FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Blazoning Mary Magdalene
Get PDFMary Magdalene is a significant figure in the Christian world, largely due to her unique relationship with Christ. As a woman and a reformed prostitute, the Magdalene is an unlikely friend to the son of God. However, despite her low social status and sinful past, Mary is featured in all four Gospels and is present at several crucial moments in Christ’s life and death: she anoints his feet as a sign of humbleness, witnesses his crucifixion and is the first to see his resurrection, after which she leaves society to lead a contemplative life in the desert. As patron saint of repentant sinners and the contemplative life, Mary Magdalene was an aspirational figure in late medieval piety, and the subject of many religious paintings and statues. There were Magdalene cults in Europe from as early as the sixth century, with interest at its peak in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries (Jansen, 18-48). Consequently, accounts of Mary’s life took on an almost mythical quality, with apocryphal texts such as Jacobus de Voraigne’s influential The Golden Legend drawing together the stories of several biblical women. This is evident in the Digby manuscript Magdalene play written around 1490-1530, which conflates Mary as the apostle of the Apostles, with Mary sister of Martha and the woman who has devils exorcised from her by Christ. As well as using scriptural references, the Digby Magdalene also draws heavily on Jacobus to create a narrative of the Magdalene’s entire life
Of Space Forevermore
Get PDFWe have been flirting with space for over two millennia. And, as this Forum so clearly indicates, we have not had enough.The Call for Papers for this special issue opens with a bold statement that makes the following claim: "with the invention of the internet—that infinite cyber space—our world has both radically expanded and contracted. Opened up, as our practice of intersecting with others has been drastically changed; but contracted, as this freedom has altered our experience of spatial distance forever." More important, "our world, our cities, our domestic, private, and public spaces have undergone a drastic re-definition; these new spaces have forced a change in our understanding of the nature of space itself."Indeed. However, beware. The temporal framework superimposed upon space—that temporal linearity associated with the pre- and post-moment of the invention of the internet—could accidentally re-introduced the normative category of absolute time that rationalizes and legitimizes the events in the world that has both radically expanded and contracted. This temporal framework superimposed upon space, which, as it is argued, caused a re-definition of the material and immaterial attributes of space, should make us aware that this framework will only represent a present intelligibility of space and will only remain valid until a new invention replaces the invention of the internet
Orienting Design, Discourse and Perception in C’était un Rendez-Vous
Get PDF"Couldn\u27t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? ... From the compression of a century-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour?" - Walter Benjamin (83)In 1976, Claude Lelouch mounted a steadicam to the front bumper of his Mercedes and drove through early morning Paris at breakneck speed, from Porte Dauphine to the Sacre Coeur Basilica. He titled the unedited eight-minute take C\u27était un Rendez-Vous ("It was a date") in reference to its final moments, in which a young woman emerges grinning—and relieved—atop the Montmartre steps to meet the driver. The title\u27s simplicity is a red herring, and the film disavows it quickly. An introductory intertitle opens, stating plainly that the film we are about to see has not been manipulated, before dissolving into a forward-moving shot inside a pitch-black tunnel on Paris\u27 périphérique highway. A rectangle of light grows from the centre of the frame, recognizable as the tunnel\u27s exit, and, as the camera penetrates it, the soundtrack of engine noises and tire squeals kicks in. The proportions of the light box and the darkness around it give it the immediate appearance of a cinema screen, a connection cued doubly by the sound\u27s synchronized introduction when we enter the space (see figs. 1-4). The analogy advertises a lineage of ideas that will emerge during the film, evoking Benjamin\u27s quote and the city symphony film among an abundance of other theorists and works that have thematized the links between the fabrics of the moving image and the city
“To the Ice-House” – With Apologies to Virginia Woolf: Conversations on Place in the Humanities
