scholarly journals Supernatural surveillance and blood-borne disease in Bram Stoker's Dracula: Reflections on mesmerism and HIV

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Fran Pheasant-Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Original Novel ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Venereal Infection

Abstract Surveillance and/or voyeuristic viewing are central to certain horror productions and are often related to control and dominance. While such modes of looking are usually less obvious in the vampire film, the vampiric gaze nonetheless exerts a more definitive and immediate effect, causing its victims to fall prey to inevitable death and an extended afterlife. Although all vampire films tend to exploit these mesmeric aspects of Victorian culture, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Frances Ford Coppola, progresses the notion of 'supernatural surveillance'. Coppola uses numerous creative visual techniques to accentuate the attention to eyes, notably in scenes that are linked to sexual desire and promiscuity. If the original novel implicitly reflected contemporaneous fears of venereal infection, namely syphilis, then Coppola's film is preoccupied with AIDS. This essay argues that the film's attention to eyes and the gaze not only reflects the mesmerism associated with Victorian culture but also resonates with new forms of socio-cultural watchfulness emerging in the AIDS era of the twentieth century.

The Art of Reception: J. W. Waterhouse and the Painting of Desire in Victorian Britain

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Male Subject ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Modern Self ◽  
Classical Knowledge

This chapter examines how paintings depicting the classical past became a way of talking about—or not talking about—sexual desire by focusing on the art of John William Waterhouse. It considers four of Waterhouse's paintings—Saint Eulalia, Mariamne, Hylas and the Nymph, and Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus—and shows that they are a paradigmatic site for reflecting on the complexity of the circulation of classical knowledge in Victorian culture—reception in action. It also explores how Waterhouse represents the male subject of desire, and how his representational devices position, manipulate, and implicate the viewer. The discussion places Waterhouse at the center of a Victorian worry about male self-control and erotic openness, and suggests that his case is an example of how one strategy of modern self-definition loves to oversimplify “the Victorians” as a contrastive other to today—and nowhere more obviously than in the field of sexuality.

Seeing Stein’s Masculinity

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-67
Author(s):  
Chris Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Man Ray

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.

The Only Tone for Terror: Tony Harrison and the Gorgon’s Gaze

2019 ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Henry Stead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
European History ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Experimental Medium ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Film And Video

This chapter introduces the reader to Tony Harrison’s audiovisual poetry, composed for and broadcast on British television through the late 1980s and 1990s. Harrison has to date made twelve full documentary film-poems, and one film-poem feature, entitled Prometheus (1998). They all brim with the darker side of European history, current affairs and class politics, and explore what limits of what poetry might do, and how it might do it, in the televisual age. The chapter sets Harrison’s film poetry in its cultural context by paying attention to the poet’s major influences in the experimental medium (John Grierson’s GPO film unit and early Soviet filmmaking), before homing in on his 1992 film-poem The Gaze of the Gorgon as a species of social psychotherapy. The act of gazing at the Medusa-like and thus usually petrifying image of twentieth-century atrocity is offered here not as a ‘dope’ to mankind, but a stimulant towards its cure. The film-poem draws explicitly on Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Dionysiac art’ and Simone Weil’s pacifist notion of ‘force’, and Robert Jay Lifton’s work on trauma and the holocaust. Harrison’s hugely ambitious and uniquely accessible film-poems are currently publically unavailable. Are they the ‘missing link’ in the evolution of contemporary film and video poetry?

The Gaze in Polybius' Histories

1991 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 10-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Roman Imperialism ◽  
Unitary Reality ◽  
As If

Summarizing Polybius' contribution to the study of Roman history, Mommsen paid him the following compliment: ‘His books are like the sun in the field of Roman history; where they begin, the misty veils which still cloak the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars are lifted, where they finish, a new and if possible still more vexatious twilight begins.’ Since Mommsen our understanding of Polybius' methods, his bias and omissions, his ideology and concerns, has progressed immeasurably, thanks largely to the work of Pédech and Walbank. Nevertheless, the idea that the Histories represent, at least in their conception, the illumination of an intrinsic reality persists. Polybius' supposed ‘poor style’ is often treated as in some way an absence of historiographical mediation. In this case, ‘transparency’ in a text, the sensation that it provides unmediated access to what it describes, is achieved not by a smooth and inconspicuous style, but by coarseness. Tarn compared Polybius' work to rescripts and despatches, as if he were only interested in an unobtrusive recording role, and this attitude to the historian, far from being in decline, has received some radical and authoritative support in recent years. One reappraisal of Roman imperialism has argued that Polybius was much closer to the reality of the process than many twentieth-century historians. Another study claims to ‘want to say no more than what Polybius said’. Ultimately, I have no argument with those who stress Polybius' honesty and reliability. More problematic, however, is an attitude to our use of Polybius' history which is often assumed in eulogies of his truthfulness: that when we read Polybius, we are enabled to gaze directly on the landscape of Roman history, a single substantial unitary reality, structured out of objective facts.

