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“Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals”. Conceptual Blending and Eco-animalism in Atwood’s Speculative Fiction
No full textThis paper takes as its starting point the notions of blending and conceptual
metaphors in order to advance a new reading of Atwood’s fiction, one which sees it as
parabolic stories projecting the conceptual metaphors “man is a wild animal” and
“nature is a victim of injury”.
Atwood’s Wilderness Tips (1991), The Tent (2006) and the MaddAddam trilogy not
only develop their own detailed blueprints of the Canadian fauna, but they also reveal
Atwood’s eco-animalism blending together men and animals, and leading to genetic
mixing of species. By spending her childhood in the bush among wild bears, silver
foxes, otter, weasels and muskrats, Atwood experienced the horrors of animal abuse. I
intend to track through these references and look at the issues – attitudes to human
crimes against nature, question of animal representations in narrative writing, historical
and personal past related to eco-animalism etc. – which they raise. But my central
purpose will be to re-read Atwood’s eco-animalism from a cognitive perspective,
projecting Atwood’s thoughts on the Canadian waste land, inhabited by genetically
modified animals and by Gothicized animal figures. In line with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land, in which thoughts are an entangled mass of animals, Atwood seems to employ
new animal metaphors to convey their eco-bond with nature and to denounce all forms
of animal exploitation. Through wild bears, aquatic birds, glow-in-the-dark rabbits,
friendly, scentless rakunks (half-skunk, half-raccoon), wolvogs, rakunks, liobams, and
so forth, I suggest, Atwood attempts to build into her works a kind of eco-warning
which T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land extols with important socio-cultural consequences
for the Canadian outcasts denouncing in Eliot’s words “those who suffer the ecstasy of
the animals”
'the road of war' and 'the path of peace': William Morris's Representation of Violence
No full textThis paper takes as its starting point J.S. Mill’s comment on war, described as “an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things”, as well as Freud’s theory of war neuroses in his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), and uses both these concepts to advance a new reading of William Morris’s literary writings focusing on violence, one which sees it as not “the road of war” but “the path of peace”.
Morris’s early romances (“Svend and His Brethren”; “Golden Wings”), not to say of A Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere, and the high fantasies (The House of the Wolfings, The Roots of the Mountains, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, The Water of the Wondrous Isles) develop their own detailed blueprint of wars and battles which reveal to be a broad philosophical meditation on the entire mediaeval vision of man’s aggressive attitude. As part of this overview of the tradition Morris devotes close attention to mediaeval emblems of war (armours; shields; swords), displaying considerable ambivalence towards them. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues – chivalric values, warriors and fair women of old time, narrative representation of war in utopian writing, etc – which they raise.
But my central purpose will be to re-read such writings as primitive forms of medievalism in a Freudian perspective. I will reflect on the conflict between the life instinct – Eros – and the death instinct – Thanatos –, and interpret the violence shown by Morrisean proper men of war as “an outpouring of innate aggressiveness”, one which introduces man’s failure of restraining his instinctual motives, reminding us that the principal task of civilization is to “defend us against nature”. Through the regression to a primitive level of personality, I suggest, Morris attempts to arouse a sense of rejection, in order to progress to the dream of order which News from Nowhere extols, with important political solutions which permit to live safely in an organizational manner with others
“‘Dante Alighieri, a dark oracle of wisdom and of art’: la rimediazione del medievalismo dantesco nei double works of art di D.G. Rossetti"
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Blending Orientalism and Romanticism: Keats’s Talismanic Lady in D. G. Rossetti and William Morris