No full textWe are a group of faculty from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who came together from the disciplines of literature, history, and religion as part of a Global Humanities research initiative.In addition to discussing our current research, and to introducing each other to a variety of different critical methodologies, we wanted to ask what the humanities does, and can, and must, contribute to broader discussions of contemporary environmental issues. We also aimed to discover what shared terminology already exists and what meta-language can be created to describe and analyze concepts of landscape and place culture across disciplinary and cultural boundaries.The evolution of the group, however, is an essential part of our "end-product," which is, in turn, a work in process. Thus we emphasize the importance of the processual aspect of both our research and our research dynamic. Rather than formulate a pre-existing goal, our ideas have grown organically into a shared sense of the importance of place to our work in the humanities. We have committed ourselves to pursuing broader ideals of promoting a sustainable university and more just social understandings of our place in the world. Through our conversations and differing expertise on various geographical and temporal locales, we have confirmed our sense of the necessity of grounding our work in the places where it occurs
“Justified in the World”: Spatial Values and Sensuous Geographies in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Get PDFIn contrast to the conventional division between "early" and "late(r)" works, the development of Cormac McCarthy\u27s oeuvre is typically described in geographical terms, with critics subsuming his first four novels under the heading "Appalachian Works" and his subsequent novels under the title "Western Works". Far from merely constituting a convenient categorising or framing device, these positional terms reflect an increasing concern with space and place in McCarthy\u27s novels.[2] In this article, I address spatial concerns that are specific to McCarthy\u27s 2006 novel, The Road, demonstrating how the protagonists\u27 desire for positionality and directionality is both heightened and hampered by an apocalypse that has reduced the world to dust and ashes.Like many of McCarthy\u27s previous works, The Road employs mapping motifs to explore the distinction between space and place, and to represent protagonists\u27 struggle to both master and move through space. In the post-apocalyptic world of the novel, however, maps are associated with a visual, abstracted and purportedly objective understanding of space that is shown to be both illusory and wholly inadequate.[3] In place of traditional cartography, The Road asserts a more holistic human or sensuous geography, a manner of constructing space that highlights the interaction (and interdependence) of the human body and its surrounding land, rather than the dominance of the former over the latter
Identity and Identification in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba and Béni ou le paradis privé
Get PDF"Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognised by him [...] It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend." (Fanon 216-17)The dependence of one’s “human worth and reality” on mutual recognition, highlighted by Frantz Fanon in his seminal text Black Skin White Masks, first published in 1952, plays a central role in the construction of identity in Azouz Begag’s first two novels, Le Gone du Chaâba and Béni ou le paradis privé, published in 1986 and 1989 respectively. Using contemporary post-colonial criticism to carry out a close reading of these two texts, this article will take into account the memory of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), which marked Algeria’s independence from French colonial rule, and its connection to France’s current attitude towards ethnic difference. Subsequently, the effect of these factors on considerations of contemporary Franco-Algerian selfhood will be examined, and the analysis will go on to demonstrate how an Algerian presence in France, forty-eight years after the end of the Algerian War, continues to come into conflict with the French Republic’s constitutional definition of nationhood, which favours unity of the nation by uniformity rather than an embracing of multiple identities
The Sparrow’s Fall: Self’s Mergence with Identity in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches
Get PDFIn This Republic of Suffering Drew Faust describes Civil War hospitals as “especially dangerous places…nurses—Louisa May Alcott prominent among them—regularly fell victim to typhoid, smallpox, and even heart failure brought on by the conditions and demands of their employment” (140). In the environment Faust describes, Louisa May Alcott “would have given much to have possessed the art of sketching, for many…faces became wonderfully interesting” (33). Alcott’s desire to depict hospitalized soldiers comes to fruition in her 1863 collection of letters turned fiction, Hospital Sketches. Although Alcott’s account is presented as fiction, it contains many levels of truth, embodying the type of story central in most debates concerning truth and authority within