FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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"I am either all the way there or I am not. I don\u27t know how to walk this middle line" (Skorczewski 109). The Impact of Manic and Depressive States on Anne Sexton\u27s Poetic Depictions of Food.
Full text linkThis research explores poet Anne Sexton’s use of food imagery in To Bedlam and Part Way Back, focusing on the way food is presented in contextual relation to the manic-depressive cycles Sexton was experiencing. This is placed within the socio-political climate of the 1950s-1960s which influences Sexton’s relationship with food
Epilepsy in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot - Language, Stigma, and Mythology
Full text linkAround 400 BC, Areatus -- one of Hippocrates’ pupils, proclaimed ‘epilepsy is an illness of various shapes and horrible’. Later, Areatus was also one of the people who called the disease ‘sacred’; according to them, a deity had sent a demon to possess the patient, or the patient had been cursed by the moon. The Hippocratic physicians were among the first to attempt to separate the scientific and the cultural/fictional discourses. However, even till the late nineteenth century, medical narratives were intertwined with the fictional narratives that surrounded epilepsy, and these narratives contributed significantly towards the stigma that has historically been associated with the disease. This paper will examine how medical and non-medical discourses shaped the representation of epilepsy and contributed to the cultural mythology surrounding epilepsy. In the course of this paper, the author will specifically focus on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which the reader sees the author’s personal view of epilepsy, cleverly accommodated into the character of Prince Myshkin, who is surrounded by social stigmatisation. Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy for a major part of his life, and he maintained detailed accounts of his seizures. His epilepsy had a huge influence on his writings and his perception of the world. Dostoevsky’s epilepsy has been seen as particularly relevant, since being an epileptic himself, his works provide the reader with an insight into the disease which is hard to find elsewhere
Darwinian Aftermaths: Reflections on the Thirty-Second Issue of "FORUM".
Full text linkThe outgoing Editor in Chief reflects upon the thirty-second issue of FORUM and the theme of \u27Aftermath\u27
The Contemporary Art of the Nature Morte in the Age of Artificial Life Forms: The Metafictional Illusion of Life in Installation Art and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
Full text linkObserving the artistic response to the illusional nature of artificial life forms in the field of installation art, contemporary writers often allude to conceptual artworks through ekphrastic means to “grasp the texture of the contemporary real” (Virilio 4) in a technologically “transformative moment” (Boxall 4). A “reality hunger” for the contemporary brings together a “burgeoning group of interrelated […] artists in a multitude of forms of media” (Shields 3) to experiment new forms across disciplines through ekphrasis, which “strikes to explode” the “stuffed package” of a culture “containable with its shaped word” (Krieger 233). In her essay “Art Objects” (1995), Jeanette Winterson shows her interest in contemporary conceptual art as she writes that “the true artist is interested in the art object as an art process” and establishing a connection to the future instead of being interested in the final product (12). Her definition of art coincides with that of conceptual art as it seeks to analyse “the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art” (Shanken 433), and thus takes on the framework of the meta-critical process from conceptual art with “the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models” (Shanken 434). Deriving from the artistic landscape of conceptual installation art and its interactions with science, Winterson borrows the subject of the nature morte and the metafictional framework to address the clashes between artificial life forms and the human civilisation by alluding to artworks such as those of Damien Hirst in her novel Frankissstein (2019) when writing about cryonic bodies: “It’s a little like an art installation in here isn’t it? Have you seen Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank?” (106). Based on the interdisciplinary interrelations between installation art and contemporary literature, this paper will read the dialogue between Winterson’s ekphrastic subject of the nature morte in Frankissstein and contemporary installation art, including works of Hirst, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Guillaume Paris, as a response to the rise of artificial life forms with respect to their metafictional and illusional nature as AI will become “fully self-designing” (Winterson 73)
Communication as Cure: Treatment & Text in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below
