-
Opacity, Narration, and “The Fathomless Word” Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Tavia Nyong’o
-
Desajustar el marco del feminismo: una lectura de Judith Butler desde el Sur Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Nelly Richard
-
The Aesthetic and Material Force of Landscape in Cinema Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Debashree Mukherjee
This essay explores the aesthetic and material force of landscape in cinema, an entity that has long been considered an index of localized climates. I adopt a transmedial and triangulated approach to cinematic landscape as filmed image, as circulating imaginary, and as the physical ground of film production. I argue that cinema reveals, in the scene of production, a mutual exertion of spatial influence
-
Weathering with You Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Yuriko Furuhata
This article focuses on the animated Japanese film Weathering with You (2019) in order to think critically about the limits and merits of site-specific, local approaches to the anthropogenic climate crisis, and to the Anthropocene and its mythopoetic tendency. While the geological period of the Anthropocene is thoroughly historical and rooted in the modern scientific paradigm of Earth history, the
-
Do I Know the Anthropocene When I See It? Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Jennifer Fay
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) is a film that gives rise to productive confusion about the sight and state of our planet and the inadequacy of our current concepts and aesthetic categories. The Anthropocene, especially on film, is “conceptually devastating.” This phrase, from Susan Neiman’s reading of Hannah Arendt and modern evil, has philosophical and moral implications for what it means to
-
The Axiom of High Modernism Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Alma Steingart
This essay follows the influence of axiomatic thinking on American intellectual thought at midcentury. I demonstrate how in the postwar period axiomatic analysis moved from mathematics into the social sciences and in the process redefined the meaning of theoretical knowledge. Axiomatics fostered a belief that theories do not emerge from first principles and that analytic coherence precedes empirical
-
The World as I found it Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Andrei Pop
The first person represented as a subject’s field of vision, as opposed to first-person language, has only been around for a century and a half. Yet the claims advanced by its philosophical inventor, Ernst Mach, are momentous: nothing less than the dissolution of the self into a world of sensations. A closer look at his images reveals less an elimination of the self than a reflection of the connection
-
How You Read Madame Bovary Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Michael Lucey
Prompted by the prior work of critics like Ross Chambers and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this article pursues the possibility that there would be a way of reading Madame Bovary that is not just about learning to be a sophisticated and refined enough reader of Gustave Flaubert to appreciate all that he managed to achieve in that novel. Rather, while sophistication and refinement may constitute a typical
-
Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the Mediation of History Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Susan Scott Parrish
In its attention to the undead state of American slavery, Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) appears to fulfill Stephen Best’s diagnosis of a “melancholy historicism” in recent Black cultural production. But instead, the film draws viewers into a virtual experience—and potential analysis—of the roles of both technological and environmental media (from TV, film, and cellphones to housing, ceramics,
-
Michel Leiris and the Secret Language of Song Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Mary Ann Smart
Best known for his reminiscences of artistic and intellectual life in midcentury Paris and for his chronicle of the 1931 Dakar-Djibouti mission, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), Michel Leiris also wrote obsessively about music, turning to imperfectly recalled fragments of song and opera to evoke key moments of early childhood and to explore affective relationships. This article focuses on two episodes from
-
Butterflies on Sweet Land? Reflections on Opera at the Edges of History Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Gundula Kreuzer
Taking inspiration from Kalle Pihlainen’s philosophy of historical representation, this essay explores some of the ways in which operatic performance can harness the ambiguity between the genre’s historicist and presentist implications to mobilize not just the difference of the past from the present but also their connection. The essay focuses on two recent examples—Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (New
-
Literary Persons and Medieval Fiction in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Julie Orlemanski
Like many exegetes before him, the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux regarded the lovers in the Song of Songs as allegorical fictions. Yet these prosopopoeial figures remained of profound commentarial interest to him. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs returns again and again to the literal level of meaning, where text becomes voice and voice becomes fleshly persona. This essay
-
The Temporality of Interlinear Translation Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Kayvan Tahmasebian,Rebecca Ruth Gould
This article examines the temporality of interlinear translation through a case study of the rendering of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry into Persian. We argue that, in its adherence to the word order of the original, the interlinear crib prioritizes the temporality of the instant (kairos) over the temporality of the linear sequence (chronos). Kairos is made manifest in the literalist translations of
-
Music Histories from the Edge Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Martha Feldman,Nicholas Mathew
-
Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, and Seraphic Devotions Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Amy Hollywood
Reading Henry James’s late novel The Wings of the Dove with Honoré de Balzac’s Seraphita, this essay argues that James performs through his novel an act of secular devotion, a memorialization of lost others through which he enables himself to continue to live.
