In Adam Bede, George Eliot explores the way a society divides its members into categories and how these categories contribute to the formation of an individual’s identity. In the mid-nineteenth century authors in the naturalist tradition often discussed this dialogical relationship between individual and society, the specific roles for social gaze, the labeling and degrading. Eliot shows an acute of these labels that no one shapes identity without their influence. According to Nancy Anne Marck, Adam Bede introduces the theme of “emerging social consciousness” where the characters gain broader awareness of human interdependence through an experience of suffering (447). This is particularly evident when examining Eliot’s characters of “lesser fortune.” Once we’ve investigated how Eliot portrays these negative social forces throughout the novel, the labeling and the stigmatization, we will return to how Eliot addresses the larger question permeating her novel of education: how one judges another against the backdrop of community values.
The paper examines the impact of cinematic representations of impoverished areas of Rio de Janeiro in the film City of God on the growth of the demand for favela tours in this city. In the first two parts, I describe postmodern changes in culture, society and economy and theoretical explanations of production and consumption of tourist attractions. In the third part, I define contemporary practices of slum tourism and examine three examples of convergence of literal versus literary and visual slumming. In the last part, I analyse the narratives of City of God movie, taking into consideration the film-making process.
This article is a study devoted to the BBC adaptation of a ghost story by Montague Rhodes James, “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” The ideas of the spectral gaze and sympathetic spectreship are used to submit that in the film the setting itself is the spectre, with which/whom the viewer is invited to identify. This rearrangement-in comparison with the situation in the original story-casts the spectral setting both in the role of the haunting presence and the victim of an otherworldly (human) intrusion. A detailed analysis of the use of the camera supports the argument.
This article is a study devoted to the BBC adaptation of a ghost story by Montague Rhodes James, “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” The ideas of the spectral gaze and sympathetic spectreship are used to submit that in the film the setting itself is the spectre, with which/whom the viewer is invited to identify. This rearrangement-in comparison with the situation in the original story-casts the spectral setting both in the role of the haunting presence and the victim of an otherworldly (human) intrusion. A detailed analysis of the use of the camera supports the argument.
The fifth book of Vergil’s Aeneid plays a crucial role in the composition of the entire poem. It provides a certain repose in the turbulent story while directing readers’ attention towards Aeneas himself, as he fully assumes the role of the leader and “father” to his people. Later reception of the Aeneid focused mainly on other, more dramatic, parts of the story (e.g. Books IV and VI). Late-antique cento poetry, however, contains several passages that find ample inspiration in Book V, and make references to this book central to their meaning. Based on an analysis of one of the poems, namely Hippodamia (Anth. Lat. 11 Riese2), the first part of this study proposes a hypothesis that all these passages are linked by two crucial motifs – gaze and performance – which could be the central connotation associated with the book among late-antique readers. The following two parts of the study aim to confirm the hypothesis using other centos (the Anthologia Latina, the Cento Probae, and Ausonius’s Cento Nuptialis).
Margaret Atwood’s novels are usually celebrated for their blunt feminism. However, in Moral Disorder-a series of interconnected stories that forms a novel-feminist concerns are replaced with worries about territory and survival. The protagonist is an insider whose sole concern is to survive and to protect her territory. The confrontation between the narrator as the insider and the outsiders does not occur directly but could be inferred by her cruelty toward other characters and her violence against the animals under her care. The present study argues that this cruelty, which abounds in the novel, could be viewed as a substitute for violence against the outsiders. The narrator’s gaze at the Indian boy who entered the protagonist’s territory manifests a garrison mentality. The frequent references to axes in the novel are compared to the use of axes in “Wilderness Tips,” a short story by Atwood in which axes also have a metaphoric significance. The beheading and dismemberment of domestic animals could be the punishment awaiting the intruder. The novel establishes a division between the insider/outsider, here/there, self/other and civilized/barbaric to call for action and awareness about the importance of protecting one’s territory.