Full text linkFleeing oncoming enemy forces in Southern France in the summer of 1940, Leonora Carrington passed into Spain and suffered a mental breakdown. Written in the summer of 1943 in an abandoned embassy building in Mexico City, the essay Down Below recalls this treatment in unnerving detail, anticipating later (semi-)autobiographical works such as Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water (1961) or Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). This essay seeks to build upon this scholarship by examining the composition of the text as a ‘treatment’ in itself, thus centring the clinical reality of Carrington’s experience, but also re-asserting her authorial agency. The intensely complex gestation of the text is, the author argues, intrinsic to its central themes and concerns, as well as constituting an essential element of the journey from illness to health. The author draws a comparison between the dehumanising effects of the sanitorium and the convulsive drug Cardiazol, whereby the isolation of madness is unbearably heightened; and the collaborative restoration of identity that occurs through narration
HIV/AIDS, Harm Reduction, and Neoliberal Containment Strategies in Contemporary UK Documentary Theatre
Full text linkUsing Peter Darney’s play 5 Guys Chillin’ as a case study, this essay explores how documentary theatre may operate as a distinctly neoliberal public health measure when it comes to reducing the risk of HIV transmission related to subcultural practices such as chemsex. The subject of countless sensationalist and tacitly homophobic headlines in recent years, chemsex has generated a kind of moral panic around gay subcultures in recent years, with several journalists and filmmakers erroneously condemning the practice as the main driver of HIV in the UK. Although Darney has described the play as an attempt to tackle such demonisation, 5GC inadvertently ends up restating pathologizing narratives surrounding chemsex via what Roger Foster has termed an ‘ethic of authenticity\u27: the notion that one can reach happiness by adapting to normative ways of living and neoliberal health diktats. Combining Foster’s critique of neoliberal therapeutic culture and the fiction of “wellness” with Herbert Marcuse’s theories surrounding so-called ‘one-dimensional society’, this essay seeks to explain how 5GC paradoxically perpetrates its ethos of anti-prejudice by pathologizing interview subjects as victims of a subculture intent on rejecting its own societal oppression
Translingualism as Creative Revolt: Rewriting Dominant Narratives of Translingual Literature
Full text linkThis essay traces the global development of translingual literature in order to confront the pervasive myth of the monolingual paradigm which insists that meaningful interaction can only occur in one language at a time in a given context. This paper shows that this Eurocentric mindset persists in translingual literature, negatively affecting critical accounts of translingual authors whose work falls outside of monolingual parameters. It offers a more appropriate account of a few of these authors, who use their writing to actively work against the monolingual paradigm and promote linguistic diversity. These authors employ translingualism as a necessary tool of identity expression, refusing to reshape themselves to the standards of a monolingual cultural purity. By prioritizing their own hybrid voices, translingual authors put the onus of comprehension on their readers, inverting the paradigm of monolingualism by denying easy access to the monolingual reader. It will focus especially on Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros, whose hybrid identity is a driving force in her work, and who uses translingualism especially in her poetry, to fully express her dual identity
Robert Frost’s North of Boston: A Poetry of Resistance
Full text linkThis article explores the idea that Robert Frost’s North of Boston can be interpreted as a poetry of resistance in terms of methodology and subject matter. The methodological thread pertains to Frost’s poetics whilst the subject matter pertains to the historical and socio-political beings which Frost dramatises and records
Against the Misuse of the ICCPR Act: Protest and Activism by Sri Lankan Political Cartoonists
Full text linkThis paper investigates the work of three cartoonists – Awantha Artigala, Gihan de Chickera, and Shanika Somathilake – in response to the misuse of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Act by the Sri Lankan police in a series of arrests between April and May 2019
On Representing ‘Doubly Othered’ Gay, Black Subjects
Full text linkIn this essay, I explore what happens to our conventional understanding of ‘othering’ when subjects are not just othered on one count, but on two: in this case, on account of both their blackness and their homosexuality. Focusing specifically on the case of artist subjects, I demonstrate that this process of double othering has significant bearing on the interpretation of these subjects’ artworks. Thereby to provide a more adequate model for approaching these subjects and their work, I propose expanding Homi Bhabha’s conception of cultural hybrids to account for these subjects’ sexuality too. In order to lend support to this expanded concept of hybridity – and to provide an example of its application to the context of artistic production – I consider the work of the Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. I draw attention to the complexity of the theoretical framework required to sufficiently capture all the processes at work in determining how both he and his artwork are perceived in a post-colonial context. In doing so, I aim to lend support to the contention that the cultural production of those in similarly ‘doubly othered’ social situations as Fani-Kayode is best understood within the context of this expanded concept of hybridity