-
Prayer and the Art of Literature in Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Robert Glenn Davis
This article reads the Proslogion of the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury as a drama of seeking and finding God. It guides the reader through a process of rhetorical inventio, with all of its attendant risks, pleasures, and discontents. The text opens a space or gap of desire, speaking in the voice of the soul who seeks anxiously to find (invenire) God but turns up only absence. The “I” who
-
Seeing and Tagging Things in Pictures Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Michael Hancher
Despite modernist precepts, digital projects that use crowdsourcing to annotate large collections of images of paintings and book illustrations with “tags” have encouraged viewers to see things in pictures and to say what they see. Both personal image tagging (ekphrastic in function) and automatic image tagging challenge in different ways the proposition that a painting as such will elide recognizable
-
Memories Are Made of This Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 James Chandler
This essay considers the cultural implications of a brief period in the life of New York’s Brill Building, America’s second Tin Pan Alley, a transformative moment in R&B that involved music performed by African American artists but written by songwriters committed to “Jewish Latin.” Recorded on 45 rpm vinyl, circulated in jukeboxes and on radio in new Top 40 radio formats, this sound formed young taste
-
“As Often as His Heart Beat, the Name Moved” Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Rachel Smith
This essay considers an instance of medieval fictionality through the devotional text The Life of the Servant by the Dominican Henry Suso, specifically, through an examination of the “Servant’s” attempt to identify with Christ. Two forms of doubleness issue from this attempt, namely, the human servant seeking to embody the divine without remainder and his figuration as sinner and savior. Insofar as
-
From Radio to Radio-visione Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Danielle Simon
This article investigates a series of experimental television broadcasts undertaken by Italian Fascism’s national broadcasting entity, the Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche, in the years leading up to the Second World War. It explores both the official autarchical policies and the technological limitations that shaped the radio network’s early experiments with television to show that producers’
-
Political Theology or Theological Politics? Hugo Ball, Early Christian Hagiography, and a New Vision for Society Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Sebastian P. Klinger
A contribution to modernist studies and the history of political ideas, this article examines the unlikely intellectual dialogue between Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and the former Dadaist Hugo Ball (1886–1927) that frames the formative scene of politico-theological discourse in the twentieth century. Based on close readings of Ball’s aesthetic, intellectual, and philosophical exchanges with Schmitt, the
-
“True Wit is Nature”: Wimsatt, Pope, and the Power of Style Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Helen Deutsch
This essay puts Yale critic and cofounder of the New Criticism William K. Wimsatt into the balance with the most influential poet of eighteenth-century England, Alexander Pope. A scholar-collector with a lifelong penchant for Pope’s poetry and iconography, Wimsatt molds his influential theoretical paradoxes of abstract particularity after the uniquely embodied poet who made himself inseparable from
-
Bob Dylan in the Country Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Timothy Hampton
At the close of the 1960s two developments changed the shape of mainstream rock and roll music. The first was a new focus, on the part of a number of influential artists, on music about domestic life—kids, spouses, home. The second was a new interest in blending rock rhythms with instrumentation and themes taken from country music. This essay explores the ways in which these two concerns overlap in
-
On the Knees of the Body Politic Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Lorna Hutson
This paper analyzes the fullest theoretical elaboration of the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period, Edmund Plowden’s Treatise on the Succession (1567). It argues that Plowden here deploys the King’s Two Bodies not, as has been thought, as a legal proof against the foreign birth of Mary Queen of Scots, but as a way of embodying and sacralizing the disputed historical relations
-
Who Are Vera and Tatiana? The Female Russian Nihilist in the Fin de Siècle Imagination Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Abby Holekamp
Focusing on a close, contextualized reading of a single case of invented identity from 1906, this article illustrates how, in fin de siècle Europe, a mutually generative relationship between the real, the imagined, and the rapidly proliferating mass media transformed the female “nihilist” from an apocryphal Russian figure into a durable Russian archetype—an archetype that had significant consequences
-
The Uses of Genre Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Ryan Healey, Ewan Jones, Paul Nulty, Gabriel Recchia, John Regan, Peter de Bolla
This paper presents a computational method for assessing the uses of the category “genre.” It takes as its example the long-standing “Adam Smith” problem, which seeks to settle whether Smith’s two major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are compatible with each other and can be seen as contributing to a larger “system” of inquiry embarked upon by Smith.