The article entitled “'Superreal images for SUPERREAL People.' Black Self-Representation as Self-Invention in Poetry and Visual Art of the Black Arts Movement: The Wall of Respect” provides an analysis of the representation of African Americans by Black Arts Movement poets and visual artists involved in making the Wall of Respect, the most famous Black Power mural. Resisting, challenging and rejecting the controlling white gaze, through their verbal and visual acts of self-representation, they made an attempt to achieve a “better and truer self” for American blacks, which resulted in black myth-making and self-invention. That phenomenon is explored here through an examination of the history, legend and aesthetics of the mural, which is approached as a multimedia Poem of the People, whose interplay of various artistic forms of expression is aimed at liberation from the oppressiveness of white cultural hegemony, achieving “visibility,” and practicing “truly black” image-making. More specifically, special attention is given to its literary component – Amiri Baraka's poem “SOS,” which is embedded in the mural, and two poems entitled “The Wall,” written for that occasion by Haki Madhubuti and Gwendolyn Brooks, the latter poem read at the opening ceremony by its author. Detailed reading of the poems demonstrates how the written/spoken word assisted and enhanced visual black self-invention and projected-cum-generated a sense of togetherness and collective identification by creating an ultra-positive image of “new blacks,” and stigmatizing “negro toms” who stood for old-fashioned integrationism. Also, through condensed references to theories pertaining to the nature of image, visual representation and the power of the gaze (by Plato, Heidegger, Sartre and Lacan), put together with concepts of African American culture and expression (Houston Baker Jr.'s “the Black (W)hole” and Robert Stepto's “immersion”), philosophical aspects of the Black Arts Movement's artistic strategy of black self-invention as well as its limitations are explored.
Artykuł ma na celu zakwestionowanie sensowności tych interpretacji Panien z Awinionu, które poszukają jego znaczenia odwołując się do stanu umysłu Picassa w okresie, w którym obraz powstawał i traktują to dzieło jako wyraz zmagania się artysty z osobistymi demonami. Oferowana tu interpretacja obu wersji obrazu wskazuje, że był on odpowiedzią na Le Bonheur de vivre Matisse’a i zarazem jego krytyką. Co więcej, odwołanie się do teorii Lacana pozwala autorowi nie tylko objaśnić pozorne niekonsekwencje Panien z Awinionu, lecz także pokazać, że ostateczna wersja tego dzieła jest metaobrazem, który ukazuje proces powstawania reprezentacji.
EN
The paper argues against interpretations of Les Demoiselles that look for its meaning in Picasso’s state of mind and treat it as the expression of a struggle with his personal demons. Rather, it interprets both versions of the painting as a response and contrast to Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre, which is proposed as the main intertext of Les Demoiselles. Moreover, an excursus into Lacanian theory allows the author not only to explain the supposed inconsistencies of Les Demoiselles, but also to propose that in its final version it is a meta-painting which analyses the way representation comes into being.
Post-Yugoslav film art is, similarly to Yugoslav cinema, exemplary of masculine cultural domination, approaching socio-national themes in a highly gendered mode and reflecting a return to patriarchy, more brutal than that during the existence of Yugoslavia. A new generation of cinéasts explores, with a backlash mixture of contempt and compassion, the themes of violence, displaying a new assault on female emancipation, which seemed to be in line with the socio-political context of rising nationalist movements that led to the bloody events of the Yugoslav war in 1991. The female character is re-located to a place traditionally assigned to women not as the subject of narrative or discourse, but as the object of love and/or hatred by a masculine subject. The films chosen to be analysed here are full-length auteur feature films – Virgina, Grbavica, Djeca, Bure baruta, with a specific focus on the work by Danis Tanović – are not representative of post-Yugoslav cinema, but as rare exceptions demonstrate that, contrary to the dominant post-Yugoslav public opinion, both the Yugoslav wars and post-war traumatic realities remain cinematically unexplored.
Article is an interpretation of Bolesław Prus’s short story "Ogród Saski". It’s spine consists in motive of visibility, and it’s background – sensuality in general, or sensual feelings considered by author as vitally important in the urban space of the second half of the nineteenth century. Gaze has its stigmatizing character and can be used as an instrument of oppression, while other senses widen the range of Prus’s heroes experiences and allow for seeking in text an antidote for “sight-concentrated” nature of urban space (here – the space of Warsaw).
The present study aims to highlight two survival strategies in the “inferno of the living” that emerge from the analysis of Invisible Cities: lightness and gaze. The value of lightness is visible in the “thin cities”, which share a fragile architecture, the contrary reaction opposing the heaviness of living, the distance from the ground. “The hidden cities”, in turn, provide the motive for a reflection (a lecture) on gaze, with the aim of training the gaze to “recognize that which is not hell”: the happy city inside the unhappy city. In Invisible Cities, Calvino’s gaze still has an ethical and civic function (present in The Day of a Scrutineer). This function, however, will give way to the epistemic and scientific function of Mr. Palomar (from The Cosmicomics onwards), whose eye is exclusively concerned with measuring the limits of knowledge, which never extends, in a revealing way, from the natural world to the human world. Thirty years after Calvino’s death, amongst the many legacies left by his multifaceted literary work, we can recover the ethical and civic dimension expressed by the values of lightness and gaze.
