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Representing Absence: Contemporary Ekphrasis in “Apesh-t”

100%
Handley A.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2020
|
issue 10
118-134
EN
Traditionally, ekphrasis has been defined as the description and analysis of works of art in poetry, and so it has been understood as the verbalization of visual images (Sager Eidt). The article examines the concept in the light of contemporary definitions that include non-verbal media as targets (Cariboni Killander, Lutas and Strukelj; Sager Eidt; Bruhn; Pethö) in order to analyze its applicability to music videos. It concentrates in particular on “Apesh-t,” a video for a track by Beyoncé and Jay-Z from the album Everything Is Love (2018). The video is filmed in different interiors of the Louvre, where the singers appear, together with an ensemble of dancers, in front of selected artworks. The discussion focuses on an analysis of a single shot which presents an ekphrastic re-configuration of one particular work of European art, Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800). The author argues that the use of ekphrasis in the video-through elaboration (close-ups and editing) and repurposing of the source material (painting)-plays an important role in the construction of the theme of “absence”: invoking not only what is represented, but what is not represented in David’s painting. It also foregrounds the potential of ekphrasis as a tool of political and cultural resistance, in the way it intervenes in the representation of the “other” in art and in the museum space.
2
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“But what a place / to put a piano”: Nostalgic Objects in Robert Minhinnick’s Diary of the Last Man

100%
Handley A.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2019
|
issue 9
331-344
EN
In 2003, Martin Rees referred to the present as “mankind’s final century.” A few years later, Slavoj Žižek wrote that humankind is heading towards “apocalyptic zero-point,” when the ecological crisis will most probably lead to our complete destruction. In his 2017 collection, Diary of the Last Man, Welsh poet Robert Minhinnick offers readers a meditation upon Earth at a liminal moment-on the brink of becoming completely unpopulated. Imagining a solitary human being, living in the midst of environmental collapse, Minhinnick yet entwines different voices-human and non-human-operating across vast spans of time. The speaker of the poems moves freely through different geographies and cultural contexts, but the voice that starts and ends the journey, seems to be the voice of the poet himself: he is the last man on earth, a survivor of ecological disaster. The paper discusses Minhinnick’s collection as a projection of the world we now inhabit into a future where it will exist only in the form of nostalgic memories. The analysis focuses on the role of objects in the construction of the world-within-the poem, where the fragments of human civilization are being claimed by forces of the environment-engulfing sand, progressive erosion-forming a retrospective vision of our “now” which will inevitably become our “past.”
3
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“Being Human”: Edward Bond’s Theories of Drama

63%
Allen D., Handley A.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2017
|
issue 7
307-329
EN
The playwright Edward Bond has recalled the impact of seeing photographs of Nazi atrocities at the end of World War Two: “It was the ground zero of the human soul.” He argues we need a different kind of drama, based in “a new interpretation of what it means to be human.” He has developed an extensive body of theoretical writings to set alongside his plays. Arguably, his own reflections on “what it means to be human” are based in his reaction to the Holocaust, and his attempt to confront “the totality of evil.”Bond argues we are born “radically innocent.” There is a “pre-psychological” state of being. The neonate does not “read” ideology; it has to use its own imagination to make sense of the world. To enter society, however, the child must be corrupted; its imagination is “ideologized.” Bond claims that “radical innocence” can never wholly be lost. Through drama, we can escape “ideology” and recover our “autonomy.” It leads us to confront extreme situations, and to define for ourselves “what it means to be human.” The terms of Bond’s theory are Manichean (innocent-corrupt, autonomous-ideologized etc.). His arguments are based in the assumption that there is a fundamental “humanity” that exists prior to socialization. In fact, the process of socialization begins at birth. As an account of child development, “radical innocence” does not stand up to close scrutiny. Arguably, however, Bond’s work escapes the confines of his own theory. It can be read, not in terms of the “ideologized” vs. the “autonomous” mind, but rather, in terms of “conscious” and “unconscious.” In Coffee (2000), Bond takes character of Nold on a journey into the Dantean hell of his own unconscious. He does not recover his “innocence,” but, rather, he has to face the darkness of both history and the psyche.
4
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

“Being Human”: Edward Bond’s Theories of Drama

63%
Allen D., Handley A.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2017
|
issue 7
307-329
EN
The playwright Edward Bond has recalled the impact of seeing photographs of Nazi atrocities at the end of World War Two: “It was the ground zero of the human soul.” He argues we need a different kind of drama, based in “a new interpretation of what it means to be human.” He has developed an extensive body of theoretical writings to set alongside his plays. Arguably, his own reflections on “what it means to be human” are based in his reaction to the Holocaust, and his attempt to confront “the totality of evil.”Bond argues we are born “radically innocent.” There is a “pre-psychological” state of being. The neonate does not “read” ideology; it has to use its own imagination to make sense of the world. To enter society, however, the child must be corrupted; its imagination is “ideologized.” Bond claims that “radical innocence” can never wholly be lost. Through drama, we can escape “ideology” and recover our “autonomy.” It leads us to confront extreme situations, and to define for ourselves “what it means to be human.” The terms of Bond’s theory are Manichean (innocent-corrupt, autonomous-ideologized etc.). His arguments are based in the assumption that there is a fundamental “humanity” that exists prior to socialization. In fact, the process of socialization begins at birth. As an account of child development, “radical innocence” does not stand up to close scrutiny. Arguably, however, Bond’s work escapes the confines of his own theory. It can be read, not in terms of the “ideologized” vs. the “autonomous” mind, but rather, in terms of “conscious” and “unconscious.” In Coffee (2000), Bond takes character of Nold on a journey into the Dantean hell of his own unconscious. He does not recover his “innocence,” but, rather, he has to face the darkness of both history and the psyche.
5
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

“The Most Photographed Barn in America”: Simulacra of the Sublime in American Art and Photography

63%
Allen D., Handley A.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2018
|
issue 8
365-385
EN
In White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo, two characters visit a famous barn, described as the “most photographed barn in America” alongside hordes of picture-taking tourists. One of them complains the barn has become a simulacrum, so that “no one sees” the actual barn anymore. This implies that there was once a real barn, which has been lost in the “virtual” image. This is in line with Plato’s concept of the simulacrum as a false or “corrupt” copy, which has lost all connection with the “original.” Plotinus, however, offered a different definition: the simulacrum distorts reality in order to reveal the invisible, the Ideal. There is a real building which has been called “the most photographed barn in America”: the Thomas Moulton Barn in the Grand Teton National Park. The location-barn in the foreground, mountain range towering over it-forms a striking visual composition. But the site is not only famous because it is photogenic. Images of the barn in part evoke the heroic struggles of pioneers living on the frontier. They also draw on the tradition of the “American sublime.” Ralph Waldo Emerson defined the sublime as “the influx of the Divine mind into our mind.” He followed Plotinus in valuing art as a means of “revelation”-with the artist as a kind of prophet or “seer.” The photographers who collect at the Moulton Barn are themselves consciously working within this tradition, and turning themselves into do-it-yourself “artist-seers.” They are the creators, not the slaves of the simulacrum.
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