Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Andrei Belyi's Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-307
Author(s):  
Olga Matich
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Moral Response ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Experimental Novel ◽  
History And Theory

The article examines the aversive emotion of disgust and its deployment in the visual arts and in the premier Russian modernist novel, Andrei Belyi's Petersburg, which has not been considered in regard to its affective poetics before. Based on recent studies of the emotions in cultural history and theory, it explores the philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects of disgust as a response to something viscerally and/or morally repugnant. The emotion, induced by the experience seen or imagined close up, provokes the observer's recoil as defined by cultural norms. As such, disgust is performative in spatial terms. Olga Matich argues that movement away from the loathsome image or idea affords the possibility of making the experience cognitively readable or legible, that disgust creates a space in which the individual negotiates her emotional as well as moral response. Yet she claims that aesthetically—and in certain instances ethically—disgust, which is always about the boundaries of the permissible, is also liberating: it offers society, its artists, and their consumers the opportunity to transgress established norms. Through extensive close readings of Petersburg, Matich shows that Belyi's experimental novel does precisely that, challenging the reader not to avert her readerly gaze from that which is unsettling and to appreciate, even to delight in, his shocking metamorphic image-making. She calls Petersburg a modernist exemplar of baroque aesthetics, characterized by excessive affect and grotesque representation, especially of the corpse, invoking the transience of life and dissolution of form.

The Emergence of Subjectivity in the Ancient and Medieval World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Cultures

This work represents a combination of different genres: cultural history, philosophical anthropology, and textbook. It follows a handful of different but interrelated themes through more than a dozen texts that were written over a period of several millennia. By means of an analysis of these texts, this work presents a theory about the development of Western Civilization from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The main line of argument traces the various self-conceptions of the different cultures as they developed historically. These self-conceptions reflect different views of what it is to be human. The thesis is that in these we can discern the gradual emergence of what we today call inwardness, subjectivity and individual freedom. As human civilization took its first tenuous steps, it had a very limited conception of the individual. Instead, the dominant principle was that of the wider group: the family, clan or people. Only in the course of history did the idea of what we know as individuality begin to emerge. It took millennia for this idea to be fully recognized and developed. The conception of human beings as having a sphere of inwardness and subjectivity subsequently had a sweeping impact on all aspects of culture, such as philosophy, religion, law, and art. Indeed, this conception largely constitutes what is today referred to as modernity. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that this modern conception of human subjectivity was not simply something given but rather the result of a long process of historical and cultural development.

History: changing the forms or forming the changes?

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
SVEND ERIK LARSEN
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Future Planning ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Vitruvian Man ◽  
Human Responsibility ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Human

Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has established itself as a specific European construct, with the 18th century as its final breakthrough in practical and ideological terms. A close analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing the Vitruvian Man, in statu nascendi, shows how the individual human being carrying the obligations and the promises of this history, is envisioned. The final remarks underline the importance of scientific knowledge in the concrete shaping of this responsibility and a plea for an increased cooperation across the disciplines.

Crafting Masculine Selves

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Chiovenda
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
Select Group ◽  
Ethnographic Methodology ◽  
The Individual

Crafting Masculine Selves represents a journey into the culture and psychological dynamics of a select group of Afghan Pashtun men. The book is based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a volatile area of Afghanistan, adjoining the border with Pakistan, carried out between 2009 and 2013. In addition to participant observation, the author employed a person-centered ethnographic methodology, wherein he conducted long-term, one-on-one interview sessions with four male individuals, and analyzed four additional life trajectories. The book unveils and chronicles how the creation and use of multiple subjectivities, and the unconscious, dissociative interplay that the individual maintains between them, is one of the “stratagems” with which individuals manage to make sense of what happens to them in real life, and to pragmatically inhabit personal circumstances that are often marred by conflict and violence, both at the interpersonal and at the political level. The main cultural thread the book investigates is that of masculinity, a crucial idiom in a very androcentric Pashtun society. Virtually all the interlocutors the book presents have to navigate deep private conflicts and contradictions related to how society expects them to be appropriate, proper men, against the backdrop of a sociopolitical Afghan context heavily impacted by almost forty years of uninterrupted war. Feeling constrained by the strict norms about a severe and honor-bound masculinity in a quickly changing Afghanistan, but equally striving to be culturally validated by their own peers, these men struggle to create and publicly legitimize their own, idiosyncratic way of being appropriate men. While they suffer at times the stern rebuke of their social environment, all the same they represent the seeds for a change of those very cultural norms.