autobiography.Alice Fahrs refers to Hospital Sketches as “a fictionalized account of Alcott’s brief experiences as a nurse in Washington” (2) while acknowledging that the story is the product of Alcott’s very real experience written to her family in a series of letters (29). Scholars classify Hospital Sketches as fiction because it is signed by Nurse Periwinkle, Alcott’s narrator and alter ego (24). Elaine Showalter explains that the letters developed into a series of sketches and then into a book: “When she turned the sketches, originally written for the Boston antislavery paper The Commonwealth, into a book, Alcott added…Tribulation Periwinkle, a doughty spinster who goes to Washington because she wants something to do, and not because she understands very well where she is going” (xxvi). Alcott’s experience remains intact but the author does not. Hospital Sketchesstands as an example of how truth and authority in autobiography become suspect, while simultaneously allowing for significance and meaning to emerge
Nabokov and Wenders: Lost Landscapes and Found Meaning in the Age of the Sign Economy
Get PDFProtest as David Andrews might against the \u27misperception\u27 of Vladimir Nabokov as \u27the postmodern author par excellence\u27, claiming Nabokov as \u27premodernist in outlook\u27 (63), there is one sense in which Nabokov cannot escape the \u27postmodern\u27 label identified by Fredric Jameson. Jameson defines postmodernism, in part, as:A periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order - what is often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism (\u27Postmodernism and Consumer Society\u27 1962).Adopting Jameson\u27s dating of this \u27new moment of capitalism\u27 to \u27the postwar boom in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s\u27 (1962), this essay opens with an assertion of Nabokov as an author subject to, what Andrews terms, certain \u27postmodern realities\u27 (63).The aim of this essay is a study of these postmodern realities as a product of the consumer society and the emergence and maturation of what Pamela Odih calls the \u27sign economy\u27 (126) in two texts from \u27high epochs\u27 of late capitalism, Nabokov\u27s Lolita (1955) and Wim Wenders\u27 Paris, Texas (1984). Paramount to the argument herein is Jameson\u27s assertion that the \u27formal features\u27 of postmodernism (defined by the era of late capitalism) will \u27express the deeper logic of that particular system\u27 (1974). However, the first requirement of this introduction is a situating of the chosen texts within what has been termed \u27high epochs\u27 of late capitalism
Surrealism and the ‘Fissured Subject’: Breton, Éluard, and Desnos
Get PDFAlthough known as one of the most doctrinaire movements of the historical avant-garde – mostly due to Breton’s intense theorising and dominating personality – individual Surrealists approached the problem of the divided and decentred subject from substantially different angles. Surrealism began as a poetic movement around the circle of Breton, Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, and Robert Desnos. By the end of the 1930s most had broken with Breton, if not the foundational tenets of the movement itself. This study examines collections of Surrealist poetry from the mid-1930s from Breton, Éluard, and Desnos as examples of the variant understandings of the subject within Surrealism. Breton published The Air of the Water (1934) in the midst of his most intense articulation of Surrealist theory in Communicating Vessels (1932) and Mad Love (1937); Éluard published Public Rose (1934), Easy (1935), and The Covered Forehead (1936) just a few years before his break with Breton in 1938; The Neck-less (1934) was published by Desnos a half-decade after being ‘excommunicated’ from the Surrealist group by Breton, though he never ceased to consider himself a Surrealist. In each case, the poet’s understanding of the ‘fissured subject’ and his vision of the potential for that subject is both Surrealist and entirely individual
Plugs
Get PDFPlugs are peculiarly intimate objects. Plugs are archaic things, that belong to an economy of spaces in which what mattered was to seal, to store, to quarantine and dam up flow. But now the plug is used for different purposes, to establish connections, and to draw together places and times. Plugs are scale-transformers: they used to keep proximal things distant, now they bring distant things up close. We use plugs not to keep things apart, but to become a part of them, to plug in rather than plug up. Plugs used to keep things in their place, enforcing a world governed by the prepositions ‘in’, ‘on’ or ‘at’. Now the plug is the enabler of relationships signified by prepositions like ‘through’, ‘across’ and ‘between’. As such, the plug is a prime example of the interference between spatio-temporal dispensations that is so much a feature of the modern world. Perhaps the plug is itself a connector between the archaic and the contemporary