FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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A Symbol in Mass Production: Ruyi Images in the Inner and Outer Cities Under the Qianlong Reign
Get PDFQianlong\u27s predilection for the Chinese auspicious symbol ruyi was satisfied by court artists and echoed in the country at large by the mass production of the New Year Picture workshops. This imperial cult manifests Qianlong\u27s authority on the country and the Han subjects\u27 recognition of the Manchu emperor
Sacred/Sacrilegious Tourism in Emily Dickinson\u27s Poems
Get PDFThis paper investigates Dickinson\u27s poetic subversion by looking at her poems of spiritual tourism, examining how these poems challenge the definition of sacredness. Although she seldom travelled, her writing frequently uses metaphors of tourism to account for religious uncertainty in a rapidly secularized and commercialized society. Her depiction of spiritual quest, in particular, deploys what William Stowe suggests as an empowering process in travel, which exposes the problematic nature of received belief systems. Her poems of tourism open up a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space, in which religious and social hierarchy can be questioned and restructured
Oral History and Revenge in Annie Proulx\u27s "The Half-Skinned Steer"
Get PDFStories are the recordings of history and serve as reminders of personal and cultural struggle. In The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition, Gisli Sigurdsson writes that before the development of written language, oral history "became a kind of knowledge bank" (57) in which stories of success, as well as those of tragedy, were retold to subsequent generations. A study conducted by Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame concludes that "earlier generations may very well determine the shape of the trajectories of future generations through what it passes on to them [. . .] for the purpose of generating foreseeable conduct" (87). While this study provides evidence that positive behaviours may be transmitted to descendents, it also implies that destructive acts may be channelled through history and generate foreseeable negative conduct. The pain of struggle, revenge, and retaliation arises from behaviours which may be perpetuated across many generations; often the original source of the feud is forgotten, yet a desire for vengeance persists.The originating concept for Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx\u27s story "The Half-Skinned Steer" is, as the author notes, "based on an old Icelandic folktale, \u27Porgeir\u27s Bull\u27" (Proulx 10). Proulx\u27s reconfiguration of the themes of revenge within this tale demonstrate how \u27old\u27 thinking can slow progress and resurrect long-forgotten grievances. In "The Half-Skinned Steer", the author relocates and remodulates the traditional folk tale to address particular issues and behaviours - work ethic, diet and vengeance - within the setting of the contemporary American West. This article will examine the ways in which Proulx reconfigures the Icelandic folktale "Porgeir\u27s Bull" to explore intersecting themes of persistence, human arrogance, and nature\u27s revenge on man
Rape and Revenge in Graphic Detail: Neil Gaiman\u27s "Calliope," in The Sandman Comic Series
Get PDFNeil Gaiman\u27s ability to weave fantasy, fairytales, folktales, mythology, canonical literature, and Gothic horror into his creative medium has played a significant role in elevating graphic literature as a subject for scholarly discourses. The Sandman series is often recognized as Gaiman\u27s most influential contribution to graphic literature. As an epic series, spanning seventy-five issues from 1989 to 1996, The Sandman tales center on the figure of Dream/Oneiros/Morpheus, the personification of the unconscious, ruler of dreams and nightmares, and all that is kept hidden from waking consciousness (Sanders 18). In this regard, Gaiman\u27s protagonist embodies the psychological fascination within the Gothic tradition, with the monstrosities that dwell deep within the human psyche. As part of Gaiman\u27s extended fantasy discourse of The Sandmanseries, the story "Calliope" stands out as one of Gaiman\u27s most overtly feminist polemics. In this tale of rape and revenge, Gaiman provides a powerful critique of male-driven economies of power and privilege through his depiction of sexual violence. Specifically, Gaiman challenges the conventional view of male mastery by illustrating the dualities of masculine creativity and failure, strength and weakness, virility and impotence, phallus and lack, as the conflicts that characterize the men of his story. In this way, Gaiman illustrates the impotence of the male perpetrators, Richard Madoc and Erasmus Fry, who violently exploit the muse Calliope by raping her and stealing her creativity to fulfill their selfish ambitions of fame and fortune
Preface to FORUM Issue 12: Authenticity
Get PDFLike many ideas forged in the Enlightenment, ‘authenticity’ has lost much of its lustre. The product of an eighteenth-century culture fascinated with the past, with notions of origins, essences, and depths, it was endowed by twentieth-century existentialism with a numinous quality that many theorists saw as ripe for deconstruction. Indeed, the traditional rhetoric of authenticity is emphatically un-postmodern in its auratic essentialism and its concern, in the absence of rational foundations, to locate some kind of centre for what is genuine and real. Such metaphysical earnestness is apt to cause embarrassment today, which is perhaps why commentators not bent on dismantling the notion of the authentic have approached it with circumspection. Among these, Lionel Trilling, whose 1971 study Sincerity and Authenticity remains essential reading, worries that ‘authenticity,’ like ‘irony’ and ‘love,’ is ‘one of those words [...] which are best not talked about if they are to retain any force of meaning [...]’ (120). More recently, Geoffrey Hartman has conceded that ‘“Spirit” and “authenticity” are word concepts that cannot be saved from their own pathos. Perhaps we should not even try to sober them up’ (1). The temperate critic, it would seem, is well advised to handle authenticity with care
Black Bodies, White Subjects: Modernist Authenticities and Anxieties in the Avant-Garde Film Borderline
Get PDFI examine the movie Borderline in its attempt to create a language of the body. Borderline was a collaborate project of the Pool group, which included director Kenneth Macpherson, the poet H. D., and her partner Bryher. Both H. D. and Bryher star in the film, along with African American singer and actor Paul Robeson. I read Borderline as a work which parallels modernist literary experiments, for instance the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, H. D. and Amy Lowell.1 This experimentalism is related to the problem of authenticity, which modernist authors often associate with the materiality of the body. The movie, as I will show in the following discussion, works with two different, intersecting notions of authenticity. On the one hand, it locates authenticity in the material body, especially the black body of its star Paul Robeson. On the other hand, it emphasizes the materiality of the medium itself.
