speaks to the archival body theorized by performance studies, but also offers an alternative paradigm for a more expansive understanding of historical genders that centres performance as an important site for negotiating gender in the past. The article ultimately underlines the role played by material and visual pasts for trans embodiment in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century
Visions of Phantasm: Madame de Sade in the Excess of Language and Imagination
Get PDFMadame de Sade (1965), a celebrated play by Mishima Yukio (1925-70), disentangles the enigmatic psyche of the Marquis de Sade’s wife, Renée, who decides to leave him after nearly two decades of imprisonment and forced separation. Featuring six female characters, the dramatic play has been often considered to reflect Mishima’s fondness for theatrical spectacle akin to that of Japanese kabuki. Setting aside the typical labeling of the play as such, this article contends that Madame de Sade engages with thematic concerns Mishima shares with fin-de-siècle decadent aesthetics.
To this end, the play sets forth a mutation of Renée who undergoes three stages of passivity, desperation, and renunciation in her relationship with Sade. These psychological transformations are interwoven with the socio-historical conditions of the French Revolution that affected the fate of the aristocracy. In the twilight of ancien regime, six characters metaphorically render various worldviews representing social and cultural disparities. Unpacking the reality of a crumbling aristocracy, the three acts imagine and assess the ontological nature of the Marquis de Sade. The process of evaluating Sade, however, results in a self-assessment of Renée herself, who ultimately accepts his immeasurable degree of monstrosity that has tacitly demeaned her as a devoted wife incapable of spirited vice. By virtue of the protagonist’s excessive subjectivity and linguistic opulence, the play eloquently stages a premonition of apocalypse for both the personal and national history of France. Simultaneously, the play reflects Mishima’s aspiration for modernizing Japanese theatre, as well as his endorsement of the autonomy of art tarnished by commercialized shingeki
Keep Your Distance: Covid-19 creativity or collapse
Get PDFIt is standard practice to begin academic articles by problematising a question. What, exactly, do we mean by the term ‘creativity’? To what, precisely, does the word ‘collapse’ refer
Book Review: Affect in Artistic Creativity – Painting to Feel by Jussi A. Saarinen
Get PDFMost Art Therapists and Art Psychotherapists have a belief in the healing qualities of the media. It is a shared article of faith that creative material processes, of themselves, can promote the development of health and stability. Nevertheless, we also know that the relation to the material element is not without hazard. This is a problem for us, I think, because we can never be certain about the relationship between a service user, or client, and the physical material she manipulates. In terms of the relation that the other has to substance and process, we are always on the outside.
This book by Jussi A. Saarinen, who is a psychologist and a post-doctoral researcher in philosophy, explores the painter’s relationship to painting, the ‘experience itself’ (2021: 1. italics the author). Saarinen stresses that he is not concerned with expression but with what painters feel ‘because they paint’ (2021:1). His book is essentially a carefully constructed argument, which engages with philosophical literatures, psychoanalysis, recent cognitive theory and interviews with artists, in support of the proposition that: “Painters paint to feel.” (2021: 1. Italics the author).
 
Repetition versus Revision: Narratives in the BBC’s Great War Centenary
Get PDFThe BBC’s plans for the First World War Centenary were of significant magnitude. Through 2,500 hours of programming, it sought to broaden knowledge of the conflict across its various media. Yet this objective was occasionally diminished by the resounding presence of popularised tropes about the war. With consideration of two key anniversaries and flagship programmes, this article reflects upon the balance between familiar ideas and new developments, the disconnect between television programming and developing historiography and the use of modern techniques in conveying a new narrative