-
Vera Molnar’s Computer Paintings Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Aline Guillermet
The Hungarian-born French painter Vera Molnar is one of the few artists who pioneered the use of the computer as a creative medium starting in the late 1960s. This article explores how Molnar’s computer-generated works used programming as a means to reflect upon the autographicity of the handmade trace in drawing and painting.
-
Wilde, Zola, Dreyfus, Christ Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Andrew J. Counter
Oscar Wilde and Emile Zola are conventionally opposed as the figureheads of, respectively, the aestheticist and the naturalist literary trends. Yet they exhibit a number of uncanny similarities—not least the turn both made in their last years toward religious themes and imagery, and especially those of martyrdom and the Passion. This article explores such images in the later life, work, and public
-
His Belly, Her Seed: Gender and Medicine in Early Modern Demonic Possession. Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Boyd Brogan
This article reassesses the role of gender in early modern demonic possession from a medical perspective. It takes as its starting point the demoniac Richard Mainy, who in 1585 claimed to be suffering from hysteria. Best known for its influence on Shakespeare's King Lear, Mainy's gender-crossing diagnosis should be read in the context of the close historical relationship between hysteria and epilepsy
-
The Social Life of Pain Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-05-01 Rachel Ablow
This essay introduces the topics discussed and the individual articles included in the special issue “The Social Life of Pain.”
-
Is There Truth in Pain? Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-05-01 Darius Rejali
This essay explores four ways in which we believe truth can be found in painful experiences, even among those people who doubt that torture “works.” These endoxa, or commonplace beliefs, tap into deep human anxieties—about manhood, the maintenance of a just world, the meaning of suffering, and the possibility of transcending injustice. As such, they make it difficult for people to hear arguments against
-
A Finger in the Wound: On Pain, Scars, and Suffering Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-05-01 Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Pain is a deeply subjective experience that includes sensory, emotional, social, historical, and cultural components. The presence of suffering in the idiom of pain exposes the gap between individual bodies that refuse to suffer quietly and the violence of indifferent social, economic, and political orders. In this essay I describe the existential suffering of Brazilian sugarcane cutters who transform
-
Slow Protest in the Occupation of Cambodia’s White Building Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Brianne Cohen
-
Art, Judaism, and the Critique of Fascism in the Work of Ernst Cassirer Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Victoria Kahn
This essay argues that Ernst Cassirer’s thinking about the spontaneity of form-giving in the creation of art, which he allies to the ethical dimension of Judaism, informs his critique of fascism in The Myth of the State. Aesthetics, for Cassirer, is not divorced from politics but one of its conditions of possibility.