IT
Il presente studio vuole mettere in evidenza due strategie di sopravvivenza nell’“inferno dei viventi” che emergono dall’analisi de Le città invisibili: la leggerezza e lo sguardo. Il valore della leggerezza trova visibilità nelle “città sottili”, accomunate da un’architettura esile, dalla reazione contraria e opposta al peso del vivere, dalla distanza dalla terra. “Le città nascoste”, a loro volta, offrono lo spunto per una riflessione (lezione) sullo sguardo, al fine di educarlo a “riconoscere ciò che inferno non è”: la città felice contenuta nella città infelice. Ne Le città invisibili, lo sguardo di Calvino è ancora portatore di una funzione etico-civile (presente ne La giornata di uno scrutatore), che lascerà il posto (dalle Cosmicomiche in poi) a quella scientifico-epistemica di Palomar, il cui occhio è intento esclusivamente a misurare il limiti della conoscenza, che non si estende mai, in modo rivelatore, dal mondo naturale a quello umano. A trent’anni dalla morte di Calvino, tra le numerose eredità che la sua poliedrica opera letteraria ci lascia, possiamo recuperare una dimensione etico-civile, espressa dai valori della leggerezza e dello sguardo.
This article, which brings together film, psychoanalysis, literature, and art, focuses on the role of paintings in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993). Scorsese conveys the imprisonment of New York aristocrats within the framework of social conventions and their evasions of social restrictions through his employment of paintings. Because the protagonists’ emotions are not revealed often, the director communicates their dramas and actions with the help of the paintings they own or appear next to. The paintings operate as Jacques Lacan’s Other, an entity that watches over the characters to make sure they conform to its selfperpetuating rules. Scorsese’s use of paintings shows that the characters perform for the Other and seek to maintain the status quo. While most characters perform within a Lacanian symbolic order, their different responses to a variety of paintings underscore the flexibility of the symbolic order.
The paper focuses on the sense of sight and seeing in the selected texts of American literature from the late 18th century to the 1930s, i.e. from William Bartram to H. P. Lovecraft. Adopting a perspective of changing “scopic regimes” – conventions of visual perception presented in a number of literary and non-literary works, the author analyzed a passage from Bartram’s Travels to reveal a combination of the discourse of science with that of the British aesthetics of gardening. In Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (1843) the main factor is the work of imagination dissatisfied with the actual view of Niagara Falls, while in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature substantial subjectivity is reduced to pure seeing. In Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Ktaadn” the subject confronts nature that is no longer transparent and turns out meaningless. In American literature of horror from Charles Brockden Brown through Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the narrator’s eye encounters the inhuman gaze of a predator, a dehumanized victim of murder, or a sinister creature from the outer space. To conclude, the human gaze was gradually losing its ability to frame or penetrate nature, bound to confront the annihilating evil eye from which there was usually no escape.
PL
Tematem artykułu jest zmysł wzroku i widzenie w wybranych tekstach literatury amerykańskiej od drugiej połowy wieku XVIII do lat trzydziestych wieku XX, czyli od W. Bartrama do H. P. Lovecrafta. Przyjmując perspektywę zmiennych „dyskursów skopicznych”, czyli konwencji postrzegania świata utrwalonych w różnego rodzaju utworach o charakterze literackim bądź paraliterackim, autor poddał analizie fragment Travels Bartrama, by odsłonić w nim połączenie dyskursu naukowego z dyskursem zapożyczonym z angielskiej estetyki ogrodów. W Summer on the Lakes M. Fuller z roku 1843 na plan pierwszy wychodzi praca wyobraźni rozczarowanej rzeczywistym widokiem wodospadu Niagara, podczas gdy u R. W. Emersona (Natura) czytelnik ma do czynienia z samozaprzeczeniem substancjalnego podmiotu zredukowanego do czystego widzenia. Z kolei u H. D. Thoreau (Ktaadn) podmiot zderza się z naturą nieprzeniknioną, która odmawia ujawnienia jakiegokolwiek sensu. W prozie gotyckiej od Ch. Brockdena Browna, poprzez E. A. Poego aż do Lovecrafta oko podmiotu (narratora) napotyka niekiedy na spojrzenie nieludzkie: drapieżnego zwierzęcia, odczłowieczonej ofiary mordu, złowrogiej istoty pozaziemskiej. W literaturze amerykańskiej spojrzenie stopniowo traci swoją siłę ujmowania i przenikania natury, z drugiej zaś strony napotyka w świecie oko złe, spojrzenie unicestwiające, przed którym najczęściej nie ma ucieczki.