The Burden of Authentic Expression in the Later Poetry of Geoffrey Hill
Get PDFGeoffrey Hill’s later work is increasingly concerned with the authenticity of the poet’s civic voice, and with the extent to which persuasive lyricism is at odds with the apprehension of moral truth. This concern provokes in his poetry a fierce, at times anguished obsession with the possibilities and limitations of language. Hill’s determination to forge an authentic and autonomous idiom, even as he acknowledges the essential “otherness” and intractability of language, underlies the strenuous difficulty that has characterised his work from the publication of Speech! Speech! in 2000. But, whereas many of Hill’s peers, from John Ashbery to J.H. Prynne, revel in linguistic indeterminacy, the poet-figure in Hill’s recent work emerges as one who strives to resurrect language, to preserve its capacity for “eloquence and apprehension” against the destructive tendencies of the age (CCW 349). These semantic preoccupations inform a broader anxiety about the public role of a poet in the modern world. Can he still aspire to the status of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators”, or has this aspiration since been undermined by Yeats’ dictum that “[w]e have no gift to set a statesman right” (Shelley 233, Yeats, MW 72)? Hill’s own acknowledgement of his diminished influence is coterminous with his refusal to accommodate popular whim, so that the authenticity of his verse as public utterance derives precisely from its difficulty, its anti-materialism and its resilient heterodoxy.
Masks of Infamy: The About-faces in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight
Get PDFIn Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), the opening credits sequence maps the contours of what appears to be some undecipherable structure, the camera sliding along its walls, curves, and grooves, which turn out to index the chest symbol of the film’s title character. This sequence suggests that this sign, or rather the idea for it, emerges from a center, as it traces out the canals, cavities, ridges, sockets, and nerves of the splanchnocranium or facial skeleton. The stylization of Gotham City in the film—a strange mixture of the Gothic, Expressionist, and Art Deco—also suggests that its grotesqueness rises from the spirit of its vain consumerist citizens, its corrupt officials, and its Mafioso industrialists. These sets find their counterpart in Batman’s costume, which is also animalistic, anthropomorphic, and steely-robotic all at once. It too contains a centre, reclusive millionaire Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton), who, as one youngster in the set-up to the film’s first action scene suggests, can right the “wrong direction” that Gotham society is taking. In contrast, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) eschews the notion of a centre, no one truly inhabiting the character’s costume or its symbolic vesture. In this update, everything wears a mask, and the film implies that there is nothing under these masks. As Renata Salecl makes clear, “when the subject sacrifices his desire to the Ideal, when he completely subordinates himself to symbolic identity and takes on a symbolic mask, it is in this mask that one can discern his desire” (11). As desire traverses our symbolic identities, it undergoes a continuous deformation, transcoding the qualities of the flesh and stretching them into such “externalities” as our moral ideals, spatial ensembles, ideological coordinates, aesthetic sensibilities, and social outfits. The desire of the characters in The Dark Knight remains mobile, acentric, and indeterminate, impossible to neatly situate or describe in somatic or representational terms alone. The masks these characters wear rather span these terms and thus carry the stamp of their topological relation to the face.
The Authentic Artwork? The Paris Review Author Interview
Get PDFThe interview is a peculiar form. Ranging from good cop bad cop interrogations to Prime Minister’s Question Time to Plato’s dialogues to the chat show, the interview is multipurpose and pervades modern culture. The literary interview (a term which is used variously to refer to the interviewee, the content or the style of presentation) is so popular that one critic has complained that poets don’t write essays anymore, they give interviews (Bawer 424). Search “interview” in Project Muse or JSTOR and the hits number in the hundreds of thousands. Yet critical analysis of the use of the interview for literary (as distinct from more scientific) purposes is limited to a handful of articles. We must ask why this is.
Introduction
Get PDFThis Spring 2011 issue of FORUM aims to explore the notion of authenticity as it is deployed in a series of fictional, or fictionalising, works. Whether the concept is treated as an ideal, an impossibility, or an overarching apparatus, the articles chosen for inclusion share a concern with the role of ‘authenticity’ as an ambition or illusion which is consciously sought or employed within the creative process. We have selected these pieces not only for their shared aspiration to stimulate further critical discussion regarding authentic representation, but also for their interrogation of the function of narrative compositions within which fictional, or fictionalised, individuals are represented