-
The Medium Is the Messagerie Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Allan Doyle
This paper analyzes the contributions of Theodore Gericault to the second volume of Baron Isidore Taylor, Charles Nodier, and Alphonse de Cailleux’s Voyages pittoresques: Normandie (1820; 1825) within the context of French Restoration historiography. It argues that Gericault’s prints are allegorical commentaries on the production of visual history during this period as much as they are examples of
-
Talk That Talk Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Matthew Hunter
This essay draws upon the work of Erving Goffman and Michael Silverstein to read Shakespeare’s first poem as a guide to mastering the burgeoning early modern art of conversation. The epyllion follows the conversation manuals of its day in embracing the aphorism as a charismatic form of talk, but it departs from its precedents in attributing to the aphorism an overtly erotic force. By according to the
-
Sound Evidence, 1969: Recording a Milanese Riot Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Delia Casadei
On 19 November 1969, two members of Milan’s neofolk music collective the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI) armed themselves with portable sound recorders and wandered amongst a crowd of demonstrators near Milan’s Duomo. The resulting LP, I fatti di Milano (The events of Milan), is a puzzling hybrid of artistic and political intent. As the sleeve note explains, the demonstration degenerated into a riot
-
The Accent of Truth: The Hollywood Research Bible and the Republic of Images Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Aaron Rich
Hollywood studio film production through the 1960s involved visual research into depictions of the past in order to help show the audience representations they could recognize and believe. This was part of a much larger and more complex republic of images through which pictures of the world, its people, and its material culture circulated within a system of modern media, including illustrated books
-
Visual History: The Past in Pictures Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Daniela Bleichmar, Vanessa R. Schwartz
This essay defines the category of “visual history” and introduces its operations across the essays included in this special issue. It proposes that such narratives accelerated time in cultures where it became increasingly common to traverse spatial distances. In this way, visual histories are not simply guides to the times, but guides to time itself.
-
Francisco Pacheco’s Book of True Portraits: Humanism, Art, and the Practice of “Visual History” Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Randall Meissen
Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644), the foremost Spanish art theorist of his generation, worked on his manuscript Libro de verdaderos retratos (Book of true portraits) for more than forty years. This essay addresses how the visual cultures of Pacheco’s Seville, especially the city’s reimagined imperial Roman past, Catholic Counter-Reformation image praxis, and visual conventions of Renaissance humanism
-
Ur: Empire, Modernity, and the Visualization of Antiquity Between the Two World Wars Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Billie Melman
This article explores the multiple visual presences of antiquity in the first half of the twentieth century and connects visual histories to the history of empires. It shows how archaeology mediated between the newly discovered material civilizations of the ancient Mesopotamian empires and experiences of modernity in the British Empire, the world’s largest modern empire. The article demonstrates how
-
Visualizing History in Eighteenth-Century France Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Susan L. Siegfried
This essay explores an impulse to visualize history in eighteenth-century France. It focuses on massive compilations of printed images that assembled overviews of history as represented by artifacts, portraits, and events and compares that documentary mode of visualizing the past to imaginary reconstructions of historical events in illusionistic scenes as depicted in the radically different formats
-
Powers of the Script Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Antoine Lentacker
For all their concern with the nature of medical authority, historians of medicine have paid remarkably little attention to the history of the medical script, the main medium in and through which the doctor’s authority is enacted. This essay analyzes the medical prescription as an instance of a written performative. While focusing on the changing uses of one particular documentary genre in turn-of
-
On Verminous Life Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Parama Roy
By the nineteenth century, models of just and civilized sociability in the Anglophone world came to encompass forms of obligation to the nonhuman, and the colony assumed the status of a crucial theater for thinking about forms of cruelty, sympathy, and protection. On the terrain of the Indian colony, this new moral economy of care and inclusion encountered an existing Indic economy of vegetarianism
-
Staring into the Abyss of Time Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Stephanie O’Rourke
This essay examines the role of geological time in the work of the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich in the early nineteenth century. It foregrounds the challenges this model of time posed for the relationship between the human and the natural—a relationship usually considered central to Friedrich’s work—and for the perceptual powers of the viewing subject.
