Search Results

This chapter examines the episode about Henry IV in the Kaiserchronik, which contains a substantial embedded narrative about Godfrey of Bouillon. Drawing on Eberhard Lämmert's concept of narrative strands, the chapter describes how the stories of the two figures are defined and combined with each other. A letter preserved in the Codex Udalrici and (apparently) sent to Pope Paschal II by Daimbert of Pisa, Godfrey, and Raymond of Saint-Gilles in 1099 provides the starting point for the analysis. The chapter describes how the content of the letter reappears, worked into the story of Godfrey, in the chronicles of Frutolf of Michelsberg and Ekkehard of Aura. A comparison of these Latin chronicles with the Kaiserchronik then shows that the latter develops more clearly than its predecessors the story of Godfrey as a self-contained narrative strand in its own right, one that is defined primarily by his presence as a character in it

Benjamin’s discussion of Eugène Atget within “Little History of Photography” (1931) touches on some of the major issues not only of the essay itself but of all his subsequent work, notably, the relation of technology, work of art, and aura. Atget’s Paris photographs serve, first of all, to illustrate the political dimension of the fading of aura. Further, Benjamin develops the idea of a retrograde futurity in the photograph: "to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.” When Benjamin associates the urban scene of Atget’s photographs with a Tatort, a crime scene, he has in mind a forensic reading that goes beyond the investigation of crime in the usual sense. He anticipates here the kind of phenomenology of urban space that he will later, in the book on Baudelaire, draw from Poe’s Dupin stories, where the urban milieu serves to signify not a moral transgression, but rather the means of instituting a specific quest. Urban space is made available for a new kind of revelation, whereby what was hitherto invisible is disclosed and invested with evidentiary value.

This chapter presents a meditation on the efforts of Brazil's Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) to replenish modern technological airspace. In order to understand the CCR's embodied techniques for breathing and for occupying space, and in an effort to critique the metaphors of surface and depth that have been used to interpret the CCR movement as a whole, the chapter revisits medieval conceptions of the air as a substance rather than an empty dimension. The chapter then demonstrates how those understandings have shaped religious and technological developments in Brazil, culminating in the construction of a monastery dedicated to the medieval order of the Poor Clares located directly within a CCR-supported global media religious network, based in Sao Paulo. Questions about space, time, and technology emerge in the course of this analysis, leading to the chapter's concluding reassessment of Walter Benjamin's notion of “aura,” not so much as a visual representation but rather, more fundamentally, as something that is breathed.

Chapter 3 examines the limit-case of what might be called écriture trouvé: found writing that has fallen into the hands and under the critical gaze of (unintended) readers. “Touch” and “tact” in the sense developed in the book’s Introduction, provide a fulcrum for exposition. The twinning of religious and secular currents continues in this chapter, and the pairing of figures is purposefully off-kilter: mathematician and inventor, philosopher and pietist Blaise Pascal and “author, artist, sorry saint, protector of children” Henry Darger. Each figure serves to illustrate the pathos of authority and molestation (Edward Said’s terms for an originating act of creative will and subsequent encroachments upon it by time and convention), as they impinge upon authorial intention and method. Their coupling is illuminated with recourse to Levinasian tropes of sensibility and “friction” in sympathetic resonance with Walter Benjamin’s more familiar notion of aura.

This chapter analyzes Disney's full-length features to illustrate how Disney develops mutual affection-images as interfaces for the mode of animistic mimesis. It is in these mutual affection-images where viewers were most likely to feel wonder. The chapter then argues that such images entice and instruct in a different mode of consumerism, one closer to fetishism than the lifestyle consumer promoted by classical Hollywood. Disney contributes uniquely to consumer culture by making newly visible a daydreaming consumer oriented towards their own fantasies, not towards the views or opinions of others.

This chapter describes Theos Casimir Bernard's early life and education in Arizona. Bernard was born in Pasadena, California, on December 10, 1908, to Glen Agassiz Bernard and Aura Georgina Crable. He was raised by his mother in Tombstone, Arizona, having been abandoned by his father before the age of two. Working as a postmistress in the town and filling in as pastor in the local Episcopal church, Aura formally divorced Glen and seven years later remarried, to Jon Gordon, a local mining engineer from Scotland. With Gordon, Aura had three more sons, Ian, Dugald, and Marvene, and together they raised the four boys in the deserts of southern Arizona. His stepfather tried to instill in Theos and his brothers an appreciation for a scientific, though not a rigid, approach to life. Theos entered college in Tucson at the newly founded University of Arizona, and was accepted to the College of Arts and Sciences. He also learned the basics of yoga.

The third section of the book, “Junk and Art,” focuses on a problem that twentieth-century critics insisted was distinctly and depressingly modern. According to Aldous Huxley in 1934, recent technological “advances” in catering to “an enormous public” meant that “in all the arts the output of trash is both absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past.” But chapter 5, “Mocked with Art,” demonstrates how Shakespeare and his rival dramatist Ben Jonson were themselves obsessed with the question whether it was ever possible to pursue artistic distinction while at the same time catering to “the rude multitude.”