American Catholics and “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” 1865–1873

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-64
Author(s):  
Erin Bartram
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual ◽  
American Catholic

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.

scholarly journals The Ethics of Survival: Responsibility and Sacrifice in Environmental Ethics

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilan Safit
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Species Extinction ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
Moral Response ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Individual

The primary concern of environmental ethics pushed to the limit is the question of survival. An ethic of survival would concern the possibility of morality in an environmental crisis that promises humanity immeasurable damage, suffering, and even the possibility of species extinction. A phenomenological analysis of the question of moral response to such future catastrophe reveals—in Heideggerian fashion contra-Heidegger—that the very question positions us in a relation of responsibility towards a world and a humanity that lies beyond one’s reach and extends into the future. Responsibility, then, arises as a constituting element that defines humanity and therefore cannot be bracketed away or suspended in a time of crisis. Through a reading of Hans Jonas’ notion of responsibility and a critique of some major notions of Environmental Ethics, this article argues that an ethic of survival is conditioned by the survival of humanity as a moral, responsible species. The main challenge of this responsibility is further suggested to be the clash between the autonomy and dignity of the individual and the vital needs of the larger community in the struggle for survival. 

Hesiod and the Visual Arts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. A. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Vase Painting ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of

This chapter explores the influence of Hesiod’s Theogony on Greek visual artists of the archaic period (ca. 700–480 bce). Since dozens of divinities and heroes mentioned in the poem appear in sculpture and (more often) vase painting and cannot be systematically treated, one major work with strong Hesiodic associations is examined as a test case. The Attic black-figure dinos signed by the painter Sophilos and dated ca. 580 bce includes more than thirty gods and goddesses participating in the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, future parents of Achilles. All of these can be found in the Theogony, and the poem can be a helpful guide to understanding how the individual figures are placed in the procession. The unique depiction of Okeanos on the dinos illustrates especially well the complex relationship of text and image.

The Digital Cicognara Library: transforming a 19th century resource for the digital age

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-54
Author(s):  
Holly Hatheway ◽  
Roger Lawson ◽  
Charlotte Oertel
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art History ◽  
Web Application ◽  
Access Point ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Digital Collection ◽  
The Individual ◽  
International Initiative

The Digital Cicognara Library is an international initiative to recreate in digital form the private book collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834). His collection of five thousand early imprints comprises foundational literature of art and archaeology, and includes a diverse range of publications in all areas of the visual arts. Our partnership's 21st- century effort advances Cicognara's Enlightenment-era ideals by making digital copies of his library available through an open access web application, where they will be fully searchable from a centralized database as well as relevant subject research interfaces. The aggregated images and text offer a potentially transformative opportunity for the discipline of art history and allied disciplines. By offering a new interface for Cicognara's collection, the endeavour allows open access availability to nearly all of the key historical volumes, the illustrations within, and the searchable metadata. The Digital Cicognara Library offers a corpus that will allow scholars to ask and answer new questions in disciplines beyond art history and archaeology, and will offer scholars of early printed books a new access point to study both the individual volumes and their relationship to each other in an accessible digital collection.

scholarly journals Art across Frontiers: Cross-cultural Encounters in America. Introduction

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-311
Author(s):  
STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Individual

This short introduction provides a brief overview of the special issue, by addressing the main historiographical and theoretical concerns that unite the individual contributions and by placing the essays in comparative, inter-American and interdisciplinary perspective. What do comparative analyses tell us about patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the visual arts? More specifically, what do these analyses tell us about the role of ethnic agency and audience, and the complex relationship between artistic practice and the “mainstream,” the local and the global?

Körperlichkeit in der Philosophie der Spätantike. Corporeità nella filosofia tardoantica

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Philosophical Importance

In this volume, the idea of the body and corporeality in the philosophy of late antiquity is examined. It deals with questions of ontology, mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, politics, theology and aesthetics. The importance of the topic results both from its historical relevance (for the visual arts, literature, the specialist sciences, religion and general cultural history) as well as its philosophical importance. From a philosophical point of view the late antique reflection on corporeality contains an impressive array of meanings discussed in this volume. With contributions by Riccardo Chiaradonna, Giovanni Colpani, Diego de Brasi, Sabine Föllinger, Christoph Helmig, Christoph Horn, Alberto Jori, Alessandro Linguiti, Claudia Lo Casto, Christoph Markschies, Dmitri Nikulin, Federico Petrucci, Flavia Salvatori, Ambra Serangeli, Daniela Taormina, Chiara Tommasi, Denis Walter

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