No full textThis paper takes as its starting point the cognitive notion of blending investigated by Fauconnier and Turner (1994), in order to advance a new reading of D. G. Rossetti’s and William Morris’s Orientalism which sees it as a blending between Keats’s Romanticism and the fabulous and exotic Arabian Nights. Rossetti’s poems and double works of art as well as Morris’s The Earthly Paradise are imbued with the atmospheres of the Arabian Nights but also rely heavily on Keats’s Orientalism. I intend to track these references and, from a cognitive grammar perspective, look at the issues they raise – the influence of Keats’s Romanticism on Rossetti’s and Morris’s poems, the parabolic projection of Arabian stories onto Keats’s, Rossetti’s and Morris’s works. My central purpose will be to re-read Rossetti’s and Morris’s poems from a conceptual metaphor perspective. Such conceptual metaphors as «East is magic» and «East is sensuality» are projected in Rossetti’s poems and art as well as in Morris’s The Earthly Paradise as ways of representing the Oriental world. From Keats’s talismanic lady in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Rossetti and Morris derive inspiration to create a fleshly Orientalism, or what Edward Said defined «the eminently corporeal»
"Canadian Fire/Waterscapes. La mappa cognitiva di Vancouver nei Fire-Dwellers di Margaret Laurence"
No full textCharles Dickens's Heart of Darkness: Anthropophagy and Lycanthropy in Great Expectations
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"The Regenerating Satire of the Last Pre-Raphaelite: Ford Madox Ford’s Rejection and Revisitation of William Morris’s Chivalric Ideal"
No full textThis paper takes as its starting point Arnold Hauser’s notion of sociology of art to advance a new reading of Ford Madox Ford’s rejection and revisitation of William Morris’s aesthetic credo. As a twentieth-century writer, Ford Madox Ford was deeply affected by the modernism of William Morris. Raised in the literary-artistic milieu of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the “last Pre-Raphaelite”, as Douglas Goldring defines Ford, came into contact with the socio-cultural activities sponsored by The Socialist League and by Morris & Co. But Ford Madox Brown’s grandson, who was amused and fascinated by the revolutionary figure of Morris, casts the Pre-Raphaelite man of genius into doubt and derision, emphasising his deficiencies and idealistic propensities. According to Ford, the era of Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, marketable poetry and the Social Revolution is now over. We can see traces of Ford’s parodic allusion to Morris’s art and writings in The Simple Life Limited (1911), “his sunniest and most successful comic novel”, an anti-utopian novel that desacralises Morris’s chivalric ideal as expressed in News from Nowhere (1890). The Morrisian world of simplicity is repeated in A Simple Life Limited but the forms are varied: always new versions, new connotations, new characterisations, but always the same satirical meaning. The “simplest English writer of [the nineteenth century]”, as Swinburne calls Morris, represents the stereotype that must be demolished. It is my objective here to concentrate on a comparative analysis of Morris’s News from Nowhere and Ford’s A Simple Life Limited from a new-historicist perspective because it allows me to demonstrate Ford’s processes of change and regeneration with respect to Morris’s mediaeval tradition. In A Simple Life Limited, Ford employs a dynamic mode of myth reading – he makes the reader aware of Morrisian myths and, most importantly, points out that they are not natural but constructed; they are, in Hauser’s words, “concrete modifications of a basic form which does not exist”. The Morrisian myth of simplicity is stolen and restored through a demystifying approach. Ford demonstrates the inapplicability of Morris’s principles to a modern socialist colony which is composed of intellectuals, poets, novelists, literary critics, theatre directors, craftsmen, architects, miniaturists, garment manufacturers and printing press operators and is dedicated to “Beauty, Art, Poetry itself and all the Finer Things” as envisioned by William Morris. Like Nowherians, Simple Lifers devote themselves to the simplicity of the lesser arts in order to better themselves and to live a simple, dignified almost perfect life. Reminiscent of Morrisian sages, Simple Lifers are experts and producers of great benefit who practice applied arts correctly. But the Morrisian idea that simple living habits predispose us towards securing happiness proves ineffective for Simple Lifers and their devotion to the lesser arts aimed at producing something useful for life appears to be completely useless in the modern era. Through Simon Branson, Horatio Gubb, Mr Major, and Ohpelia Branson, I suggest, Ford deconstructs and regenerates Morris’s mediaeval tradition revealing his filiation to and distancing from the cultural and social formations pertaining to the Victorian era of mediaeval revival
Minority Languages and Cultures in Audiovisual Translation (Routledge Research in Audiovisual Translation)
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