15 research outputs found
Angel With a Missing Wing: Loss, Restitution, and the Embodied Self in the Photography of Josef Sudek
No full textContextualized within his life story and his political and cultural milieu, the author interprets Josef Sudek's quest to find what had been lost as a driving force behind his life's work. Through the analysis of his photographic oeuvre, this essay will build a conceptual bridge between Sigmund Freud's formulations on mourning and identification, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of the embodied self. Synthesizing these contributions with Melanie Klein's theories on mourning and reparation, Hannah Segal's application of Klein to Proust, Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit, and its contemporary elaboration, après-coup, I will posit Sudek's work as an extension, reclamation, and re-creation of the self, and of the world that comprises the embodied self
Text As Muse, Muse As Text: Janáček, Kamila, and the Role of Fantasy in Musical Creativity
No full textA close reading of his letters and the texts on which Leoš Janáček based his late works, contextualized by critical historical and biographical events, sheds new light on Janáček's fantasy world--and, in particular, the critical role played by his late-life muse, Kamila Stösslová The author shows that Janáček's muse was also "composed": that the contours of his passion were in fact patterned after the significant literary works he chose to set to music, mapping her object representation onto the various characterizations and narratives specified by those texts. The Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters" is reconstrued this quartet as a condensed distillate of the various texts around which Janáček constructed his fantasy love—including, and perhaps most significantly, an occult work literary tnot previously identified. If Janáček's muse was modeled on texts, then those texts, too, were his muse
Metamorphosis and the aesthetics of loss: II. Lady of the woods–The transformative lens of Francesca Woodman
No full text
Design as Dream and Self-Representation
No full text Philip Johnson’s masterpiece—the Glass House—is compared to a dream and conceptualized as containing encrypted and embedded representations of the self. Freud’s masterpiece— The Interpretation of Dreams—is the theoretical and methodological model for this approach to design-as-dream. Drawing on Johnson’s words and forms set in biographical, historical, and cultural context, interpretive paths are traced from manifest design elements of the Glass House to overdetermined latent meanings, yielding new and surprising insights into the Glass House, its elusive architect, and the process of its design. A mirror that reflects an image, a lens that focuses it, and a prism that reveals its components, the Glass House turns a lucid eye onto its maker. </jats:p
"To Half Believe and Wholly Play": Dialectics of Reality in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Two Bad Mice
No full textThe commandeered dollhouse of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Two Bad Mice is understood as an allegorical stage for and symbolic container of the inner life of the child—in particular, her oscillatory play between the real and the fantastic. These dialectics are both dramatized in the narrative, and woven into the fabric of the prose. Enjoining them to "play" along, Potter reassures the young reader that in spite of her "bad" impulses, feelings and fantasies, she are not "so very very naughty after all.
