Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Covid-19 or Collapse: A Note
Get PDFIt is autumn 2020 now, following more than 16 weeks in a total lockdown last spring. Then hopes, more lockdowns, closed borders, and dreams that Covid-19 would be treatable soon. In week one of lockdown, I began the Art Therapy at Home Project - with 12 at risk primary school children
M. P. Shiel, the Decadent Vortex, and Racial Anxiety
Get PDFDecadent literature is unique in that it purports to confront the realities of nature as it was imagined in the late nineteenth century – nature that, like language, had proven itself deaf to human concerns and unwilling to uphold its end of the mimetic bargain that the Romantics had struck with it. If nature had shifted, over the course of the nineteenth century, from Wordsworth’s nurturing and unbetraying presence to Tennyson’s harpy, then decadent writing registered this shift and attempted to make sense of the new identity of nature and the hard truths that accompanied it. Recent criticism by scholars such as Dennis Denisoff and Benjamin Morgan has explored the relationship between decadent literature and nature through an ecocritical lens, whether in relation to paganism (Denisoff) or scalar understandings of the globe (Morgan).[i] Amidst this recent convergence of ecocriticism and decadence, whether via what Denisoff describes as ‘Pagan animism and ritual de-individuation’ or what Morgan explores as a ‘spatial scaling-up’ of literature in discussions of global climate change, human subjectivity has, somewhat inevitably, slid into the background.[ii] Ecocriticism, in its efforts to think through the effects of human agency on climate change and imagine a future for the earth that is not based on humanity, has by necessity turned towards unique ways that science fiction and fantasy writers explored extended and collective kinds of subjectivity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ursula K. Heise predicts that ‘The larger-than-life hero or single protagonist may decrease in importance, since epic-style narratives over the last century have tended to shift the major narrative actants from individual human characters to collective and sometimes nonhuman actors’.[iii]
[i] See Dennis Denisoff, ‘The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats’, Modernism/Modernity, 15.3 (2008), 431-46, and Benjamin Morgan, ‘Fin du Globe: On Decadent Planets’, Victorian Studies, 58.4 (2016), 609-35.
[ii] Denisoff, ‘Decadent Paganism’, p. 444; Morgan, ‘Fin du Globe’, p. 611.
[iii] Ursula K. Heise, ‘Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene’, ELH, 86 (2019), 275-304 (p. 301)
Baudelaire now: the sounds of childhood
Get PDFA major issue, beyond all forms of pointless subjective concerns, is that of the changes in one’s representation, not of an artwork but of an artist. The fact is that one’s appreciation of a creator is never constant – the reason an actor finds Shakespeare a genius is bound to vary according to one’s age, background, ideals, or how one’s life has previously been shaken. So, as a researcher in the interaction of philosophy and translation, I aim first to retrace the stages of my appreciation of the poet that has accompanied my life for many years
Baudelaire: The Iceberg
Get PDFI had heard that Les Fleurs du mal was one of the most important and influential works of poetry in the last two hundred years, that it was a foundational text of modernity, that it was scandalous, that it was powerful. And so as a sophomore French major in college I eagerly checked it out of the university library, having read only a small handful of poems from it before, the usual ones that often serve as someone’s first inroad to his poetry: ‘Correspondances’ with its vertical and horizontal worlds that seem profound when you’re sixteen, ‘L’Albatross’ and its seemingly transparent lesson about how the world mistreats its poets, also a lesson that teenagers are likely to find appealing. And so, once I had read through all the poems of the collection, my first thought was ‘Really? This?’ Never would I have guessed, if I hadn’t read and been told, that this was the foundational text of modernity. It was not that I just wanted to move on from it, though. While I can’t quite recall exactly how it happened, I was led to find out more, pursued an independent study that my professor wanted to make about the entire history of French poetry but which I convinced him to divide in three equal parts: pre-Baudelaire, Baudelaire, post-Baudelaire. (‘An interesting way of dividing up literary history’, said another professor.) And then, when it came time to choose an undergraduate honours thesis topic, I was a full-on Baudelairean
Enseigner L’Etranger de Baudelaire ou initier l’étudiant à la quête de l’identité
Get PDFSi nous souhaitons lire une poésie distinguée par une langue à la fois incomparable et rigoureuse, nous ne retrouvons pas mieux que celle de Charles Baudelaire. Ce poète célèbre du XIXe siècle nous a tant inspiré. En effet, la lecture de son recueil Les Fleurs du mal qui favorise le contact de l’âme et l’esprit à travers l’expression d’un monde spirituel original crée par un homme tiraillé entre une écriture idéale mais mystique, valorise notre appréciation de ce poète. Cette lecture nous a permis d’étudier, avec un certain enthousiasme, différents poèmes tels que « L’albatros » et « Correspondances », en tant qu’étudiante de langue et de littérature françaises. Par la suite, la richesse du langage baudelairien nous a incitée, en tant qu’enseignante, à choisir son texte comme un support d’un cours d’histoire littéraire adressé aux étudiants de deuxième année Licence d’Education et d’Enseignement. Dans l’intention de définir le XIXe siècle ainsi que ses différents mouvements littéraires, nous avons opté pour l’étude du poème « L’étranger »[i] de Baudelaire afin de traiter la question du vers libre qui annonce en même temps l’étude de la poésie moderne du XXe siècle. Alors, par quoi se distingue l’enseignement de la poésie de Baudelaire ?