scholarly journals The Interracial Theatre of 'Strip Tents' in Travelling Shows: Spaces of Sexual Desire in Southeastern Australia, 1930s-1950s

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Southeastern Australia ◽  
American Tradition

By the end of the nineteenth century agricultural shows (what in the American tradition are called 'fairs'), were well established in Australia.  An enduring symbol of agricultural progress and rural modernity, they became in the twentieth century a vehicle for the professionalization of agriculture and the evolution of European farm women's political organizations. 

When the poet becomes the muse

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-374
Author(s):  
Nina Rolland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Song Settings ◽  
The Gaze

Women are ubiquitous in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, presented either as ideal, unattainable figures, or as earthly, abominable creatures. Instead of examining the gaze of the poet on women, it is interesting to reverse the roles and to explore the gaze of women on Baudelaire, or more precisely what women hear in Baudelaire’s poetry: what happens when the poet becomes the muse? While the most famous musical settings of Baudelaire’s poems have been composed by men (Duparc, Fauré, Debussy), this article aims to uncover musical settings of Baudelaire’s poetry by twentieth-century female composers. In a first instance, this article offers an overview of twentieth-century songs by female composers; from the mélodies of Marie Jaëll to the contemporary settings of Camille Pépin, what do song settings of Baudelaire tell us about the visibility of female composers? Secondly, the article provides a detailed analysis of L’Albatros (1987), a music-theatre piece by Adrienne Clostre. By deconstructing Baudelaire’s poems, Clostre offers a reflection on creativity that cannot be separated from a general understanding of the place of female composers in society.

Encoding Female Sexual Desire on the Egyptian Stage

1999 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-280
Author(s):  
Tori Haring-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Female Sexual Desire ◽  
Egyptian Woman ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

When sexuality is a formally censored topic on the stage, how can one represent this fundamental human desire? For centuries, Western playwrights have used sex in highly coded language so that it is simultaneously acceptable and titillating. But Nehad Gad, one of Egypt's most prominent writers in the late twentieth century, and the only Egyptian woman to have her plays translated into English for publication, devised her own method to mention that taboo subject. She filled her plays with the desire for commercial goods—an important topic in this increasingly materialistic country. But for her characters, men and women alike, the desire to acquire and exchange commercial items is also a means of expressing sexual desire.

scholarly journals Jonathan Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)

Authorship ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Ulleland Hoel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle

Jonathan Cranfield. Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. £24.99

scholarly journals Escaped from the Harem, Trapped in the Orient: An analysis of the multiple gazes in Nadine Labaki’s movie Where Do We Go Now?

1970 ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
Anna Kokko
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Broad Array

Throughout history, the majority of artists have been men, and quite often the women in their works have been featured as passive objects of male sexual desire. This sort of one-sided dynamic is ubiquitous; it can be detected in the vast majority of Western nude paintings, and even modern advertisements tend to conform to the same pattern (Berger, 1977). As a consequence, feminist discourse of the representation of women in visual culture has focused on the concept of male gaze. However, the proliferation of images in modern times has given rise to a “broad array of gazes and implied viewers” (Sturken, 2005, p. 87). Women are no longer simply objectified, nor is the business of directing the gaze relegated to solely a male domain.

The Strange Career of Fair Play, or, Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria

2015 ◽  
pp. 267-283
Author(s):  
Lara Kriegel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Boer War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Late Victorian Literature ◽  
The Ideal

Wars fought overseas had an indelible imprint on the Victorian home front and its cultural formations. In their responses to the Crimean War (1854–6), writers of middlebrow fiction promulgated the ideal of muscular Christianity, wherein might was deployed for purposes of right. This notion found popular expression in the ideal of the games ethic, which had at its core the quintessentially British notion of fair play. This became a preoccupation within late Victorian literature for young people, as well as a recurring motif in the popular press, particularly during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). Although it would be subject to reversal during the Great War (1914–18), this idea would endure well into the twentieth century. As it traces the career of fair play, this essay seeks to understand the contours of Victorian culture in the later nineteenth century and the reverberations of Victorian values into the twentieth century.

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