-
An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
This article examines the birth of interactive computer screens from enemy targeting and tracking systems (especially computerized radar) that distributed information processing in an ecology of operations among humans, computational instruments, and the environment. It proposes a concept of “computational screening” to account for the integration of visualization and information processing that gave
-
His Belly, Her Seed: Gender and Medicine in Early Modern Demonic Possession Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Boyd Brogan
This article reassesses the role of gender in early modern demonic possession from a medical perspective. It takes as its starting point the demoniac Richard Mainy, who in 1585 claimed to be suffering from hysteria. Best known for its influence on Shakespeare's King Lear, Mainy's gender-crossing diagnosis should be read in the context of the close historical relationship between hysteria and epilepsy
-
Eyewitnessed Historia and the Renaissance Media Revolution: Visual Histories of the Council of Trent Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Evonne Levy
This essay examines the collision of Renaissance narrative or historia in the visual arts and the eyewitnessed event and the pressure put on that convergence by the dissemination of the latter in the new print media. The example discussed here is the Council of Trent, a storyless but signal event that conformed with difficulty to an ideal “historia,” and one that was often depicted after eyewitnessed
-
Pain and Memory in the Formation of Early Modern Habitus Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Mitchell Merback
Between the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, pain and memory became interdependent in three domains of social and religious life: religious devotion, education, and criminal justice. The grounds for this affiliation were prepared by a training of individuals in the control of affect and the acceptance of memory training as a regimen of virtual self-wounding, often facilitated by violent imagery
-
“No Pain, No Gain” and the History of Presence Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Shigehisa Kuriyama
“No pain, no gain” is a rather strange saying, exhorting us actively to embrace what we ordinarily abhor and are desperate to avoid. It promotes the idea of good pain. This essay excavates the historical and metaphysical roots of this idea and situates the modern slogan in the context of a profound change in the experience of presence.
-
An Interview with ELAINE SCARRY Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Rachel Ablow
In this interview, Elaine Scarry elaborates on her writing and activism in relation to the threat of nuclear war.
-
Heartfelt Musicking Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-08-01 Bettina Varwig
This essay proposes a somatic archaeology of German Lutheran music making around 1700. Focusing on a single cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, it sets out to reconstruct the capacities of early modern body-souls for musical reverberation, affective contagion, and spiritual transformation.
-
Afteraffect Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-08-01 Nouri Gana
This essay discusses the politics of affect in post-1967 Arabic literary and cultural production. It argues that melancholia’s underappreciated swerve from normative structures of power and mourning is a threshold moment of critical and cultural enablement in the Arab world, where the nexus between proxy and settler colonialisms continues to produce and reproduce almost all aspects of literature and
-
Staging the Last Judgment in the Trial of Charles I Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-08-01 Julie Stone Peters
The trial of Charles I (said mid-seventeenth-century radical Protestants) was “a Resemblance and Representation of the great day of Judgement.” Situating the trial in its theological and iconographic context, viewing it as an expression of broader Puritan performance culture, this essay offers a close reading of its staging, arguing that we should view the assertion that the trial resembled Judgment
-
Unit Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-08-01 Andrew M. Shanken
This essay peers through the peephole of the word unit to reveal the word’s journey across multiple fields from the mid-nineteenth century through the present. A keyword hidden in plain sight, unit links science and the world of measurement to society (family units), politics (political units), architecture (housing units), cities (neighborhood units), and, more recently, big data, the carceral state
-
Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-05-01 Jeffrey Knapp
Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on so momentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage
-
What Do Nanquan and Schrödinger Have Against Cats? Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Robert H. Sharf
-
A Short History of the Picture as Box Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Amy Knight Powell
In “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), Clement Greenberg compares the easel picture, disparagingly, to a box-like cavity cut into the wall. In this essay, I argue that late medieval panel paintings—which indeed often took the form of boxes—show Greenberg to be justified in making this comparison, if not in doing so disparagingly. But what Greenberg failed to fully acknowledge is that the easel
-
Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Roger Mathew Grant
This article places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in eighteenth-century music theory. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. By refracting contemporary affect theory through
-
Remembering “Planet Auschwitz” During the Cold War Representations (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Kathryn L. Brackney
During one of the most famous moments of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, author and Holocaust survivor Yehiel Dinur took the witness stand in the summer of 1961 to deliver a brief and enigmatic testimony about what he termed “the Auschwitz planet.” Over the next two decades, as international Holocaust consciousness re-emerged in the shadow of the Cold War, writers, thinkers, and filmmakers would elaborate