[i] Tous les vers cités sont extraits du recueil Le Spleen de Paris. Charles Baudelaire, L’étranger, Le Spleen de Paris (Paris: Classiques français, 1997), p. 11
‘Les Plaintes d’un Icare’: An Appreciation
Get PDFOf the many indisputably great poems Charles Baudelaire gifted to French and world poetry, there is one I carry in my memory at all times, learnt in the original language. It belongs to the small group of additional poems that were published in the first posthumous edition of Les Fleurs du mal of 1868. This group includes such wonderful mature lyrics as ‘L’Examen de minuit’, ‘Recueillement’, and ‘Le Gouffre’. But the one I love is distinguished by its literary – if not literal – wings: ‘Les Plaintes d’un Icare’.
There are two reasons why I admire this poem so much. Firstly, I see it as a key to Baudelaire’s tragedy, arguably the closest there is to a true epitaph. Secondly, I find the rhythm and music spellbinding, even electrifying. Baudelaire rebukes his admirer T. S. Eliot in advance. He is not hollow; he is not stuffed. He demonstrates that a poem of suffering is one that correctly predicts the poet’s downfall, not one that fails to predict the poet’s salvation
My Baudelaire
Get PDFRecently I was seeking an epigraph for a suite of poems entitled Âpretés pour après in preparation for a collection of my work in French; I finally fixed on ‘Cependant je laisserai ces pages…’, which may appear elliptical, but a devotee of Baudelaire will recognize the phrase that follows, ‘parce que je veux dater ma colère.’ This is the concluding sentence of that great page of rant printed at the end of Fusées, the one beginning ‘Le monde va finir. La seule raison pour laquelle il pourrait durer, c’est qu’il existe.’ There is a telling variant, some editions have tristesse as opposed to colère. Both emotions are present in the passage, but it is notably the articulate anger which proves to be so nakedly prophetic:
La mécanique nous aura tellement américanisés, le progrès aura si bien atrophié en nous la partie spirituelle, que rien parmi les rêveries sanguinaires, sacrilèges ou anti-naturelles des utopistes ne pourra être comparé à ses résultats positifs
Covid 19: a personal reflection
Get PDFLooking around my small cosy living room which is unusually clean and tidy I sit on my sofa and look out of gleaming patio door windows onto a recently mowed lawn and neat garden borders. My beloved brown terrier snuggled in his basket is gently snoring. The sun is shining, there is not a cloud in the sky and the birds are singing. From this vantage point, to the unknowing eye everything appears ‘normal’ but of course nothing is ‘normal’ or ever will be again
Nest Suspended: artwork and poetry in response to Covid-19
Get PDF‘Nest Suspended’ is an artwork I felt compelled to create in response to Covid-19 global pandemic. As an experienced art psychotherapist living and working in Sydney, Australia, practising since 2004, this artwork provided the much needed container to help process and makes sense of some of my inner and outer experiences, as private and public worlds were turned upside down and inside out
Lament
Get PDFThis ‘Lament’ is presented as a concrete prose poem addressing the loss of in person sessions and the move to the online platform during the covid-19 pandemic. The chiasm literary structure has been used to format the words of the ‘Lament’ in an archaic form and to present language and thoughts in a way that challenges our perceptions of the ways we read text and picture online. The work of Riley, Lemma and J. J. Gibson have been introduced to help frame beginning thoughts on what it means to be working with another in an art therapeutic context online.
Keywords: Lament, chiasm, intersubjectivity, loss, online, virtua